Introduction:

If you’re moving your website to another server or host, you’ll need to migrate it. The migration of a website must be done very carefully since if anything is overlooked, there may be a substantial loss in web traffic due to lost search positions.

Your recovery plan may take some time to fully kick in depending on how much the search engine ranking signals have been affected. And typically, it’s a lot harder to climb back up in rankings than it is to lose rankings.

The good news is that you can avoid all of this by performing an SEO migration whenever you set up a new website!

Why You Need SEO Migration

Suppose you have a website receiving a lot of traffic leads conversions and raking high on keywords, ultimately resulting in good organic traffic. Still, you are looking at rebuilding it and giving it a new look. In that case, you definitely need SEO migration because you have seen good results with the content you have on there already.

SEO migration, in short, includes moving all the existing content, which consists of all the text on your website, over to the new website.

This is important because the text is what helps you rank high on searches, as it includes the keywords. You can, however, add extra content if you want to, but our advice is always to keep what was already there if it was performing well previously.

Many businesses overlook SEO migration simply because they have never heard of it and do not understand its impact on their website and business as a whole.

SEO migration might not be needed in some cases if your keywords are not ranking as high and you are not receiving organic traffic. In that case, you can start from scratch.

However, SEO migration is a must if you have a website that is doing well. Marketing agencies will always be cautious of these provisions.

For example, we will always run a website through SEMrush to check how well the rankings are doing and traffic and if it is worth doing SEO migration when we are set with the task of migrating websites.

What Are the Risks of Not Doing an SEO Migration?

There are severals risks that result from not doing an SEO migration. Here are the most important ones to keep in mind.

Drop in Rankings (and traffic!)

Launching a new website with no SEO migration or SEO understanding will ultimately lead to a drop in traffic and rankings. This will be extremely damaging for most businesses, especially to e-commerce stores with thousands of pages.

Even service-based companies can be heavily impacted as they have separate pages of their services as well.

Conversions Start Decreasing

Conversion can be a tricky thing and often it can be difficult to ascertain why a customer may not be converting on a page that used to convert all the time.

When migrating to a new site, this can cause minor changes to the way the site appears – which could be the difference between a user converting or not.

You should be consistently testing whether your web pages are converting, and working to make them convert better as much as you can.

Broken Internal Links

There are SO many websites with a bunch of broken internal links. This is a big thing to keep in mind when performing an SEO migration. When an internal link is broken, your user will be taken to a 404 page when they click it.

As attention span is shorter than ever, this will likely result in them deciding to move on from the site – meaning you lose the customer unnecessarily. An increase in broken links is common following an SEO migration, which is why it’s crucial to work with developers that possess a good attention-to-detail.

Don’t Rush an SEO Migration

SEO migration is definitely something to keep in mind if you are looking to rebuild your website. It will not only save you the headache, but it will also save you a lot of money and potential leads and traffic.

Always speak to an SEO agency if you are looking at rebuilding your website, they will be able to advise you best and help you through the SEO migration process.

As a full-service agency, we will make sure to check the number of pages you are ranking for first because we know the impact it can have. Web developers  who are not part of a full-service agency, will always overlook these things as they do not understand SEO and only focus on web development and design.

So since you’re here, and you’ve read until the end. Why not book a discovery call with us? We’ve handled tons of SEO migrations in the past, and we’d be happy to do the same for you.

Have a listen!