The crucial importance a SEO Expert brings to a website migration

Change is a natural part of a business, particularly when it comes to your branding, technology, content architecture, user experience & even product enhancements in the business's digital presence. It is inevitable phase of a business life cycle at many points during the journey to progression and success. One such major activity is the migration of the SEO optimized website migration to a newer website along with its content and features.

And whatever the goal may be, it is not uncommon for all major initiatives to fall upon the work bench of the contemporary digital marketer or the head of techonoloy for major technology changes.

One crucial thing to be mindful of is Google’s tendency to be least accommodating towards major website changes, especially Web Content, technology used and URL changes. The Google algorithm relies heavily on indexed historical data for it's rankings results & a change in the primary web page or content information leads to disruptions of crawling and indexing.

Therefore, many brands & their marketers have seen how many domain migration changes result in staggering losses of traffic and rankings, and suddenly the most well-known brand in an industry becomes non-existent within Google’s universe. It is therefore imperative to ensure the changes you’re making can be correctly comprehended by the Google algorithm.

Expecting a lonesome digital marketer to be a jack of all aspects of the migration activity is quite unrealistic. A SEO expert can be a prime asset in this scenario of migration times for brands & marketers.

Whilst a Digital Marketer today is an revenue generation leaning with an user design & interface focussed roles for obvious customer feedback ratings, first and foremost it’s crucial to understand how the migration specific changes bering made in the migration are communicated to Google.

Here are five ways in which the expertise of an SEO professional can propel your website towards a successful migration.

1. Complexity of URL mapping and redirects

Since a site’s popularity linkages and page equity is an essential part of SEO, SEO Experts at the activity helm can deal with redirect handling and URL mapping and all the complications that come along with it on the technology, content, duplication, accessibility, page re-directions, enabling timely crawling, replacement in Google indexes, resolving page not founds, orphan pages, back links juice to new web pages, enabling faster page speeds during the Redirects phase, trouble shooting old indexed pages, canonical tags and domain redirects.

2. Decoding the old website’s work flows for benchmarks

After all the mapping and setting in Google crawlers to your new site, the main driver behind the web migration is to attract enhanced Search Rankings, more Clicks & visits, increase the engagement factors and achieve more goals from it. However, without understanding how your original site performed, it’s very difficult to establish if your new site is actually superior. This, therefore, highlights the importance of benchmarking.

By aggregating the different metrics and views of landing pages, meta tags & snippets, page speed, bounce rates and goal completions into measurable benchmarks, a beautiful, detailed benchmark of how your new website performs, and how it’s interpreted by both search engines and users can be created duly by the SEO experts. Astute benchmarking will allow for in-depth, helpful post-migration analysis, particularly for those metrics that can only be recorded at a particular moment.

After the migration is completed, only a SEO Expert will remember to check the prime important numbers that make sense for progressive performance of the migration aspects. SEO Experts will make sure users aren’t just on your site, but crawlers are too and that your newly launched website is totally getting the quality score juice from the past SEO efforts done on the website.

3. Migrating your tracking tools Much like Google’s search engine, Google tools like Analytics, Search Console, Page Speed etc. aren’t so keen on supporting your site migration either. Therefore, you have to make sure you’re ready to start tracking the new site, ideally without losing your old data.

Most commonly a SEO Expert is an Google Analytics & Data Studio expert too. And so with these skills, they will ensure that the proper measurements of important factors are of a continuous nature.

4. Human Thought based Testing & addressing of issues

All new upgraded websites run the risk of causing all sorts of issues with duplicate content and ranking cannibalization. And there’s no way to track backlinks or see exactly what it will look like in a SERP while the new website is in a staging environment.

An onboarded SEO Expert can thoroughly re-test each individual redirects and crawl out duplicate content and orphan pages. This process is critical to make sure that every redirect behaves as expected and that the appropriate status codes are applied properly.

The SEO Expert will enure that the correct Sitemaps, XML files, No Index clauses etc. stays live on the legacy site as well as the new website for a seamless migration process.

5. Launching and mitigating loss

For many website migrations, there is always a loss of traffic arising from the interim or longish period when old indexed pages resolved is being replaced by the new website landing pages. This resultant traffic loss is a product of search engines and users not recognizing your new site in snippets. A SEO Expert will assist in rendering proper content which is needed to ensure rankings in search engines and the traffic is back on the upswing.

Just remember, that the harvest the past years of SEO optimization can be finished in a single hour without proper guidance and direction on the optimal way to undertake the steps required for Google and the implementation of the measurement dashboards in the Google tools of Google Search Console, Google Analytics etc. during the data migration activity.

Hence a SEO Experts role is very vital in this process and the benefits of progressive traction in rankings, visits, goals etc. from the new website will accrue in a maximum beneficial manner for the brand & marketer.