United States
SEO Migration
SEO migration services ensure that any changes you make to your website, will be fully understood by Google, so that you retain and grow your search visibility, rankings and traffic, rather than losing it all in a flash.
With the rapid pace of technological change, the growth of mobile usage and significant changes in platforms, it is essential that your website is up to date, benefits from the latest technology and provides the best user experience possible. This often means upgrading your website or developing a brand-new website.
A site migration often involves a substantial investment, which should, in turn, lead to significant improvements in user satisfaction and conversions in order to repay the investment. However, without proper planning, preparation and implementation of a complete SEO site migration, your traffic and visibility can fall off a cliff, damaging your ROI.
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When would you need SEO migration services?
At Zelst, we have been helping companies with SEO migrations for almost twenty years and have handled numerous standard and unusual migrations, including:
- Design or UX changes
- Upgrading to the latest version of your CMS
- Changing CMS
- Domain name changes
- Transferring to a different server or website host
- Subdomain or subfolder changes
- Changing site structure or navigation
- Switching from HTTP to HTTPS
Is SEO migration risky?
Unfortunately, despite all the considerable improvements that you have envisaged from your new website, many new sites often experience huge declines in search visibility, rankings and traffic, even with all the fanfare of a new site launch. This drop-off can often take many months or even years to recover from and can cost you a considerable amount of money. So how can you avoid that?
It's easy – make sure you work with an experienced SEO migration service provider to help guide you through the process and ensure that your move is successful, stress-free and delivers on your investment.
With any site migration, there will be an element of risk. However, at Zelst, we will work with you and your developers to ensure that your migration goes off without a hitch, identifying and fixing snags before they can become problems.
SEO Migration Strategy and Process
We find the best results are achieved when we get involved in the process right from the start, from when you first begin thinking of developing a new website.
We develop a carefully thought-out SEO migration strategy, which ensures everyone understands:
- What is going to happen and when
- What their role is in the migration
- What they should expect
- What should be achieved
Once you’ve lost your previous authority and rankings, it is much harder and will take much longer to get them back. This is why it’s much more effective for us to be involved from the planning stage, as we know how to ensure your website’s authority and value is passed onto the new site.
SEO Migration Services with Zelst
- Preparing
We can both prepare your website for the migration and advise you on how to give your migration the best chance of success, such as when is a good time to launch your new website.
2. Crawling
Once the staging site (sometimes known as a nav site) has been created, we can really get to work. We’ll crawl the staging site for on-page and backend SEO optimisation opportunities, as well as reviewing the staging site from a UX and functionality perspective.
3. Redirecting
One of the biggest pitfalls of any SEO migration is in the redirects. If a 301 redirect is not set up successfully, then you may not pass on the value and authority from the existing site to the new site, which can have devastating effects. We can highlight where any redirects have not been set up or have been set up poorly, such as if there are any loops or chains that could impact your website.
4. Testing
Once your new site is live, we’ll spring into action and test everything. We’ll check your robots.txt file, review your new website’s speed and mobile friendliness, crawl the old pages to test the redirects and request indexing from Google and Bing.
5. Monitoring
The SEO migration isn’t over on the go-live date. We’ll continue to closely monitor your website’s visibility, rankings and traffic. Although we expect to see fluctuation immediately after the migration, this should level out and the improvements to your website should begin to show some results.
Of course, there is a significant amount of work needed to ensure a successful site migration. Peter, our managing director, likens it to a duck on a lake – it may look easy and smooth from the outside, but there is plenty of paddling going on under the water!
If you’re interested in knowing exactly what goes into an SEO migration, check out our comprehensive guide to site migrations. If you would like to work with Zelst’s SEO migration services, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our expert team today.