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Site migration can be challenging, but companies often need to migrate for various reasons. Most of them migrate to switch to a better technology or change the location domain. Website migration is not a quick process that can be completed in a specific time frame, especially when it comes to SEO. To increase your organic visibility, an SEO migration requires careful preparation, analysis, and monitoring.
The main purpose of migration is to keep high search engine rankings, traffic, and conversions. This article outlines the key steps to a successful SEO migration, helping to prevent a drop in organic presence.
The process of changing the URL, content, structure, redesigns, technology, or location is known as website migration. You can migrate to improve outdated technology, redesign the website, make structural changes, or rebrand. In this process, it is important to ensure minimal disruptions, as they may affect the webpage’s organic presence and user experience.
Migrations can take many forms depending on the company’s goals, including switching to a new CMS, upgrading servers, or integrating platforms. Overall, migration is a strategic process that aims to improve functionality, user experience, or business objectives while maintaining search engine performance.
The site migration can impact SEO rankings because moving your website from one domain to another may result in a drop in organic traffic. This happens as search engines need time to crawl, index, and adapt to the new site structure and content.
Here’s a good example from Microsoft Bing showing what can happen to your Bing search visibility when an SEO migration isn’t done correctly.
Imagine you are moving to a new house and you need to pack your belongings to transfer to your new address. You don’t want to leave your valuables at your old address. So, website migration works in much the same way. You need to ensure that all the SEO value you’ve built on your current site is safely transferred to your new site.
Migration can result in decreased traffic and lower search rankings; therefore, a carefully planned SEO migration plan is a must for a smoother transition.
Without proper planning, there are common mistakes you may face when preparing for a webpage migration, such as:
One of the most important steps in page migration is to perform proper planning and organization. Poor planning can lead to numerous mistakes in the process, including missed deadlines, data issues, and system downtime, all of which can impact the overall budget.
Key factors that need to be considered pre- and post-migration are:
Following these steps improves the planning and leads to a smoother webpage migration.
Without a migration backup plan, it is common to experience data loss and operation disruptions. Having a comprehensive backup strategy ensures all data and files can be quickly restored in the event of system failures or errors during migration. Also, a backup plan helps with:
Effective preparation for migration is crucial to achieving successful site performance with minimal downtime and disruptions.
SEO is closely connected to website migration. When migrating to another domain, keep in mind several important SEO elements:
Misleading these important SEO elements can have a negative impact on the whole SEO performance, leading to poor organic outcomes.
Many companies face significant damage during migration due to failed team communication. If teams are not involved in every step of the migration process, it can lead to an increased risk of mistakes, including negative outcomes, a drop in rankings, a lack of accurate information, and missed opportunities.
Therefore, ongoing and clear communication is essential because:
SEO teams are responsible for a wide range of challenging tasks that require focus and precision. Without continuous and clear communication, they are more likely to make mistakes that impact long-term SEO success.
When URLs are changed without a proper 301 redirect, search engines can lose track of the content, and users can face 404 errors. This results in significant declines in traffic and rankings. Without testing, missed or incorrect redirects can go unnoticed, which additionally causes lost content and users.
Before and after migrating, you need to test the new changes because they may lead to:
Ensure you test the old and new websites before and after the migration to improve user experience and maintain SEO performance.
Although site migration comes with certain risks, it has many benefits if done right. However, you need a detailed SEO migration guide or professional SEO migration services to help you run it successfully. All steps involved are divided into two main parts: pre-migration and post-migration.
Pre-migration planning is an important part of the overall migration process. The SEO performance is crucial for Google rankings; therefore, every effort should be made to preserve these values.
The pre-migration planning includes activities that need to be done before the migration process, such as:
Crawling your current webpage helps to analyze the current structure of your content, URLs, and hierarchy. It is important so you can use it post-migration to identify indexed pages, technical structure, and metadata.
A site crawl provides valuable insights such as the number of indexed pages, internal link structure, canonical tags, and existing errors. The full backup ensures that all this data is stored safely and can be used for comparison after migration. A common tool here is Screaming Frog, where you can see which pages are indexed, the internal link structure, and other important information from a crawl.
This is a typical Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawl overview, analyzing internal URLs, status codes, and indexed pages to ensure all pages are properly tracked during an SEO migration.
Gathering important SEO data, including traffic statistics, a detailed backlink report, an XML sitemap, meta tags, the current traffic situation, and URLs of indexed pages, is essential for future analysis. By collecting SEO data and metrics, you can compare post-migration performance with your previous benchmarks.
In our experience, most websites generate a large percentage of their organic traffic from a handful of pages. So, it’s important to protect the pages that drive the most relevant traffic to your site. You can easily check which pages are those via Google Search Console, for example.
You can take your analysis a step further and protect your “up and coming” pages that are now starting to perform well. Once again, you can check that on Google Search Console by clicking on the “compare last 3 months to previous period” filter, which will give you an understanding of which pages have been on the rise.
Prior to migrating, you need to access all data relevant to making SEO decisions from tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, or Semrush to capture key metrics, including impressions, clicks, and backlinks. All data refers to how your rankings or traffic perform after the migration, allowing you to identify changes and make corrections if needed. Equipped with all this information, you’ll be able to make better decisions and know which pages deserve more attention when migrating.
The next step in your preparing phase is to start building a staging environment and test your website before it goes live. A staging environment is a duplicate of your new version, created to test all changes before deploying to end-users.
Test 301 redirects, meta tags, and URL structures to ensure everything is good. During the migration, the staging environment should look as closely as possible.
One important tip: make sure search engines don’t index the staging site. You don’t want duplicate content floating around and affecting your SEO. You can easily block it using a robots.txt file. It’s like putting up a “do not enter” sign while you’re still getting everything ready.
The robots.txt file looks like this:
If you want to tell the Google bots to stop crawling a certain page, you need to write the page you want to block like this:
After updating your robots.txt file to block certain pages from being crawled, the next step is to make sure it works correctly.
First, test the file using Google Search Console’s Robots.txt Tester, shown below. Then, upload the updated file to your website’s root directory (https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and make sure it’s publicly accessible. Monitor the crawling through GSC to be sure that the page doesn’t appear in search engines.
Important tip: Always double-check that your staging site is blocked during testing, and remove unnecessary restrictions once the new site goes live so Google can crawl and index your live pages properly.
In this step, redirect all old URLs to their corresponding new URLs. You can start by creating a map in a spreadsheet, using data from a crawl report. List all indexed URLs from the current website and assign a corresponding new URL for each page to ensure proper redirection after migration.
Try to create a redirect map that looks like this:
Start by listing the old URLs and new URLs to each page. The main purpose of creating a redirect map ensure that an old URL is not missed in the redirection process.
Document all existing keyword rankings before migration to identify pages for improvement. Using keyword tools, such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, can help compare pre-migration keyword rankings with post-migration rankings and measure any changes in visibility.
By using the “compare” functionality on Ahrefs, you can easily see whether your migration has been successful. Just select the dates you want to compare, and the report will immediately show changes in ranking, which you hope will be all colored green in the “change” column.
To ensure the staging page is ready for deployment, a technical audit is crucial. Running a technical SEO on the staging site helps to confirm that all pages, links, content, and tags are in the right place. Common technical checks include navigation analysis, SEO audit, crawl documentation, analytics checks, mobile testing, site speed, and broken backlinks.
After your website migration is complete and the staging site has gone live, you should follow a post-migration SEO monitoring to verify that all elements are functioning correctly and that the site is performing as expected.
The crawling process you performed in the pre-migration phase should be repeated after the website migration. Old site crawling gives reports on whether all URLs are redirected properly. This ensures that both users and search engines are seamlessly guided to the correct pages on your new site, preserving SEO values and maintaining a positive user experience.
Verify that all 301 redirects are functioning properly and that canonical tags point to the correct URLs. Incorrect redirects or canonicals can cause duplicate content issues or loss of link equity. Use tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to confirm that every redirect and canonical setup aligns with your new site structure.
It can be done manually as well, by using Redirect Checker, like this:
Or by using Screaming Frog. Enter the URL in the search bar, click Start, and in the right section, you will find the 301 redirects by Internal Redirection (3xx). See the example below:
You should crawl the new website to find any potential technical issues that need to be addressed and improved. The post-migration crawl is as important as the one done in the pre-migration phase because the post-migration reports provide data after the move, so you can easily compare if there are changes. Tools like Screaming Frog are useful to catch:
In addition, it is important to check for issues with page indexing. It is common to have some changes with organic traffic, because Google bots are trying to re-crawl the new pages. In our practice, this works best by following this in your GSC, in the “Page indexing” report.
With Google Console and Google Analytics, you can easily identify bugs and errors. In GA4, review the “Pages and Screens” to identify URLs that generate 404 error responses. These errors often indicate missing redirects or broken links. Setting up proper 301 redirects helps to recover lost traffic and improve user experience.
Regularly monitor these reports to catch new 404 errors early. Compare traffic patterns before and after migration to detect any sudden drops that might signal unresolved issues. Additionally, create custom alerts in GA4 to notify you when error pages spike, allowing for faster response times and consistent SEO performance maintenance.
The XML sitemap is a file where you can find all pages that search engines need to SEO index. The robots.txt file is a text file that tells the Google bots which pages should not be indexed. After migration, update these files to ensure that crawlers can effectively navigate and index the page structure. Review your robots.txt file to confirm that no critical pages are accidentally blocked from being indexed.
You can find a free robot.txt tester, or you can try Google’s robots.txt. Tester to address errors in your new file. This works in your Google Search Console. Follow the image below:
After migration, it is important to review your existing backlinks and ensure other websites are linking to the right pages on your new domain. Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console to identify backlinks that lead to your old website that return 404 errors.
If you find broken or outdated links, update your redirects so that users (and search engines) land on the correct pages. This small “cleanup” step can go a long way toward protecting your SEO performance, preventing traffic loss, and ensuring your site authority carries over smoothly after the migration.
You can easily do this in GSC: in the Links menu on the left, you can find all the external links.
Tip: You can export all the external links for further analysis. Click the “Export external links” in the right corner.
Track keyword rankings and organic visibility to identify any changes after migration. Use tools that can provide valuable insights about the performance. There will probably be temporary drops in rankings because the bots are re-crawling and re-indexing the new pages, but continuous monitoring can help to detect issues early and maintain SEO performance.
In addition to keyword tracking, you should regularly check Google Search Console for indexing updates, crawl errors, and coverage issues. Analyzing traffic trends can help you identify pages that are losing visibility.
The best way to ensure that you have migrated successfully is to compare pre- and post-migration performance to identify problems early. Also, adjust content, metadata, or redirects as needed to recover or improve rankings over time. Think of it like giving your site a little boost after the move, so search engines and visitors can find everything smoothly.
A website migration is a long and technical process that requires a lot of planning, research, good strategy, and measurement. Many factors are involved in maintaining and increasing visibility, organic traffic, and improving SEO performance. A detailed SEO migration checklist is essential so you won’t miss any important steps in pre- and post-migration processes. Only one small mistake can lead to a major issue hard to recover from. Therefore, with a proper SEO migration plan, you can successfully transition your website while preserving rankings, traffic, and setting a strong baseline for long-term SEO growth.
Book a free consultation today to learn how we can help you attract more of the right traffic and turn it into qualified leads for steady growth.
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