Site migration support

Firstly, we need to know how your website is currently performing. We start by looking at the following areas: Content audit – a detailed look at how your current website content is performing; Identifying your top-performing pages which offer you the most value (and need the most attention during migration); What your organic rankings and visibility look like pre-migration.

After analysing your current site, we’ll create a plan for improving performance on key metrics. This will vary depending on the type of migration, but we will typically look at: Keyword rankings; User engagement; User retention; Traffic coming to your website; Traffic to your key product/service pages.

Once we have benchmarked your current website’s performance, we ensure Google Analytics is set up and tracking properly on your new website and that your historical data has been carried over.

Our SEO team will consult you on the possible SEO risks and how best to mitigate them. We will advise on the best time to complete your site migration, plan out a migration framework for best practices and help you define a successful migration for your organisation. This is largely dependent on the type of migration and your business goals.

We’ll review your website code to ensure your website is running as quickly as possible. Any elements that are negatively impacting your SEO will be removed.

If internal links are not updated post-migration, the site will either return 404 errors (page not found), or the link will go through a redirect. This includes links in your menus, content and sitemap. We’ll perform an internal link audit to identify and 404 or redirecting internal links, where they are located, and what they need to be updated to. Then we will update your links to the new URL structure.

Depending on the site changes that are taking place, redirects may need to be considered. If the site is moving domain, or from HTTP to HTTPS, this is fairly straightforward. However, when site structure changes are being made, it is highly recommended to review all URLs to see if redirects are required. We will compile this list after URL mapping, as well as provide a usable doc to your developers (be it a csv, .htaccess file, or other workable document).

Your backlink profile is just as important as your internal links to ensure there is no lost value post-migration. We’ll compile a complete list of existing backlinks so you can involve the relevant PR and let them know to update the URL(s) in good time.

Google Search Console configuration is one of the most important ways to let the search engines know that you’ve moved your website to a new domain. We’ll create and provide assets to let them know your website is moving, and that your URL structure will be updating. This means we can track the performance of your website migration and ensure your new URLs are being indexed.

Our SEO experts will create a website migration plan to prioritise tasks and highlight our step-by-step process, ensuring you are kept in the loop at all times. You’ll be able to visually show your team the plan in a timeline format so everyone will know what tasks will be worked on and when.