website migration services

Important SEO Checklist

A website migration is like a Broadway play – months of rehearsals and adjustments before the curtain goes up. No plan survives contact with the enemy, however, and things tend to go wrong even with proper planning. Having an SEO working with you and your developers every step of the way can help mitigate risk and put your website back onto its growth path quickly.

Know What You're Migrating

A website migration often involves more than a few moving parts – content, platform, CMS, URL changes, images, hosting concerns, server configuration – just to name a few. Without an SEO team on the gound with your business, you risk missing key steps in the development process that can cost your site organic traffic and limit its future performance potential.

How Many Pages to Keep?

Setting benchmarks for performance is a key component to understanding your migration recovery and growth plan. Part of that strategy is leveraging performance data to understand what content needs to move into the new site experience and what pages you should cull during the move. Removing low-quality content now can be a key performance driver later.

Staging Environment QA is Key

Quality assurance while your site is in its staing environment is crucial to avoiding serious errors during the soft or hard launch of the migrated domain. Always allow time for developers to receive feedback on staging environment progress and implement fixes to issues encountered. Doing so may save your site millions in lost revenue.

What Does Migration Recovery Look Like?

This question comes up a ton during the planning phases of any website migration. Stakeholders want to know how much organic traffic is at risk, and while benchmarks are generally great for gauging your site’s unique path to recovery, it’s important to remember that flux is normal. Recovery to growth can take a full quarter to achieve wth your SEO team conducting triage post-launch to patch critical issues.

migration goes wrong

SEO Migration Services Highlights:

  • Platform Experience: SFCC, Endeca, AEM, Sitecore, Shopify, WordPress, Magento, Drupal
  • Number of Migrations Completed: 15+
  • All migration engagements include project management & checklist
  • All migration engagements include 1:1 redirect mapping for most popular pages

Migration Checklist & Project Management:

Your timeline for migrating your website should involve at leats two months of pre-planning, a couple weeks of go-live triage and implmentation support, and two months of post-launch support & bug busting. Of course, that’s an ideal scenario. We have experience working with tight timelines as well. 

Our migration checklist identifies the key milestones in the migration process that your teams absolutely need to hit to be in the running for a soft hit to your traffic at launch and a swifter recovery. Handling dozens of these projects across a variety of platforms gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect.

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