Website migration is a stress inducing experience for most SEO consultants and content marketing professionals. After all, it takes a lot of time and effort to build up page-rankings and not very much time to lose them completely while migrating to a new server. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way if you’ve planned ahead properly.
In a recent article in SEO Journal titled, 4 Reasons Why Website Migrations Fail & How to Overcome Them, author Steven van Vessum lays out a strategy for web publishers who are preparing for a website migration that minimizes SEO losses as much as possible. (Spoiler alert, this strategy involves lots of advance planning.)
Planning ahead is van Vessum’s number one bit of advice for anyone planning a website migration. In this case, it means involving your entire team, including copywriters and SEO consultants, as well as preparing checklists for each of them to use throughout the process. This is, he points out, the most critical stage of the process.
Van Vessum also advises web publishers to make certain that they know exactly what the risks of a migration are. He points out that search engines owe you exactly nothing when it comes to SEO. That means that if you lose all your page rankings because of your migration, there’s no one at Google who’s going to help you earn them back.
Finally, van Vessum stresses that a successful website migration is going to be a team effort. Everyone needs to know their role well in advance of the move and be prepared to implement their checklists with as little strife as possible. While there will always be some loss involved with any website migration, it can be greatly mitigated with a little bit of advance preparation.