Website Migration: Change Your Design Without Affecting Your SEO

In this digital era, it is not easy to successfully run a business without a website. You need a website to attain an online presence and gain an edge over your competitors. Regardless of the nature of your business, maintaining an online presence will elevate your business beyond geographical boundaries, generate more clients and prospects, increase brand awareness and legitimacy, and boost your sales revenues.

More and more business merchants have realized the essence of a business website. This could be the reason why there are over 2 billion websites in the world. To elevate your business and stay a notch higher than your competitors, you must build a reliable website.

Website Migration: What it is? And Why It Is Necessary?

Like most things, a website is subject to change. Therefore, a time will come when your website will need a new home. Change, edit, add or remove several aspects of your website to enhance user experience or technical performance. That is what website migration is all about.

However, migrating a website is not as easy as it sounds. The process becomes even more complex if the website has hundreds or thousands of web pages. If the website migration process is not executed well, it might cause serious site errors, high bounce rates, and poor SEO performance. Haven’t we heard of the horror stories of website migration going wrong? It causes wiping out company data and taking a toll on a website’s SEO.

This article intends to guide users on migrating a website without affecting search engine ranks or any other website element.

Website Migration Checklist: How to Migrate Website While Optimizing SEO

As we have already mentioned, the website migration process is a bit complicated. If not done right, it could seriously affect your search engine visibility. Here are some quick-win suggestions you should consider when migrating.

1.    Analyse Your Current Website

Before you embark on the business of migrating and redesigning your website, you must first benchmark the performance of your website’s performance. You should examine and analyse metrics and key performance indicators such as bounce rates, number of form submissions, domain authority, and time on site. This information is necessary to know what is working and what is not. From here, you can proceed to redesign your website but with these metrics in mind.

2.    Remember to Upgrade the SSL Certificate

We know that SSL certificates can do a great job for SEO. Google uses the HTTP/S factors as one of the most important elements for ranking websites in its SERPs. Website migration provides an excellent opportunity to install SSL on your website. Even if your website already has an SSL certificate, upgrading the certificate could bring value to your SEO. For example, upgrading to a wildcard SSL certificate if you are creating subdomains. It will secure unlimited subdomains within one domain name.

In other words, you should use the website migration process to ensure your site has an SSL certificate for SEO. In addition, it would please you to learn that SSL certificates do not cost you much. There are various cheap SSL certificates available in the market which could work perfectly fit for your SEO. The certificate is easy to install and maintain.

3.    Optimize Existing Content for SEO

One of the best strategies for achieving SEO goals is ensuring that every page on your website targets two or more keywords. This strategy has worked for my website and so many others. The logic here is that all content should be built around what your target audience is looking for.

When migrating, you must ensure that content on the current website is optimized for SEO before it can feature on the new website. For instance, it would be prudent to have keywords included in the titles, introductory paragraphs, URLs, body, and Meta descriptions. Although when you update this content, it will take time. It is a necessary element of the entire migration journey, which positively affects SEO.

4.    Solve All Theming and Conflicting Pages

You should leverage the website migration process to explore internal theming and page conflicts. For instance, you might have to consolidate multiple thin pages into a single comprehensive page, and you could cannibalize two conflicting pages competing for the same keywords.

Solving such conflicts will help to establish a robust website authority and break through any glass ceilings that might be causing visibility problems in the search engine results pages.

5.    Enhance Your Link-Building Strategy

You should leverage the website migration process to create a more robust linking strategy. Link building entails creating hyperlinks that drive web visitors from other sites to your website. Building quality links that direct visitors to your site signals to Google that your website has quality resources on the subject. This explains why websites with more backlinks tend to earn higher rankings from search engines.

The website migration process gives you a unique advantage in analysing your link-building strategy. It presents an avenue to find new backlink opportunities. You can replicate your competitor’s SEO backlinks, solve broken links, and regain missing ones. All these will help to earn you some great spots at the top of the search engine results pages.

6.    Improving Web Page Speeds

We all know what website speed does. Hear this- A one-second delay in page loading makes page views drop by 11%. In other words, speed is a direct ranking factor and it should be treated during a website migration. You should use the website migration session as an opportunity to do various things that enhance website speeds and boost your ranks in search engine results pages. For instance, you should:

• Ensure browser caching is activated
• Compress images
• Minify web resources
• Minimize HTTP request
• Optimize all media files, such as videos and infographics

Doing this will speed up your website and increase your ranks.

7.    Updating Your Site Architecture

Once all content is pruned and optimized for SEO, your focus should shift to the remaining pages. The trick here is ensuring that your site visitors understand the relationship between your pages without difficulty.

For instance, your home page should be linked to the About Us page, products, blogs, news, and contact us pages. This website structure is critical because it helps search bots understand the relationship between pages.

Final Words

This article has explored seven tips you should follow during website migration to optimize your SEO. Some of these tips are complex and make the migration process a bit long and complex, but they are necessary. Once you factor in all these tips, you can relaunch your new website. If you are unsure of what should be done, I recommend you find an expert to do the task.