Ideally, your SEO team should be working alongside your website developers throughout the entire website migration and redesign project.

SEO must be considered throughout the process and will eliminate the need to rework layouts and coding. If you’re waiting until development is complete, we can provide your developers with a punch list of items to complete. Building and executing an effective website SEO migration strategy is a complicated endeavor. The earlier you begin planning, the more time to do it correctly.

Proper migration of all existing optimized elements from your old website is crucial for success. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a much less optimized site after launch than the previous website.

Without SEO migration, We’ve seen traffic drop anywhere from 30-90% – sometimes in just a few weeks. It then becomes an uphill battle to identify which elements weren’t migrated, move them over and then wait for the search engines to react. Often we find it can take up to 12 months for rankings to return, if not longer.

The amount of SEO work and time required for a successful site migration depends on many variables, including:

• Existing organic value: If there is a lot to preserve, more resources are required to protect existing rankings and organic value. Consider SEO consulting services to determine your website’s existing organic value.
• Website size: How many pages do the old, and new websites have?
• Backlink profile: The size and complexity of your old website’s backlink profile will have SEO ramifications and can affect SEO strategy/resource allocation.
• Content additions: Does the new website have new pages, sections, or other optimizable resources?
• URLs: Will they be changing or staying the same?
• Dynamic optimizations: Does the website need to deploy dynamic tags for titles, meta descriptions, and other SEO elements?

When migrating to a new website, it’s crucial to measure the impact the migration had on your website’s organic visibility. Always run a baseline keyword report so that you can compare future rankings to the old website. You can analyze your traffic by source/medium in Google Analytics and other software. You can set your source to “organic” and your medium to “google.” The most important SEO metrics to pay attention to following a site migration include:

• Organic keyword rankings
• Organic traffic
• Organic conversions (sales, leads, form completions)

Yes, it is possible to migrate to a new platform without losing search engine rankings. While there may be an initial decline in organic rankings and traffic while Google crawls your new website, with proper SEO planning, your website should end up ranking better in search engines.

Google does not want to punish a company for building a new and better website. But, if you create a worse website, especially from an SEO perspective, you will quickly lose organic rankings and traffic.