Migrations don’t have to go south
When it comes to SEO site migrations, there’s a lot at stake. Get it wrong and you could lose your rankings and backlinks, tank your online visibility and wave goodbye to organic traffic. We’ve seen it happen time and time again. We’ve even rescued a few websites after developers have bombed them. But trust us when we say that it’s a lot harder to salvage a site after a bad migration than it is to do it right from the get-go.
If you want SEO migration services that cover all bases to ensure the migration is as smooth as possible and you maintain your rankings and traffic on the new site, speak to Dark Horse.
Like any good SEO strategy, a site migration takes careful preparation and planning. Our SEO team offer the full trifecta – Technical, Content and Digital PR – to maintain organic visibility and optimise the new site for maximum performance.
Not sure which pages are worth keeping and which should be scrapped? We use performance data (we’re talking Google Analytics, Search Console and keyword ranking tools) to assess the quality of the content on your site. We can then advise on which pages to keep, remove, improve or consolidate to ensure everything on your new domain is relevant, optimised and unique.
If there are technical issues on your current site, the last thing you want is for these to be carried over to your new one. Our Technical SEO experts audit your site to find any issues, listing all the technical requirements and opportunities to improve site performance, speed and user experience.
A site migration is a great opportunity to get your house in order. Whether you need to update your page titles, H1s or URLs in line with new keyword research, enhance your meta descriptions with calls to action, include better alt text on your images, add canonical tags to avoid duplicate content, or use schema markup to help Google identify the content on each page, you’ll have the perfect opportunity to do so.
Our experienced Content team can help map out a set of keywords to each page and propose new tags (i.e. page titles, meta descriptions, headers, etc) to maintain and improve your current rankings, while our Technical team will look after canonical and structured data to maximise crawlability.
Providing a good user experience is the key to online success. If your site is currently hard to navigate, now is the chance to restructure your menu.
Our SEO migration services include advice on navigation structure and content siloing, so your new website is easier to use for both the end user and Google (the easier it is to crawl, the more big G will like your site).
Did you know that sites see a 40% drop in organic activity after a poor migration, on average? Don’t rely solely on your web developers to execute your site migration – you need expert SEO knowledge to get it right. We’ve done countless successful migrations and can support you every step of the way, so your organic performance doesn’t slip.
If you’re migrating a website, chances are your URL structure will change, either because you’ve optimised the slugs with new keyword research, updated the navigation and where the page sits on site, or because the domain name has changed. In any case, you’ll need to carefully map out where each existing URL should redirect to. Otherwise, you risk losing the keyword and backlink authority of that page.
Our technical SEO team will crawl your site and map out all current URLs to their future ones on the new website.
Ask any SEO agency worth their salt and they’ll tell you that you should have as few internal redirects on site as possible. Why? It makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website and won’t waste any crawl budget. Internal redirects can also slow a site down, which can negatively affect user experience.
As part of our SEO migration services, we’ll make sure all internal links are updated in line with the URL redirect map, so everything on site links directly to the new and correct page.
We implement our suggested changes on a staging site and test everything pre-go live. Post go-live, we then crawl the new site and double check everything is working as it should. Is anything blocking search engines from crawling? Have any new technical issues arisen? Are new pages being indexed? Have there been any drops in rankings or speed? Meticulous checking, every step of the way.
All SEO actions at Dark Horse are data-driven, and we suspect you work the same way. To ensure you’re tracking the right events and obtaining the data you need to make informed business decisions, our Technical team will set up Google Analytics and event tracking on your new site.
They’ll also update Search Console so Google knows that your website is moving to a new domain.
Don’t risk losing all of your hard-earned organic visibility. Get your migration right and capitalise on the benefits of a better performing and better optimised site with Dark Horse.
We live and breathe SEO. We’ve hired the best brains from Manchester and the surrounding areas to deliver SEO migrations that benefit your business in the long term.
It really depends on the size of your site and how much optimisation work needs doing, but the average SEO migration project takes about 40-50 hours from start to finish. There may be additional hour needed to monitor and fix things post go-live too.
Get in touch and we’ll give you a better idea of how long your project will take.
If done right, a domain migration can potentially improve your organic rankings and increase traffic, though it’s important to work closely with an experienced SEO team (*cough cough* like Dark Horse) to ensure that your site migration is done properly and in a way that will help improve your search engine rankings.
To assess the impact of an SEO migration, you should:
Overall, it’s important to monitor a variety of metrics and factors to get a complete picture. Dark Horse can help with all of that too.
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