you can do this using tools such as Screaming Frog. The crawl lets you gather all the information on your site and see it as Google does, plus it gives If you don’t have an you the first step for creating your redirect list (more on that later). Carry out keyword research This step isn’t essential, but we would highly recommend that you take the opportunity to improve your SEO during your migration. This is not only your chance to optimise your site’s aesthetics and technical performance, but also to optimise your URLs, metadata, headings and all other on-page elements and keyword research will be your foundation that this work is based on.
Determine your site architecture
Once your keyword research is complete, you can employment database use this to create your new site architecture. Analyse how your current content ranks, identify if there are any gaps and see which content should stay, go or be consolidated and what, if any, new content needs to be created. Create your redirect list Creating your redirect list is an essential step of any site migration. Go back to the crawl you ran of your website and then map out where each URL should go. Create a spreadsheet with one column for your old URL and one column for your new URL, this way you can ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
This is important so that you don’t
create any 404 status error codes, this is bad not only for user experience, but it will also have a big impact on your SEO if there are lots of them. So, when creating your list, make sure you map your old URL to the new version of that same page, or the very closest equivalent – don’t just map any pages that aren’t being moved over to your home page for example. Retain or improve all your on-page and off-page SEO efforts As we mentioned earlier, if you carry out keyword research you can take this opportunity to review and improve your existing on-page efforts such as your headings and copy.
However, there are also technical
SEO elements that you should look to improve or add before your new site launch. Consider your HTML mark-up, page load speed, core web vitals, mobile friendliness, geotargeting, schema mark up and more. Use a sandbox to carry out a pre-launch review Before you launch, test your new site on a test server/ sandbox. This gives you the opportunity to carry out a pre-launch audit and test elements of your site’s performance such as the redirects to see that everything is running as planned.
This helps to retain any previou
s data in case it gets erased during the migration. It also gives you the chance to review your data and see how your site is currently doing, so that you can then. Measure how your traffic and conversions improve post launch. Ensure Google Analytics, Search Console and/ or other search. Engine tools are set up To avoid any gaps in your data. And reporting, set up . Yur analytics tools as soon as possible. For most sites in the world. This will include to be able to be more efficient Google Analytics. And Google Search Console, but if you like in a country that . Commonly uses another search engine you might want to set up their equivalents as well.
For example, if your site is targeting
America, you may also want to set up Bing Webmaster Tools. Launch The time has arrived, set up your forwarding redirects, unpublish your old site and launch your new one. If done correctly, this should happen pretty seamlessly. Crawl your material data new site Once you’ve checked your redirects, run a crawl of your. Site toReview whether or not everything has gone as planned. Some of the most important things you’ll wa. nt to look for. Are indexability, crawlability, duplicate content, 404 status errors, broken links and. Redirect errors (more on that below).