SEO Best Practices During Domain Migration
We have had several clients recently who have undergone site consolidation and/or migration. Usually, this has happened because of exciting acquisitions or big brand shifts. Consolidating content and changing domains can be a risky time for your organic authority. However, if you have a comprehensive migration plan, you can mitigate a significant amount of the loss usually associated with domain changes and protect your organic traffic.
Why is Domain Migration Risky?
Domain migration is usually a complicated project with changes in site organization, technical infrastructure, and content coverage just to name a few. Even if you’re doing a very simple adjustment where the entirety of the website stays as is (no change in URLs (outside of domain), design, nav, layout—just a straight domain change), your rankings can still fluctuate.
Why?
Link equity and historical authority were attached to your old domain and might not immediately get passed to your new domain and URLs.
Search engines and answer engines can lag indexing a new site, so there might just be a gap in ingestion.
But if you’re doing a more complicated migration and chance then you also face the following risks:
Loss of brand recognition
Technical issues
Content gaps and topic/query changes
How to Approach a Solid, Strategic Domain Migration
Plan any changes with SEO in mind
Site migrations almost always come with site changes. But site changes—if done without traffic analysis or SEO considerations—can have unexpected and dire consequences. We heavily recommend bringing an SEO specialist to the table during the early stages of a site migration. They can provide data-driven insights that can help you adjust your strategy and site plans accordingly.
Understand your current traffic
Make sure you understand where your current organic traffic is coming from. What are the most popular pages? What are your most popular queries? It’s best if you have an SEO topical map that shows you what areas of your website are successful with what intent or topics. You can then determine what the most important priorities are for keeping and protecting areas of your website and organic traffic intents.
Audit your backlinks
Use an SEO tool (AHREFs, SEMRush, Brightedge, Conductor) to identify your valuable backlinks. Not all backlinks are created equal, so low authority and low credibility backlinks aren’t very important for this assignment. However, identifying the backlinks that contribute to your SEO value will then help you track them through the transition. After your domain has changed, you can reach out to the most important sites and ask them to update their links accordingly.
Map out your 301 redirects
Thorough and accurate redirect handling is critical to passing along your link equity to the new site, and it’s the easiest way to clearly demonstrate what has happened with your site change to search and answer engines. It might be tempting to do a quick and dirty blanket 301 redirect, or even a many-to-one redirect strategy. But both of these options come with large risks. The more tailored your redirect strategy, the better.
Every page on your old domain should redirect to the corresponding page on your new domain. If you aren’t pulling over its corresponding page, then it should go to the next most closely aligned page. One-to-one redirects almost always have the best migration results. If it isn’t a one-to-one, then you run the risk that the pages aren’t close enough and you’ll lose link equity and query positions.
Plan your timeline carefully
Do not pull your old sites down until the new site is live. Make sure your redirects are in place and everything on your new site is ready to go. Only when new site is fully live, everything is working correctly, and your redirects have been pushed, should you fully decommission old domains.
Ensure technical cleanliness
This is another way that websites go awry when migrating their domain. If significant technical issues pop up (site speed, JavaScript errors, missing metadata, security settings, 404s), then your site is highly vulnerable to drops in organic search performance. We’ve even seen sites be migrated with a noindex tag on every page across a site.
Ensure you run site crawls during multiple stages of the site migration process. Double check site code issues, index configuration, and content structure. A clean site is a successful site.
Post-Launch Continues
After you’ve gone live, you also have more tasks to check and double check:
Create new XML sitemap and verify robots.txt accuracy
Update CMS settings
Notify Google of site change in GSC
Update social media and external profiles
Keep regularly checking analytics and crawling your site
The biggest piece of advice we can give is ensure that you have an SEO specialist who consults with you early on and often during site migration plans. Organic traffic is very valuable, and you don’t want to run the risk of losing your hard-earned traffic and authority right when you should be celebrating a big site change.
If you have any questions about site migration and organic impact, let us know. We’d be happy to talk through your concerns.