Overview
What is an SEO migration?
An SEO Migration is where your Google search rankings, your web authority, and all the cool stuff that makes you rank with Google and brings organic traffic to your website, are moved with you when you change web hosts.
SEO can be hard work, and you don’t want to lose all the benefits of that hard work when you migrate. So StudioHawk will make sure all the SEO bells and whistles go with you.
How can StudioHawk help with a migration?
StudioHawk can help to minimise the loss of traffic to your new domain or CMS. We map and implement redirects, provide recommendations, help with site structure, monitor traffic and report to you on the progress and any impact on your organic traffic.
StudioHawk works with you throughout the website migration plan and keeps working with you to get you even more traffic through SEO campaigns.
We also have experience implementing all different types of website migrations, including Protocol, Subdomain, Domain, Top-level domain, Content Management System and Structural migrations.
What’s involved in an SEO migration?
For such a big job, a crucial undertaking, you shouldn’t just think one day- let’s migrate our website. You need a structured plan, you need a checklist!
Migration checklists
StudioHawk has helped a number of large and small businesses migrate their website, and SEO, across new domains and CMS’s. We’re thorough in our work thanks to a comprehensive checklist, created especially by StudioHawk.
Pre-launch
- We audit your keywords and content and make sure the keywords are working.
- Check your metadata and fix where necessary.
- Check and test your URL structure and ensure the right redirects are in place.
- Thoroughly check your internal linking structure.
- Export your backlinks, and give them another audit as well.
- We benchmark your new site and do a rendering check.
Post Launch
- Testing of key pages.
- Submit to Google for indexing.
- Review ALL redirects.
- Test the new XML sitemap.
- Test mobility usage.
There is a lot more that goes into a site migration. We couldn’t list EVERYTHING here, but you get the idea of how thorough we are with your website and your SEO.
Doing a site migration is one of the most difficult and technical SEO operations you can perform. You need to know that it will be done right, the first time.
Difference between a traditional migration & SEO migration?
A regular site migration is a case of taking your website or content from one CMS to another. If all goes well, your web pages appear just as they were or even better on your new domain or CMS.
An SEO site migration is all of the above, but we help keep your SEO achievements and progress. With page redirects, we help transfer and migrate your existing organic traffic to your new website. We also help maintain your backlinks, metadata and content.
We make sure that you’re not starting from SEO zero when you migrate your website.
What different CMS’s can StudioHawk help migrate from?
At StudioHawk, we can help you migrate to and from all CMS’s. This can include WordPress, Shopify, Squarespare and Magento migrations. As SEO Specialists, we have experience navigating and implementing changes on all CMS’s and know when and where to implement redirects
SEO Migration faq
Got A Question?
Check Out Our SEO Migration FAQs
Sometimes your website won’t allow you to perform certain actions. Your CMS might be slow and outdated, and possibly insecure. Your business may have evolved and grown, and so you need a more complex website capable of handling more products and services and, more importantly, more traffic.
How large is your website? Is it a small business with a handful of product pages and some blog posts? We can do any size.
Are you an enterprise-level business with a website that has thousands of products, internal links and a host of backlinks? We can help you migrate too.
StudioHawk has successfully helped businesses of all sizes with an SEO Migration.
The simple answer is – you lose your SEO and organic rankings. Your current SEO success is based on all of your site structure, authority, content and metadata. You can’t just take some and leave the rest. It will hurt your ranking.
StudioHawk does a backlink audit first, to clean up any broken or toxic backlinks. Then we implement backlink redirects to your new domain. This keeps the Page Authority gained from any potential lost backlinks and helps mitigate potential lost authority.
In a word – very important. They are permanent redirects that pass full page rank equity to the redirected page. 301 redirects are a fundamental process for any migration.
SEO migration is not an exact science. It can be quite volatile. We can plan and prepare as much as we can, but there can always be some loss of SEO. However, by keeping with StudioHawk we can campaign to regain any SEO losses and help mitigate any volatility.
How long is a piece of string? While uploading the redirects can be done pretty much right away, if you have a complicated website, with many pages it can take weeks or even months to map out and plan for a migration.
We would say the 301 redirects are the most important part of your SEO migration. You want that page authority to be kept from your old site and that’s what a 301 redirect can give you.
This depends on how big your site is and how much help you require to get the SEO site migration done right.
A simple, small business website with only ten pages would take less time and money to migrate, compared to a large business with over a thousand web pages, internal links, backlinks and a swathe of metadata and content to migrate.
StudioHawk has successfully helped HEAPS of businesses migrate their websites. We’ve created our own comprehensive checklist so we don’t miss anything, not the smallest detail.
We will walk you through the process and be there to help if things get a little rocky.
We are very good at what we do, and we’d like to help you too.
Ready to Prepare for your migration?
We’re excited to collaborate with people from a variety of industries and backgrounds. Give us a call if you’d like to learn more about migrations work and how you can ensure your website transfers over correctly.