What’s the one thing that can make any website stand out among thousands of similar ones on the internet? How can you make your business more prominent to users online? What is the thing that can help you attract higher traffic flux? The answer to all these questions is a straightforward thing called SEO. The right SEO strategy is the only solution if you want your business to thrive online.

So, it won’t be wrong to say that SEO is vital for the growth of your revenue generation online, and you need to ensure that your SEO strategy is working the right way all the time to produce the required outcomes. But when it comes to eCommerce website migration, there is a considerable probability of things going out of order and affecting the performance of your website on so many levels.

 

Ecommerce website migration is not a straightforward process and involves various complexities that you cannot ignore at any cost. Moving your website to newer technology can bring forward various problems; affecting your website traffic or sales. Any minor mistake in executing the migration plan can result in more significant disasters. But you don’t have to worry anymore, as today we will discuss how you can prevent any SEO loss in the eCommerce website migration process. We will go into every detail so your migration process goes as smoothly as possible, and you won’t have to face any difficulty SEO-wise.

 

How to execute a plan for the migration process?

As we have discussed above, website migration is a complex problem. If it’s not executed correctly, it can result in many SEO disasters. Therefore, you need to micro-manage this migration by keeping a keen eye on each petty issue. It might seem like a lot of extra effort to many, but trust us, in the end, you need to put up all these efforts for excellent outcomes. Here are some crucial pointers to consider while executing the migration process:

 

All Stakeholders are On the Same Page

The first thing you need to do in this migration process is to ensure that all the stakeholders are on the same page. These stakeholders include the project manager, SEO team, and UI/UX experts. It is super important that all these people be involved in every step and decision-making process. Significantly, the UI/UX, sever coding, and client coding should be by the SEO team’s suggestions and decisions.

 

Must Consult with the SEO team

It is essential to involve the input from the SEO team from the very beginning of the process to ensure smooth results. Ensure that the SEO team is monitoring the whole process very keenly and closely. Also, the new UI/UX must be SEO friendly, having space enough to add content, H1tags, etc., quickly.

 

Strong Execution Plan, TimeLine, and QA Process

One must have a strong execution plan developed after thorough research and input from every team. First, the stakeholders should have approved the plan before its execution. Then a proper timeline for execution should be formulated, and all teams should work to meet that timeline, which will ensure the safe execution of the migration plan.

 

What are the Important Factors that need to be focused on?

 

Ecommerce website migration is a tricky process and can affect many things SEO-wise. Like your website traffic flux, etc. Some factors are essential, and you have to focus on them while working on newer technology. Here are some of these factors. Let’s have a look at them:

• Load speed
• Mobile-friendliness
• Domain authority
• Optimized content
• Links
• User experience
• Technical SEO
• Accessibility
• Secure website

 

How to Execute SEO Approach?

The migration to the newer technology can result in SEO losses, and who likes that? No one. So, you need an approach that ensures a successful migration process without any loss of traffic, sales, conversion rates, and other important SEO factors. The execution of this process should be smooth and without a hitch.

To make things simpler, we need to divide the execution process into two categories, prelaunch and postlaunch. Let’s look at some essential points that will help you understand how-to smoothly execute the SEO approach:

 

Prelaunch Checklist

• The number one thing to do is to determine the SEO benchmarks of some crucial SEO factors like:
  • Keywords ranking
  • Organic traffic
  • Index page
  • Page load speed
• Then comes the SEO audit. It would help if you run an SEO audit to check on flowing things:
  • HTML text ratio
  • Canonical tags
  • Indexing
  • Crawling
  • Broken links
  • Map out the transition of old URLs to the new ones.
  • Check all the meta descriptions, meta titles, H1, H2 tags, etc., for the entire website.
  • The transition of the website content to the new website
  • Have a keen eye on the search console’s setup and google analytics.

 Post Launch Checklist

Here is a checklist of the things you need to do post-launch

• The first thing you need to do postlaunch is to run an SEO audit.
• Run an SEO test for both mobile and desktop versions of the website
• Then comes the bug fixing. You need to identify the bugs and then fix them
• Look for any broken links so you can fix them
• It would be best if you also regenerated the sitemap.xml.
• Go for running a 301-redirection test to look for any errors or flaws
• Keep a keen eye on your website crawling and indexing
• Run SEO audit to check website traffic and keyword ranking.
• Keep tracking and monitoring the results.

 

What are the Necessary Points to Consider before Migration?

There are some essential things you always have to consider before website migration. Taking care of these things beforehand can help you avoid various things that could go wrong in this whole process. These things are discussed below:

 

SEO Benchmarks of SEO Matrices

The first thing you need to do is to check benchmark all the SEO matrices of your website so you have all the stats and figures with which you can compare the post-migration results. These important metrics are:

• Check your website’s ranking.
• You must know how many of your pages are indexed by google with a domain.com search.
• Check out your domain authority.
• Keep a keen eye on homepage rank and authority matrices.
• It’s imperative to run an arch audit at this point. It is one of three audits that you need to run. Running these audits will help you spend the minimum effort to get the required results.

 

 Complete SEO Audit

• SEO audits at this point are very crucial as they help you get a clear picture of what’s happening and what you want from your SEO services after the migration process is completed. Here is an audit checklist that is essential to follow pre-migration
• The first thing you need to do is to run an architecture audit. It will help you disintegrate everything.
• The audit will help you determine if all your 301 redirects are working correctly.
• It also gives you an idea that all your meta descriptions, h1, h2 tags, title tags, etc., are proper and unique.
• Another important thing that you can find through an audit is the number of links linking to the homepage. If the number is more than 100, you need to cut that count.
• Check out the crawl ability of your website.
• Add the change in address in webmaster tools for switching domains.

 

SEO Points Need to Check after Migration

• Once your website migration process is done, you need to check whether things are working the way they should be. You need to compare the new results with the older SEO benchmarks to check the performance of your SEO strategy for the new website. Here, we have compiled a post-migration checklist for you:
• The first thing to check post-migration is the number of your page indexed by the search engine with domain.com search.
• Compare the number of keywords driven keywords before and after the launch.
• Look out for the keywords that bring you the most of the traffic flow. Then compare these results with prelaunch ones.
• Similarly, compare the top content attracting the most traffic with the prelaunch results.
• Initially, due to 301 redirects, the number of indexed pages will drop a little. But soon be back to the older state after 301 redirects are sorted out.
• The ranking will most likely take a dip in the initial stages, but it will climb back again once you have cleaned up your 404 errors and figured out 301 redirects.

 

 

How will an SEO Company Help Its Client to Migrate the Website?

Ecommerce website migration has a high risk of affecting your SEO strategy. It can significantly mess up your essential SEO matrices like traffic, ranking, indexing, etc. You need a professional SEO company that has experience running these transitions successfully. so, let us figure out what should be the overall game plan of an SEO company for this whole migration process

 

Objective

The first thing that everyone would like to know is the objective of the migration process. Well, a professional SEO company has two points in mind for website migration, and they are:

• To shift the whole website to newer technology with the best UI/UX experience.
• The migration process should not affect the SEO parameters at all.

 

Challenges

There might be many challenges an SEO company has to face in the migration process. These challenges can be:

• Big database website
• The time crunch is another crucial factor. Usually, the clients do not have much time to offer for the transition of the website.
• Another challenge could be the strong SEO background of the website, like traffic, ranking, etc.
• Abandoned pages that are not linked to other pages also add to the challenge in the migration process.

 

Possible Solutions

A good SEO company always has a game plan to tackle these problems. The possible solution to the problems mentioned above could be:

• With all the time restrictions and a website with an enormous database, an SEO company can go with the current database with better and newer technology.
• An SEO company should perform a thorough prelaunch audit to check all the SEO metrics before the launch. It will give them a clear picture of where the website is standing SEO-wise and how everything should go unhitched.

 

What are the Best SEO Practices That an SEO Company must Follow?

Here are some healthy SEO practices to ensure that everything goes smoothly and safely. By following these practices, you can avoid losing your website traffic, ranking, etc. These practices are:

 

 Practices Related to Design (UI/UX)

• It’s essential to involve your SEO team when working on UI/UX
• It is always good to avoid unnecessarily HTTP requests
• Using compressed images is always a good idea
• Always choose the design that allows you to add enough content to the website
• Focus on internal linking so everyone can reach deep down pages of your website
• Your codding should be extraordinary so that your website is easily crawlable by the search engine

 

Directory (URL) Structure

• Make sure that each page should have a descriptive URL that should also be unique.
• URLs are case-sensitive. Ensure to use lowercase all around to avoid inconsistency
• It’s always a best practice to maintain duplicate URLs. It’s too complicated for you; try to maintain it for top-performing pages.
• Using underscore for separating words is an old practice and is very confusing. Try to use a hyphen instead of an underscore.
• Using unique characters in URLs can lead to inconsistency. Try to avoid them at all costs.

 

Mapping of Redirected URLs (301)

• The first thing to do is to formulate a list of all URLs.
• If there are many pages, go for the automated URL mapping.
• Make sure there are no redirect chains and redirect loops.

 

Measure Rankings Before and After Migration

• It’s always appreciated benchmarking all the vital SEO parameters like ranking, number of indexed pages, top-performing keywords, etc.
• Compare the prelaunch results with the post-launch results to ensure that everything is working up to the mark.

 

Checkout for Any Missing Page(s)

Website migration should never end up in missing pages. If there are any missing pages, you need to look for some common causes like:

• Inconsistency in naming URLs
• Missing pages from the navigation
• Static pages

 

Configuration of GA and GSC after Migration

• You need to figure out whether you will need a new GA account or will you be working with the current one. Using a current account will help you maintain your historical data.
• You must ass analytic software codding into the new design.

 

Final Thoughts

Ecommerce website migration is a challenging task and can bring up a lot of petty problems along its way, especially for your SEO strategy. But these healthy practices, pre, and post-launch agendas can help you in smooth migration without affecting your traffic, ranking, and other essential SEO parameters.