Need To Migrate To A New Website? Here Are Ways On How Search Engine Optimization UK Agencies Can Help
When your company grows bigger, you may need to undergo a website migration eventually. Unfortunately, most companies don’t prepare for migrations effectively. A handful of issues can harm a brand’s overall performance in the search results. Changing your domain name or poorly migrating your website from HTTP to HTTPS could cause a negative effect in organic search traffic. However, hiring a search engine optimization UK based agency will make the process much smoother and easier. Here are the things that they can help you with your website migration.
1. Know when to conduct website migrations
SEO agencies are always well organised and prepared for website migrations. For that reason, SEO companies that provide search engine optimization services UK based for website migrations will conduct the process during the slow part of the year. A website migration during or shortly before the holiday is definitely a poor strategy. Their goal is to prevent you from losing any traffic. However, if you really lose traffic during the process, you can rest assured that it’s minimal since you migrated when business is slow.
2. Get rid of error pages
All the links on the new website should be functioning properly. A UK search engine optimization agency will crawl your new website to verify that you have no 404 pages. If you have one, SEO experts usually do not redirect these webpages to your homepage. You can find the right replacement to a 404 page and change the website link itself to point to the replacement. If there are no replacements, it is better to remove these pages, given that it isn’t a large amount.
3. Setup Google Search Console properly
You will need to set up a new property in Google Search Console for your new domain name. SEO agencies can verify that it is for the correct version, accounting for HTTP vs. HTTPS and www vs. non-www. They’ll also submit the old and new sitemaps to solidify the message that the old website has become redirected to the new one.
They’ll also send a change of address within the Google Search Console, ask Google to crawl the new sitemap, and utilise “fetch as Google” to submit your website to be listed. It is also their responsibility to check if your redirects and links are error-free before doing this.
4. Map your new website
Website navigation is essential for customer happiness. When customers easily find what they are looking for, they are very likely to come back to your website. SEO experts can create a sitemap that makes sense and is convenient for your visitors. Additionally, search engine optimization UK based agencies will also greatly improve your website’s user experience.
5. Look at the analytics
Not knowing your traffic may be damaging your website migration process. You should quickly see if any traffic is lost after the migration. UK search engine optimization agencies can produce a backup of your own Google Analytics data to let you know what your traffic is like and which webpages are being visited. If any traffic is lost, your SEO agency will export the Google analytics data from your new website and compare it with all the info out of your previous website, allowing you to recognise precisely which webpages lost traffic. On many occasions, a reduction in traffic will probably be isolated to individual pages, as opposed to occurring over the whole website.
6. Update internal links
Internal links are the HTML tags in your website code that let you jump from page to page. These links should be updated, even if you did your redirects properly. When you have way too many redirects, it could lower your website’s efficiency and PageRank. You may avail of search engine optimization services UK based to rewrite the links, which is done by performing a research and replace operation on your database. This changes the domain name without altering the folder structure.
7. Avoid duplicate contents
Numerous problems throughout the website migration process can lead to duplicate contents. A duplicated content happens when both multiple versions of the URL are posted, and that can hurt your traffic. Instead, what you should do is hire an SEO agency as they can use redirects to solve this problem. So if any of your customers use your old URL, they may be redirected to your new website.
You can get advantages from a website migration as long as you do it properly. If you do this task on your own without sufficient knowledge about SEO, you might lose search engine traffic during this process. However, don’t be scared of moving to another website. With professional search engine optimization UK based companies, you can expect that the process will go smoothly and efficiently.
1. Know when to conduct website migrations
SEO agencies are always well organised and prepared for website migrations. For that reason, SEO companies that provide search engine optimization services UK based for website migrations will conduct the process during the slow part of the year. A website migration during or shortly before the holiday is definitely a poor strategy. Their goal is to prevent you from losing any traffic. However, if you really lose traffic during the process, you can rest assured that it’s minimal since you migrated when business is slow.
2. Get rid of error pages
All the links on the new website should be functioning properly. A UK search engine optimization agency will crawl your new website to verify that you have no 404 pages. If you have one, SEO experts usually do not redirect these webpages to your homepage. You can find the right replacement to a 404 page and change the website link itself to point to the replacement. If there are no replacements, it is better to remove these pages, given that it isn’t a large amount.
3. Setup Google Search Console properly
You will need to set up a new property in Google Search Console for your new domain name. SEO agencies can verify that it is for the correct version, accounting for HTTP vs. HTTPS and www vs. non-www. They’ll also submit the old and new sitemaps to solidify the message that the old website has become redirected to the new one.
They’ll also send a change of address within the Google Search Console, ask Google to crawl the new sitemap, and utilise “fetch as Google” to submit your website to be listed. It is also their responsibility to check if your redirects and links are error-free before doing this.
4. Map your new website
Website navigation is essential for customer happiness. When customers easily find what they are looking for, they are very likely to come back to your website. SEO experts can create a sitemap that makes sense and is convenient for your visitors. Additionally, search engine optimization UK based agencies will also greatly improve your website’s user experience.
5. Look at the analytics
Not knowing your traffic may be damaging your website migration process. You should quickly see if any traffic is lost after the migration. UK search engine optimization agencies can produce a backup of your own Google Analytics data to let you know what your traffic is like and which webpages are being visited. If any traffic is lost, your SEO agency will export the Google analytics data from your new website and compare it with all the info out of your previous website, allowing you to recognise precisely which webpages lost traffic. On many occasions, a reduction in traffic will probably be isolated to individual pages, as opposed to occurring over the whole website.
6. Update internal links
Internal links are the HTML tags in your website code that let you jump from page to page. These links should be updated, even if you did your redirects properly. When you have way too many redirects, it could lower your website’s efficiency and PageRank. You may avail of search engine optimization services UK based to rewrite the links, which is done by performing a research and replace operation on your database. This changes the domain name without altering the folder structure.
7. Avoid duplicate contents
Numerous problems throughout the website migration process can lead to duplicate contents. A duplicated content happens when both multiple versions of the URL are posted, and that can hurt your traffic. Instead, what you should do is hire an SEO agency as they can use redirects to solve this problem. So if any of your customers use your old URL, they may be redirected to your new website.
You can get advantages from a website migration as long as you do it properly. If you do this task on your own without sufficient knowledge about SEO, you might lose search engine traffic during this process. However, don’t be scared of moving to another website. With professional search engine optimization UK based companies, you can expect that the process will go smoothly and efficiently.