eCommerce Migration: How to Keep Your SEO Checklist
One facet of your website’s success is the user experience. As well as overall feel. If this is something that is needing improvement, you need to know all of the actions required for eCommerce migration, and moving your site to a new platform while keeping your SEO efforts in the process.
Why Bother With SEO Migration?
SEO is a long term investment. Carefully implemented strategies and hours of optimisation should not be thrown in the bin. If you migrate your site, and forget your SEO efforts, this could lead to a drastic drop in organic traffic to your site, as well as your rankings. Losing out on the conversions and the revenue these channels bring in, makes the whole migration process rather futile.
Your eCommerce Migration Checklist for SEO:
Run an initial audit.Make sure to note all of the areas that need improving. This will serve as a benchmark for your migration process on the new platform.
- Make sure to crawl your site using an SEO spider tool. There are many options available to you online, namely: Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, DeepCrawl, and others.
- Check in with Google Search Console, and run an analysis on your current site.
- Collect all of the necessary data. Look into your H1 tags, no follow tags and so forth.
- Create a list of all pre-migration actions. Make a list of the URL structure and take great care in noting your websites current architecture. Take this chance to update your current keyword matrix and check for keyword gaps.
- Make sure to note your 301 redirects. Note all pages on your current site that have high organic rankings and make sure they get properly redirected after the move.
Once the site has been successfully launched, follow these steps to ensure you haven’t forgotten any SEO aspects:
- Audit your site and re-run the website crawl you did before the migration process. In this you should check back to the initial benchmark crawl you did, and access where there are discrepancies.
- Make sure you have no broken links. Then take note of duplicate content, title tags, meta descriptions, header usage, image attributes and so forth.
- Check your page speed on a couple of pages.
- Check for 404 pages.
- Resubmit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console to have your newly migrated site reindexed.
Are We Done Yet?
Once the above has been taken care of, don’t think of the process as complete. There will always be bumps in the road when it comes to a website migration. There may be a traffic drop, for example. Note the weak spots and optimise. Perhaps you forgot to remove a ‘noindex’ tag.
Best practice is to always continue monitoring traffic, and all other facets of your site. This way, should anything be left behind, you won’t miss it. The next few weeks are crucial, be sure to check Google Analytics regularly, as well as Search Console. There are a multitude of ways to track and analyse data from your site. Stick to this.
Conclusion:
All platforms and migrations vary. That means there is no foolproof plan to make sure that there are no hiccups along the way, however, the above checklist allows for you to keep yourself in the know. This way, there should be no chance of missing anything, and if there is, you can easily and efficiently rectify them.
Sound daunting? Have no fear. Radical Cloud Solutions will assist in every aspect of your eCommerce migration process, ensuring that your current SEO standings are not lost – and with our digital marketing and SEO offerings, improved.
