TL;DR

Ideally, we’d call this pre-migration SEO or something similar but, in reality, SEO becomes involved in platform and website migrations often as a second thought and regularly during a last minute panic. Honestly, it’s easy to understand – the world of search and digital has become hugely specialised over the last decade, with experts dedicating themselves to one very specific aspect of the skillset. 

It’s difficult for one person to know a lot about multiple things (look after your generalists, folks!), so a skilled web developer may overlook SEO when planning a migration in favour of optimising UX, backend integrations or general aesthetics, an ecommerce manager might be more concerned with carrying over CRO improvements and taking care of the path to purchase – but without an SEO involved, you could end up with a phenomenal site that nobody ever sees.

Pain points

If you’re worried about any of the following, our migration service may be what you need:

• Losing visibility during migration
• A large change in folder structure (such as with a move to Shopify)
• Information hierarchy planning for new templates and page styles
• Large and complicated redirection plans
• Avoiding long lists of old or broken links and images
• Making sure the new site is primed for ongoing SEO work
• Making sure Google Tag Manager is prepared for the switch.

What we mean by migration service

With ongoing problems with the WordPress CMS (and the knock on to WooCommerce) following ongoing litigation between WordPress.org and Automattic, the ongoing security issues that seem to have followed Magento into Adobe Commerce, and many large, custom sites built a decade ago now reaching the end of their usefulness, many businesses are looking to move home. In fact, in order to remain competitive, a huge number of brands are set to move soon.

When we say ‘migration service’ what we mean is that we help make sure brands move sites successfully, with (ideally) no loss of visibility and no issues that are likely to cause drops in traffic, relevance, authority or more. 

We do this by either creating or auditing redirection plans, sitemaps, robots.txt files and much more – making sure that the beautiful new design hasn’t accidentally hidden all of your copy with JavaScript, pushed it so far below the fold as to be irrelevant, that the site doesn’t go live with a noindex tag, or (almost as bad) that the duplicate dev environment is indexed.

MMC Digital’s migration service

We’ve seen most of the issues that can arise from a migration, and are well aware of the rest – we witnessed the fateful ASOS migration of 2018, watched through our fingers the WHSmith migration of 2019, and many more besides – but, thankfully, over the last (rapidly approaching) 20 years, we’ve also helped to guide agencies, B2B businesses, ecommerce brands and more through complex migration processes.

Clients choosing MMC Digital for website migration help can expect the following:

• Roadmap: first things first, we’ll create a roadmap which will detail the points at which SEO needs to be involved in the process, and exactly what will be done when.
• Site crawl and redirect mapping: we’ll crawl the site and make sure there’s an up-to-date record of all pages, including visibility, importance, inbound links etc. and begin mapping those onto the new platform’s required folder structure.
• Broken links and errors: we make sure there’s an up-to-date list of existing issues that can be rectified during the migration.
• Redirects: we’ll produce an optimised redirect file for your platform of choice to make sure you’re preserving everything of importance to your business both commercially and from the perspective of authority.
• Core web vitals: we’ll test and retest throughout development to make sure the site is primed to pass CWV tests from launch.
• Content review: we audit your site content and make sure that you’re carrying over the important stuff (and make recommendations on pruning deadwood). 
• Tracking audit: we audit your site’s tracking – both on platform and on the Google side to make sure you’re ready to switch sites seamlessly, with no loss of data.
• Go-live checklist: to reveal orphaned pages (inaccessible without external link), overlooked content, or important URLs that search engines haven’t discovered yet.

What can our migration service do for your business?

This is one of the most simple of these we get to write – the absolute best case for a migration is that there’s a resultant bump in visibility and performance that comes from fixing issues during the migration, but the main reason to have somebody provide SEO consultation during a migration is continuity. Unfortunately, this is one of those services we have to advertise with a call to caution rather than optimisation. We’ve seen too many businesses cost themselves money with a poorly managed migration – we aim to make sure that that is not the case for you.

If you need help with your migration SEO, just drop us an email, call or fill in a brief contact form for an initial, no obligation discussion.