SEO Site Migration Services in Brighton & Hove

We can help protect & grow your traffic

A site migration is an immensely challenging and complex undertaking, not to mention damaging to your business if done incorrectly.

However, moving to a new content management system, changing URLs or drastically altering your website’s content and design needn’t be an exercise in firefighting.

Not only will we help you protect website traffic, but we’ll put the foundations in place to help it grow as well.

Site migrations with expert support and direction

Many businesses undertaking a site migration feel that they don’t get the level of support or expertise that is needed, or what they’re paying for. A lack of strategic direction can hinder proceedings too.
Thankfully, we bring both to the table.

Using a robust, tried-and-tested process honed over many, many successful migrations, we’ll take on as much of the process for you as is required.

The end result? Safeguarded rankings and traffic combined with a springboard for long-term success, to help you outperform the competition.

Our Approach

The migration of any web content from one location to another carries a degree of risk, especially in the case of high traffic websites that contribute substantially to a business’s revenue.

Ensuring that SEO strategy is included as a key pillar throughout the migration process ensures that the risk is minimised and that performance can grow sustainably.

Employing a cautious, phased approach, all site migrations begin with a strategic preparation and research phase.

Phase 1: Preparation + Strategy

We begin by benchmarking your current set-up and performance, to inform the priority pages that must be safeguarded and allow us to report on the success of the migration. All content will be thoroughly audited to determine its traffic, backlink and revenue-driving value.

New opportunities will be surfaced through a period of keyword research, helping to inform a roadmap for content creation and optimisation for the post-migration website.

The output of this first stage will be to provide a list of pages that are to be retained, which ones should be re-optimised and what can be consolidated, alongside optimised metadata.

Next, we’ll take a look at the navigation and hierarchy of your website, providing recommendations for how pages should sit within optimal categories post-migration, utilising the keyword research undertaken earlier to help inform taxonomy, category naming conventions and URL structure.

The core element of any site migration is the redirect mapping, whereby the old URLs are redirected to your shiny new ones. By extensively crawling your entire site, we can ensure that all pages are redirected to their closest equivalents within the new structure to help protect and grow traffic and rankings.

Phase 2: Staging Site Analysis

We’ll carry out a thorough technical audit of the new site in a staging environment, pre-launch, to help ensure parity with current properties and to detect any major issues.

Working closely with your developers we can ensure that fixes are implemented correctly before proceeding any further.

Phase 3: Go-Live + Post-Launch

By being online as soon as your new site launches, we can check for any hidden obstacles or errors that may have occurred in transfer from staging to the live environment, such as noindex directives, missing SSL certificates and errors with canonical URLs. We’ll test all redirects to ensure they have been implemented correctly, crawl the site to check that recommended metadata and on-page content has been added as stipulated.

Finally, we’ll configure Google Analytics and Search Console, upload XML sitemaps and notify them of the change of address.

The first few weeks after a migration can see rankings fluctuate, so we’ll be on hand to report on progress and pick up any potential problems before they become risks to your traffic and revenue.

As well as helping businesses carry out new migrations from scratch, we are well versed in disaster recovery following poorly-executed migration projects that have taken place previously. By employing the thorough process detailed above, crawling your website to assess deficiencies in the redirect mapping and optimisation, we can help you to regain lost rankings and traffic, as well as provide the springboard required for sustainable growth. And as an award-winning SEO agency in Brighton, we have the knowledge and knowhow to help you succeed.

Site Migrations