Building an online brand is one of the most important endeavors for all organizations. Branding is more than a recognized logo and catchy tagline, though. The unsexy truth is that one of the biggest indicators of brand success is SEO. While most organizations post SEO-friendly content, they don’t always think about SEO during migration. Here’s why having a website migration SEO checklist is fundamental and how to execute it seamlessly.

Why It Matters

Sites are built with SEO in mind: keywords, strong links, images with SEO-friendly file names. All of that online credibility can be lost in a second if the website migration checklist doesn’t include SEO. That doesn’t mean websites can’t change, it just means care must be taken.

How To Protect Your SEO With A Four Step Website Migration Plan

Migration is tedious but transition is possible without a loss to SEO. Here are four steps to help and tips for implementing the plan.

• Create An Index Of Your Site: Starting with your main page click every extension on every page. Your new site’s pages should mirror each current page to protect your current SEO.
• Create 301 Redirects For Each Page: These are the mail forwarding notices of the Internet – and you’ll want one for each page you listed in step 1. 301 redirects transfer SEO data to the new address.
• Assess Your Inbound Links: Links to your content help build your reputation online. As you migrate your site update these links. Create a ranked list of the pages whose links drive traffic to your site and ask those webmasters to update the links so that you don’t lose these valuable hits.
• Perform an SEO Audit: There is no better time to assess a site’s SEO power than during migration. Look closely at pages and tags noting missing tags, lacking keywords, duplicated content and whatever else is weakening your SEO value online.

Tips For Successful Migration

• Make sure everything you do is for your site as “http://” and “http://www.” Google keeps data on both.
• Transition in chunks. You are less likely to overlook things if you break the task down. Keep both sites live throughout the transition.
• Check as you go. Check pages, links, tags and make sure Google acknowledges the changes so that you don’t lose anything.
• If you are changing your domain name make sure to create and submit a new sitemap to Google.

You don’t have to do it on your own: Digital Firefly Marketing can assist in some or all of the four steps in a great website migration SEO checklist.