Geeky Tech’s
SEO Migrations
You worked hard for your traffic. A proper SEO migration makes sure you don’t have to sacrifice hard work for big change.
Considering a Migration?
Did your company just acquire another business and want to merge the old and new websites? Are you changing your domain name? Are you undergoing a major website refresh with new service pages and a content reorganisation?
All these scenarios require an SEO migration, and we’ve helped our clients maintain their organic traffic in every last one of them.
To ensure a smooth and accurate process, we split up our migration service into two phases.
The pre-migration phase covers all the preparations and meetings needed to understand:
- Your goals
- The full scope of the migration
- Any potential problems that could arise
The post-migration phase covers everything that happens from the moment your migration is launched. This is when we implement all the actions planned during the first phase and monitor and report on the results.
Pre-Migration Phase
A Friendly Conversation
(Applies to all migration scenarios.)
As soon as we hear the word ‘migration,’ we assemble our squad and book a migration overview call.
Who’s invited? You, your development team, and any other third parties involved in the process. We have this meeting before too many decisions have been made to pave the way for a better working relationship.
Geeky Tech has a standard set of questions to help us understand what’s going on, what platforms are involved, and what your expected timeframe is. It’s also the perfect chance for you to air out your concerns, which we will document for reference later.
Pre-Migration Phase
Pre-Migration URL Mapping
(Applies to all migration scenarios.)
We want to maintain your organic traffic no matter what happens to your site.
To do that, we create a list of your URLs and prioritise them by traffic volume to give us a better understanding of what pages to keep and which pages can be safely culled or edited. What we end up with is a list of pages and their Google Search Console clicks from the last 12 months (any link with at least one click is included).
Pre-Migration Phase
Third-Party Script Documentation
(Applies to domain name change or website environment changes. Not required if absorbing another site.)
Forgetting about third-party scripts can cause post-migration nightmares, but we’ve got you covered. We’ll look through your site for these types of scripts and get the list of any platforms you rely on during our overview call:
- Salesforce
- Hotjar
- Microsoft Clarity
- Hubspot
- Dealfront
- Lead Forensics
- Mouseflow
- Etc.
Since our SEO work relies so heavily on Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics scripts, we always make a point of documenting them, but we’ll also include anything else you’ve requested (or anything else that we find).
You can bet that everything will be checked on the go-live date to make sure all scripts have been carried over.
Post-Migration Phase
(Applies to domain or website environment changes. Not applicable if absorbing another site. )
If we’ve done our job, your migration won’t be as stressful as moving house, getting a divorce, or something equally as wretched.
There’s a lot happening for you on go-live day, so we only ask to be informed once you’re live, and that you make sure our logins haven’t changed.
On our end, we’ll check that those scripts are all there and that the site hasn’t been set to noindex (if you don’t already know where this switch is, it’s best to stay ignorant). We’ll also tell Google Search Console if you’ve had a change of address.
If your migration scenario involves a new website, our technical team will, at this point, also do a website audit to make sure there’s nothing wrong with your new baby.
(Applies to all migration scenarios.)
We’ll now check your URL list to see if all that beautiful organic traffic has somewhere to go.
We make sure that a redirect chain hasn’t been created on your redirected pages, and that all 404 pages are redirected to a relevant page. Any pages that still exist can be ignored (if the content has changed then rankings may alter, but we’ll check that in a bit).
This process can take 10 minutes or 10 hours depending on the size of the site and how many URLs have changed.
You might be planning on deleting your old domain once the new domain is live, but that would be a very silly mistake.
Since this is where your redirects live, the old domain still needs to exist. If you delete the site or don’t continue to host it then the redirects disappear, and all that meticulous work we’ve just done will be for nothing.
Best practices dictate that you’ll need to continue hosting the site and paying for the domain name for at least one year, so make sure this is factored into your budget.
(Applies to all migration scenarios.)
We’ll create a dashboard with a dedicated migration page to show you everything from 90 days before your migration to 90 days after, down to the daily details.
(Applies to all migration scenarios.)
You’ve gone live and all the tracking scripts and redirects are in place, but our job is far from done.
We now have to check your traffic and rankings for fluctuations, and your new sitemap (presuming it’s new) for its indexation rate. We do these checks at week two, then again at months one, two, and three.
We’ll let you know at these milestone dates how things are going and if we need to take any extra action in order to maintain your rankings. We’ll send you a 90-day report showing you the final results and, if all things go according to plan, what a success the whole process has been.
Of course, we’re still available for support after the 90-day milestone, but from our experience, the migration is old news at this point.
Who Is Responsible for Your Migration?
Successful migrations do not flourish in murky grey waters. If the various responsibilities aren’t ironed out early, we can almost guarantee that problems will arise further downstream.
First of all, who should even be involved in the migration process? Most of the time we’re dealing with marketing managers and the developers they hired to build their new site. We act as consultants in the process. We help both the marketing managers and developers understand any potential pitfalls and will offer another set of eyes across the whole process.
Deciding where pages should be redirected is generally the marketing manager’s job, but we can assist or even do this for you. Clients tend to know their own website better than we do, but we’re more than happy to sense-check their decisions.
The developers are typically responsible for this job. Since they will have access to the development environment (we stay out of there until launch day) and can implement these early, the changes will be immediate when the new site goes live.
That’s when we check everything and make edits if needed.
Yes, we can do all the redirects, but this is typically slower than having your dev team handle it.
We’ve been successfully helping our SEO clients for many years and our process just keeps getting better and better. No matter where you are in the migration stage, it’s never too late to reach out. We’ve even helped clients recover their traffic after what can only be described as migration nightmares.
Contact us today to secure your migration success and maintain your online visibility.
