Refreshing, migrating, or relaunching your website is probably not a decision you’ve made lightly. You are hoping this process will add functionality to your platforms and value to your brand. However, you want to minimize any loss of the value and equity your site has already built up – in terms of traffic, search rankings, link values, and more. This is why you want to make sure you are planning for SEO before, during, and after the migration process.

What should you consider before the launch?

Goals and Planning:

Make sure you have addressed the following questions:

• What changes are you intending to make and how will they improve your site?
• What value does your site already have and how will you protect that value?
• What are the concrete goals and benchmarks of the process, and how will you be tracking progress and measuring success?

Content Mapping and Optimization:

Changing the mapping and information architecture of your site will affect SEO, so use the tools at your disposal, such as page crawlers and search engine data, to understand how your current site is operating and how people are finding and engaging with it. It is important to identify what pages of your site, currently, are most valuable to your SEO and make sure that they, or their content, aren’t omitted in the redesign. Make sure that as you redesign, critical content isn’t getting lost and that the new sitemap contains and accounts for all of the needed content and changes you are planning to implement.

Also, don’t forget that changing how your pages are structured individually, as well as connected to one another, will affect SEO. Make sure that you are protecting the relevance of your content to your target searchers.

Redirects:

Managing redirects may be the most challenging and intensive part of the launch. As much as possible, you want to avoid a user getting a 404 response when trying to access your content – this can affect your link equity. Since you can’t control if other sites will update their links to your content, it is important that you are using tools like crawlers or Google Search Console to map out all of your redirects and ensure that they are bringing searches to your new site.

What should you monitor post-launch?

You should only launch when you are certain that the new site will operate effectively – it’s better to delay the launch than go live with a product that negatively impacts your brand and value, or even be forced to revert back to the old site!

Check Those Redirects:

Make sure that all those carefully-built redirects are working as intended, and repair them as needed.

Dev-to-Live Audit and Code Validation:

Double check that all content and featured have successfully been implemented from the dev site to your live site. Sometimes certain dynamic features like tables don’t migrate properly. And run the code on your live site through some simple audit programs like Lighthouse to ensure that the live site is operating comparably to the test site.

If you are satisfied with how your new site is running, that your SEO is within your targets and your redirects are effective, you are ready to generate and submit your XML sitemap, and then go back to the (relatively!) simple job of monitoring your new site and keeping up with SEO optimization. It was a slog, but because you were organized and had a plan, you pulled it off!

Happy migrating!

Managing redirects may be the most challenging and intensive part of the launch. As much as possible, you want to avoid a user getting a 404 response when trying to access your content – this can affect your link equity.