SEO Migration Services

My experience as an SEO Website Migration Consultant

Having worked in SEO for nearly 9 years, I’ve now established myself as a specialist in SEO website migrations, helping many clients over the years to successfully migrate to a new web design, platform, domain or structure. Having taken the lead on website migrations for clients both big and small whilst working agency-side, I now manage the entire migration process as a Freelance Website Migration Consultant.

I’ve worked on many website migrations over the years, from large ecommerce sites to smaller, service-based websites, and have therefore developed a process which ensures your web designers, developers and project managers are armed with the knowledge they need to successfully migrate your website without harming organic performance.

I don’t rely on tools to do the analysis for me. I use Screaming Frog to crawl your site and analyse the data manually to get a true understanding of any issues that could cause a loss in organic visibility.

I’m based in Bournemouth, UK but the entire migration process can be done virtually.

My role in the migration process

My role in the migration process is to minimise the risk of losing organic visibility post-migration. I’ll be checking to make sure no SEO errors are made by designers or developers that could jeopardise your organic visibility and will be involved in the project from start to finish (and beyond). I’ll also be advising you on how to set your website up in an SEO-friendly way so that SEO can become a bigger part of your strategy moving forward.

Website migrations present a real risk to your keyword rankings, organic traffic and organic conversions. I’m not saying this to try and scare you, it’s just a fact. I’ve seen the after-effects of quite a few migrations-gone-wrong so I know just how devastating a failed migration can be. I’ve even helped quite a few clients to recover from organic visibility loss post-migration (see case study here) but it’s not a quick and easy process. Prevention is most definitely better than cure.

An SEO Website Migration Consultant such as myself is there to prevent technical, structural, content or design changes that can either confuse Google, cause a loss of organic visibility or get you removed from Google’s index altogether.

By choosing to work with me, you’ll have someone on board whose sole purpose throughout the entire migration is to think ‘SEO first’. While not every decision needs to be made for SEO, I can at least make you aware of any risky changes throughout the process so that you can make informed decisions.

While my general SEO migration process involves the essential areas to retain organic visibility, I do offer add-on services which look to help boost organic visibility.

Once your website is successfully migrated, I am on hand to assess the initial impact. The first step is to crawl the site and ensure everything has been successfully migrated across from the staging environment to the live site. From there, I’ll be reviewing Search Console to keep an eye out for any errors as Google gradually crawls and indexes the new site. I’ll be reviewing how quickly Google starts to index the new sitemap and will report on any changes to traffic and the particular areas that have seen an impact. Migrations are often the best time to then roll straight into a monthly retainer where we can look to strengthen and build on the organic visibility of the new site over time.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to have an SEO Consultant involved in your website migration. One of the main reasons I have seen websites lose rankings and traffic overnight is because of a failed migration, and more often than not an SEO was not consulted during the process.

I have managed countless website migrations over the years, including mergers of multiple websites into one, new website (read the case study here) and it’s probably one of my favourite projects to work on as there is so much data to dig into, and it’s a great feeling to be able to help ease a website owner’s worries during a migration.

From forming the right sitemap, to ensuring page design has considered SEO and managing the technical SEO setup, I help to keep your website performing at a high level post migration.

I have also done many audits for website owners who have just experienced a failed migration, and can identify anything that may have gone wrong along the way and help with a plan for recovery.