Top 8 SEO Must-Dos for a Successful Site Migration

I often encounter a common misconception when advising brands on SEO MVP (Minimum Viable Product) during a site redesign or migration project: “Now is the perfect time to change everything and make ALL the SEO better!”

While this enthusiasm comes from a positive place, the reality is that the primary SEO goal during a migration or redesign should be to do no harm.

But what does this really mean?

During a site migration, the focus should be on preserving your existing SEO equity while future-proofing your new site for long-term growth. Implementing too many changes at once can make tracking what’s driving positive or negative SEO performance after launch difficult.

So, what should be the top SEO priorities during a site migration?

Focus on building a strong Technical SEO foundation first. Here’s how to achieve that:

1. Benchmark, Audit, and Preserve What Works

   Ensure your SEO team is benchmarking and auditing your current site. Carryover what’s performing well and improve what’s not aligned with your business goals. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.

   For example, if you have high-ranked pages with optimized meta tags, robust structured data, strong on-page content, and internal linking, then you will want to make sure both the content and technical SEO elements supporting these pages are brought over to the new site as 1:1 as possible.

   Focus on incremental changes that align with new business goals, like introducing a product recommendation carousel. Make changes and improvements that do not risk current SEO equity.

    

2. Avoid Unnecessary Changes

   I often hear requests to overhaul the URL structure, even when it’s unnecessary. Sure, removing “.html” from product URLs may look cleaner and nicer from a UX perspective, but if it requires 10,000 301 redirects that would otherwise not be needed, it’s not worth the impact. If it doesn’t need to change, leave it alone.

3. Defer Advanced SEO Customizations

   Prioritize getting the essential SEO elements right during the build. Advanced features like self-service options for structured data or heavy customizations can wait until post-launch. With the typical time and budget constraints of a project, your initial goal should be to ensure that SEO is functional at launch, and that further optimizations can follow.

4. Don’t Overhaul All of Your Content

   A site redesign might feel like the perfect time to rewrite all your content, but this is often unrealistic. It’s a massive undertaking, and if you’re also juggling a complex migration, it’s better to save content strategy updates for post-launch. Changing too much at once also makes it harder to identify the cause of performance impacts – negative or positive.

5. Remove Outdated and Low-Performing Content

   This is a great time to clean house. Prioritize removing outdated or underperforming pages, like a 2007 Black Friday post or a product page that’s been discontinued for five years. The less clutter, the better—for both users, search engines, and the back-end management of your data.

6. Complete Content Migration Work as Early as Possible

   All content migration and development work should be 90-100% complete at least a month before launch. Use that month for final QA, testing, remediation, and performance checks. I often see projects where this is overlooked, leading to last-minute issues, surprises, and negative impacts.

7. Prepare for Post-Launch Stabilization and Remediation

   Even the best SEOs can’t anticipate every error or crawler issue before launch. Your staging environment will never be 1:1 with your production environment and how crawlers interact. Allocate time, budget, and priority for post-launch stabilization and remediation efforts. Your SEO team needs the bandwidth to perfect the implementation after launch.

8. Prioritize a Robust Post-Launch SEO Strategy

   SEO isn’t a one-and-done effort. Even with a solid technical foundation, consistent monitoring and ongoing optimization are key. Plan for a post-launch SEO strategy that focuses on technical improvements and fresh content. This is how you’ll maintain SEO equity as well as drive long-term organic growth and traffic.

SEO Migration Case Study Examples

Here are two case studies that show the importance of technical SEO oversight in a project.

Negative SEO Outcome Example:

The problem: The client engaged in a headless PWA eCommerce redesign and site migration project without SEO oversight. This resulted in business-critical misses within the technical SEO, content, and UX implementation and migration strategy impacting the site’s natural crawlability, indexing, web performance, and user journey, negatively impacting organic visibility, traffic, and conversions.

Within the first 3 months post-launch, the domain experienced 50-75% losses in organic impression and click performance, resulting in an estimated 500k YoY revenue decline.

The solution: Two senior SEO strategists were brought in to analyze and make remediation recommendations. Some of the key updates included correction of errors and misses within 301 redirect mapping, sitemap.xml processing, SSR of key page elements, schema, store locator implementation and strategy, internal linking, Google Merchant Center feeds, caching and data fetching, and Core Web Vitals performance.

Nov vs March 2024:

+48% organic ranking pool
+421% Users
+424% Engaged Sessions
+323 Conversions
+544% Revenue

Positive SEO Outcome Example:

The problem: The client planned to redesign and migrate from an Adobe eCommerce monolithic solution to Adobe Magento – Pylot PWA. The domain was an industry leader in a very competitive market, with 1k+ pages to consider and over 28k keywords ranking on page 1 of Google SERPs.
The solution: The client acted on our SEO recommendations and oversight throughout the project, with the main goal to at minimum preserve and maintain their SEO performance post-launch.

YoY Post-Launch Growth:

+33% 1st Page rankings
+49% 2nd Page Rankings
+15% Impressions
+11% Clicks
+14% Avg. Ranking Position

SEO Lays the Groundwork for Digital Success

Technical SEO is the foundation that supports your entire UX, content, and marketing strategies. Without a solid SEO strategy in place, your marketing efforts may fall flat. If you’re planning a site migration or redesign, ensure your team includes experienced technical SEO and content managers with a track record of successfully navigating migrations.

By doing so, you’ll not only preserve your SEO equity but also set your brand up for future growth.