SEO during a website migration or relaunch: How strategic planning ensures success
SEO migration is the process of transferring search engine rankings, authority and indexing signals in order to avoid search engine ranking disadvantages in the event of major changes to the domain or website structure.
Why is it important to consider SEO during a website migration?
Over time, your website has built up organic visibility in search engines such as Google and Bing. As a result, it ranks for relevant keywords that potential customers use to find your offering. However, changes to URLs, content or the entire website influence how search engines perceive and evaluate your site. The aim of any migration should therefore be to minimize potential traffic losses.
A thorough SEO migration is crucial to minimize losses in visibility and traffic and to achieve more than before in the long term. Website migrations and relaunches are among the most challenging projects a company can undertake. Especially for larger and international websites with many subpages, precise planning and consistent implementation are essential to preserve the SEO value built up and ensure visibility in the search engines.
It is important to emphasize that even with an optimally planned migration, it is not possible to completely avoid losses. Rather, the focus is on limiting potential losses in traffic and rankings and carefully managing the project to achieve greater success in the long term. Mistakes such as missing redirects (e.g. non-redirected URLs) can significantly affect visibility and jeopardize the success of the migration despite significant investments in time and money.
Strategic SEO advice from the outset is key to avoiding such mistakes, making the transition as smooth as possible and laying the foundations for sustainable success. In this article, we explain how we guide our clients through a website migration and what steps are necessary to achieve positive SEO results in the long term.
1. Early involvement of SEO consulting
The cornerstone for a successful website migration or relaunch lies in the early involvement of SEO consulting. SEO experts should already be involved in the planning phase in order to analyze the new structure of the website and identify potential SEO risks at an early stage. This phase is particularly important to ensure that all country-specific requirements, existing rankings and traffic sources are maintained and no unexpected losses occur.
For websites with many subpages and international traffic, it is particularly crucial that SEO consultants are involved from the outset to develop the appropriate redirect strategy and ensure that all relevant SEO signals are retained. This is where we lay the foundation for the website to retain its full visibility after the relaunch or migration.
2. Close coordination with content, UX and other teams
A successful migration requires the collaboration of several teams - SEO, content strategy, user experience (UX) and development. SEO is closely interlinked with these areas, as a holistic strategy forms the basis for a successful migration. The content strategy is crucial to ensure that the content is targeted, high quality and at the same time structured to optimally support the new SEO goals.
UX also plays a key role: an improved user experience, well thought-out navigation and optimal loading times can send positive signals to search engines and boost rankings. By continuously coordinating these teams, we ensure that all requirements are covered and optimized.
3. Phased analysis for a smooth process
A multi-phase analysis and implementation process is crucial to cover all aspects of the migration and minimize the risk of visibility drops. Our ideal migration strategy includes the following phases:
Pre-migration phase: Preparation and analysis
Preparation begins with a comprehensive review of the current website. Here, we conduct a full SEO audit to identify the key SEO factors that are critical to maintaining visibility - such as traffic-rich pages, existing backlinks and current rankings.
In addition, we create a redirect strategy for all relevant pages. Redirecting the old URLs to the new target pages is crucial to preserve SEO values and avoid ranking losses. The choice of migration type (domain change, CMS change, protocol change) is also carefully examined in this phase.
During the migration: Technical implementation and monitoring
During the actual migration or relaunch, we ensure that all technical changes run smoothly. We test the 301 redirects and make sure that the URL structure remains intact and that no important pages are lost.
A staging environment helps us to check and optimize all changes before go-live. Crawling and indexing errors can be detected and rectified at an early stage before the new site goes live. In this way, we ensure that the new website is accessible and optimized for search engines.
Post-migration phase: Monitoring and fine adjustments
After the go-live, it is crucial to continuously monitor the SEO performance of the new website. We track all relevant KPIs - from traffic and rankings to 404 errors - and analyze the indexing of the new pages in search engines. The new backlinks and internal links are also checked and updated if necessary to ensure the site's SEO value in the long term.
Other optimizations include submitting the new XML sitemap to Google and Bing and checking the robots.txt file. The continuous review and optimization of the page speed and mobile usability of the website ensure that all technical SEO requirements are met and that the performance of the website is further improved after the migration.
Conclusion
For large and international websites, an uncoordinated migration can quickly lead to massive drops in visibility and rankings. It is therefore essential to integrate SEO into the project from the outset and to promote close collaboration between all teams involved.
Even with careful planning, not everything always runs smoothly during a migration or relaunch. Therefore, additional measures such as continuous monitoring are crucial to react to problems at an early stage and ensure that visibility recovers. A temporary drop in rankings after a relaunch is normal - but the goal is to limit this drop and increase visibility in the long term.
Our well-thought-out SEO strategy shows how early and strategic SEO advice and continuous monitoring can lay the foundations for a successful website migration or relaunch.
