There are numerous aspects of a website redesign or redevelopment that can impact a website’s rankings.
If the old website ranks well for key terms as a result of excellent on-site copy, or if it loads extremely quickly, then these attributes should be at least as strong on the new website. If not, the site will likely lose rankings for keywords – even though the design might look better or have more user functionality.
A key part of a migration is setting up 301 redirects for any URLs that will change on the new site.
We compile a list of all URLs and links that exist on the old site and ensure that every single URL resolves so that search engines crawlers don’t see any errors when they visit the new site.
The periods before, during and following a migration are often associated with Google Analytics tracking errors.
We have ample experience of transitioning websites while keeping tracking data intact and correct.
Common issues we see are when the development site sends data to the live site which can make live traffic seem higher. Sometimes, analytics tracking is omitted entirely, and sometimes it is set up in a different way which makes it impossible to compare traffic before and after the migration.
We help you navigate changes to your site structure.
Sometimes, for a website migration, it is necessary to change the structure of URL levels – or maybe even to change all URLs completely.
We help clients to make the right choices when rewriting URLs to ensure that they are search engine friendly, as well as understandable by users.
