Yes, you can migrate your website without losing your hard-won search rankings. Google and other search engines want to reward businesses for creating better websites. However, you need to make sure that you’re taking the right steps.
There are several things that need to be included on your SEO website migration checklist in order to keep your rankings safe. As part of your migration strategy, you should plan to:
- Conduct a site crawl before your migration
- Map all URL changes
- Self-canonicalize new pages
- Fix duplicate content issues
- Put custom 404 errors in place
- Add your new sitemap to the Google Console
- Redirect links that you’ve changed
- Update PPC campaigns and links on other platforms
- Mark the change in Google Analytics
There is a lot to keep track of! Partnering with a digital agency for website migration SEO services can help maintain, or grow, your rankings. While you may see an initial decline in rankings immediately after your website migration, your website should end up ranking better after the migration once Google crawls your new site.