What is an SEO migration and what aspects should we take into account?

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What is an SEO migration?
An SEO migration is the process we implement when significant and structural changes are made to our website.

It could be a hosting migration, a CMS change, a domain migration. In fact, there are many cases in which we can talk about migration. What unites them all is that it is a complex process in which you have to be very careful and detailed.

It is called “SEO” because the idea is that through migration we transfer all the authority and positioning factors to the new structure, thereby avoiding losing the performance obtained in search engines.

Why is it essential to do a migration correctly?
Let's imagine that we have an e-commerce and we want to make a change in our web architecture by creating new product categories. The categories we currently have already positioned (to a greater or lesser extent) in the search results.

In order not to lose this organic positioning and the traffic it brings, it is essential to permanently redirect (using a 301 response code) those old URLs that share the same search intent with those new URLs that we are going to create. Otherwise, we will lose the positioning we have at that time.

In the following image, we can see the impact of a poorly implemented migration process using the famous Sistrix visibility index .


Source: Sistrix
We see how the index drops abruptly once the new website is launched, which translates into ranking losses for a large number of keywords.

Improve your SEO!
Following the same example, in the following image we can see the history of keyword ranking changes offered by Sistrix (pre and post migration).


Source: Sistrix
We see how those keywords for which we appeared are no longer present in the rankings.

This drop is mainly due to the fact that a large part of the URLs were high school senior email database temporarily redirected (302) to the home page.

Since the content of these pages did not share the same intent as the home page, Google has detected that these pages no longer exist and has stopped positioning their URLs in the SERPs.


Source: Link Redirect Trace
We must keep in mind that Google understands a prolonged 302 redirect as a permanent 301 redirect, so it is not advisable to carry out this type of practice.

What types of SEO migration exist?
As we said, there are different situations that may lead us to have to implement a migration:

Change of platform/technology : When we decide to manage our site from a new CMS, for example, moving from Shopify to Prestashop.
New domain : When we decide to change the domain name or its extension. For example:
oldbrandname.com to newbrandname.com

brandname.com to brandname.es

Modifications in the URL structure : When we want to change the structure of our site or make modifications to its web architecture , such as:
brandname.com/red-pants to brandname.com/pants

brandname.com/green-pants to brandname.com/pants

Changes in the web structure : This situation occurs when we want a folder on a website to become a subdomain or vice versa.
How to perform an SEO migration?
There are several aspects that we must take into account when implementing a migration. It is common to see certain errors in its implementation that cause significant traffic drops.

Below we see those considerations that must be kept in mind:

Plan
For web migration processes, especially for those projects that have a multitude of URLs, it is important to set deadlines.

Carrying out a migration takes hours and you must first understand how both the website you intend to migrate and the new one are structured.

Get all the URLs
It is essential that you have all the URLs listed. To do this, you can use different tools such as Screaming Frog, Google Search Console or Sistrix .

Improve your SEO!
The idea here is that you don't overlook any URL, especially those that bring in a large volume of traffic and/or receive external links , because if you neglect any URL and don't assign any redirects to it, it will end up translating into a worse ranking in the search engines, and the external links will end up in an unappealing 404.

With Screaming Frog, you can also scrape the sitemap, which can help you detect orphan URLs. To do this, simply go to “Settings → Spider → Crawling” and enter the sitemap addresses you want to crawl.


Source: Screaming Frog
When you're crawling the web, you can sync Screaming Frog with the Google Search Console and Google Analytics APIs to see which URLs are performing best and prioritize them more.

On the other hand, using Sistrix, if you go to the “directories” section, you can segment the website by its main folders. There you will find the visibility index for each of them as well as the keywords and URLs positioned in the top 10 and 100. This will also give you a first idea of ​​which folders and URLs you should pay special attention to.

To see what URLs are in any of the folders, simply click on the one you are interested in, access the keywords section and you will see all the URLs with their respective keywords. You can then export this information to get all those URLs.