We are always pricking our ears when we hear that SEO has been underestimated when switching from an old e-commerce shop to a new one. Many big names already did it: Rabobank, KLM, Transavia - all had a costly "oops, we're not findable in Google anymore" moment.We want to avoid this fornew web shops in the future, with this handy SEO migration checklist.
Why is SEO so important in migration?
Obtaining a strong position in Google for e-commerce shops is hard work. Visitors now know how to find the shop well through search results. Migration of an e-commerce shop should not cause this position to disappear. All the accumulated history and link value must move with it and visitor numbers and conversion must be maintained. That is why SEO is so important.
Our SEO specialist Jelle speaking
H1, a partner of ours that we work with more often, asked us a while ago to explain more about the importance of an SEO migration. In conversation with Angelique Nanning of H1, Jelle explains in this video what steps need to be taken. Prefer to skip straight to the checklist itself? It's below the video!
The preliminary SEO migration checklist
- First things first: arrange a good testing environment
- Check the current positions of the most important keywords
- Also map key landing pages for organic traffic
- Make a survey of all old URLs and domains. Among other things, use Google Analytics and a crawler for this purpose
- A thought-out URL structure for a new e-commerce shop works wonders
- Time to move old URLs to the new URLs with a 301 redirect. We don't want to encounter unexpected 404 not found pages
- Also take care of legacy redirects These are the old redirects that are still in the system
- We don't want to encounter them, but to be on the safe side, set up the 404 page properly
- Check the loading time! Under two seconds is best
- Check content, images, make sure everything is correct
- Upload the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console and place the old one on the new web shop This way Google understands that there are redirects from old to new URLs
Once the checklist is successfully completed, the new e-commerce shop is ready to go. But a migration is not just preliminary work. This is a preliminary SEO migration checklist for a reason.
The aftercare SEO migration checklist
- Check that all redirects are working
- Monitor page indexing through Google Search Console
- Enter a new address via this same tool when changing domains
- Adjust key inbound links
- Check the trackings, are the target measurements still correct?
- Run Google Ads campaigns on the branded keywords previously searched for. This is the ideal way to inform visitors
- Adjust destination pages and extensions when Google Ads campaigns are still running
