Recently, we had a client who – very abruptly – decided they wanted to take their marketing and website design in a new direction.  There were, unfortunately, no heartfelt goodbyes.  In fact, we didn’t even get the chance to offer them basic advice before they started changing up their tactics and website design.

Acting with unwarranted haste, they decided to migrate their website design off UXI® to another platform.  We’re not sure where the fire was, but their rash actions had some terrible repercussions.

We continued to track their main domain.  They had been pulling back on SEO work for several months, so their rankings were trending down.  Then, to the dismay of the SEO specialist on the account who put in over a year of work, we saw this data:

In the course of about 6 weeks, they went from a website getting a total of 15k organic search impressions to one getting virtually zero.  SEO demolished.

What went wrong?  Well, like a renter behind on rent skipping out in the middle of the night, they didn’t tell anybody where they were going.  In this case, that included Google itself.

Changing Website Platforms Means Changing URL Structures

Say you decide you want to move your website from a WordPress theme to new CMS template.

When you do, the URL structure of every back page on your website will change.  That means that the search engines will reindex every page on your website as if it were a new page.

If you have years of SEO authority built into those pages, you lose it all.  Every web page and blog post providing links into your domain and getting ranking for particular keyword queries will be lost.

This is the main reason most businesses are circumspect about migrating their website to a new platform.  Without great care, your website’s organic traffic can be lost.

301 Redirects:  Your Forwarding Address

What’s sad about the above client is that if they had just communicated their plans to us, they would not have lost all their SEO juice.

You can provide Google with a forwarding address for every one of your web pages with a process called a 301 redirect.  Basically, 301 tells the search engine that an old url moved to a new one.  Inbound links are redirected to the new page and the SEO authority is preserved.

Given that this article is not intended for developers, we won’t go into the details of how to set-up 301 redirects.  Ther are many online resources if you want to break the process down.  If you have a lot of pages you’re migrating, enough said that this a technical, somewhat tedious process business owners and marketers usually farm out.

What is vital is that you make sure it gets done before you start migrating your website.  If not, you’ll be starting over with SEO.

Conduct an SEO Audit

When we get a new client at Marketing 360® who wants to migrate an old website to our UXI® platform, we conduct a thorough SEO audit so we can plan 301 redirects and other migration issues.  This includes:

• An analysis of organic traffic, keyword rankings, and landing pages.  Prioritization of vital pages providing high performing traffic.
• A URL analysis to determine how much change will occur.
• An inbound link analysis.
• Process for capturing and migrating all page metadata.
• A content analysis with a plan to migrate all content.  Includes plans for updating, consolidating, and eliminating content as needed.
• Establishing a time-frame and calendar for the migration process.
• A 301 redirect spreadsheet that outlines how all pages will redirect.

For our experienced team, this is a routine process.  We’d never take on a client without making sure their existing SEO juice was coming with them.  Simply put, it’s hard to start an online marketing relationship when the first thing that happens is the client loses all their organic traffic.

Too bad our former client didn’t get that same diligence from whoever they decided to work with.  Honestly, we expected a call from them but didn’t hear back.  Even though they left without saying goodbye, we did them the professional courtesy of an email explaining the data we’re seeing.  If too much time has not passed, it might be possible to salvage some of their SEO juice.

But the clock is ticking.  Right now all those old URLs go 401 error pages, which hold no SEO value at all.

A website migration can be tricky.  If you plan to update your platform, plan ahead.  When you leave and don’t tell anybody, your prospective customers won’t be able to find you.