SEO Migration Recovery Services

Migration Recovery Key Take Aways

• Recovery efforts for SEO traffic should take place as soon as possible after go-live

• An experienced SEO consultant can identify what went wrong and action mitigations

• Recovery campaigns can exceed previous SEO performance, although results can never be guaranteed.

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​What To Do When An Website Migration Has Hurt Your Traffic And Revenue?

Migrations don't always go to plan, and recovering lost SEO visibility and revenue to rankings falling as a result of post-migration issue requires the assistance of an experienced SEO consultant to analyse the issues, formulate a plan and oversee the execution of that plan. While recovery is seldom as overnight as post-migration problems, it is possible to return or even exceed previous traffic and sales. If your traffic has dropped overnight, it may be the result of a recent migration that search engines are critical of - if that is the case, its worth having a call with an SEO consultant to build and execute a roadmap for recovery of the organic traffic channel.

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Signs Your Migration Has Gone Wrong

Unfortunately, a problematic SEO migration is usually never an instant loss of organic traffic after go-live. Unless core pages have '404 error' status, your site will continue with some momentum and rankings will start being affected as search engines crawl your site over the next days and weeks. It could take a month to realise the full extent of your migration problem. So how can you tell as early as possible?

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Errors on Screaming Frog and other crawlers

Site crawlers used by SEO professionals will flag up any technical issues on your site immediately. A post-migration site crawl is the only sure-fire way to proactively find post-migration issues before they affect your website's performance.

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Google Search Console Page Indexing Report and Bing Webmaster Tools

If you are noticing a decline in clicks, impressions and average positions on both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, then you can confirm that it is not related to a algorithm update that has hurt your site. Alternatively, SEO news outlets will publicise any updates, so you can verify if an update has affected you or not.

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In our experience, an algorithm update is a giant refresh of the rankings, so any latent issues or improvements tend  to kick in in bulk during these. Outside of updates, rankings change more or less on a case by case, page by page basis. So, if you're not paying attention to your web performance it could be several months before  you realise your recent migration was a hand grenade for your rankings waiting to go off.

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Common Migration Issues

When auditing a site following post-live issues, there is a checklist of common issues we crawl for. Depending on developer resources these can usually be sorted with a bulk change ticket, or else require manual fixing within your CMS. By far, the issues arising from migrations are from incorrect implementation of small details on the site. In some cases, the new platform may have issues that cause search engines to lose trust.

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On-site issues

• New instances of internal links to redirects

• New instances of internal links to 404-errors

• Canonicalization

• Unintended no-indexed pages

• Incorrect title tags

• Incorrect descriptions

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Search engine-side issues

• Discovered - Currently Not Indexed

• Crawled - Currently Not Indexed

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Our Migration Recovery Process Explained

We have experience helping businesses recover from imperfect SEO migrations, both as part of full-time SEO project, and also as a one-off SEO project with a client. Regardless of the scope of the project or the scale of the site, we are able to work with you to return your SEO traffic to pre-migration levels.

• Book your free discovery call and walk us through your recent migration

• We will conduct a Post-Migration Site Audit and Analysis

• We will put together a recovery roadmap and share that with you for sign off

• We will execute the pre-agreed plan with regular progress reports

• We will monitoring and amend the work as needed

 

It is worth noting that while we will do our best to identify what went wrong with your migration and to rectify the issues, as ever with SEO, complete recovery is not something we can promise. We do provide a support period to ensure the post-migration recovery has had all the work it needs.​

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Types of SEO Migration Recovery

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CMS-Specific Migration Recovery

Recovering lost rankings following migration to a new platform or CMS can be tricky as it requires familiarisation with the new platform, but otherwise it is a standard SEO error-fixing process, so long as all major traffic generating pages were migrated too.

 

North West SEO has years of SEO experience on a multitude of CMSs, from WordPress and Wix to Shopify, Umbraco and many other custom-built CMSs. We are able to hit the ground running and begin the optimisation process on your new platform, whatever it is.

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Domain Migration Recovery

Losing organic visibility following a domain migration can be tough to recover from. If redirects were not implemented correctly, then search engines will need to recalibrate your site's authority, making recovery of organic traffic an uphill battle. North West SEO has experience helping businesses recover from domain migrations that haven't gone to plan, and we can build a roadmap that is suitable for your budget.

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Is It Too Late to Recover My Lost Traffic?

For a website that was in good heath pre-migration, then leaving it a few weeks or months before an organic channel recovery campaign isn't too late. To return organic traffic to pre-migration levels, speed is of the essence however, and working with an SEO specialist like North West SEO is of paramount priority.

 

The aim is to send signals to search engines as quickly as possible that your site is exactly the same site a before the migration, and the loss of traffic is often a result that those signals stopped being clear. 

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When it IS too late to recover all traffic

If there is no accessible save of the previous site to compare with, such as what pages you had that didn't migrate and are now 404 errors, then recovery requires re-building and re-writing lost content from scratch, in this case the recovery is about damage limitation and you need a longer plan to recover through creating new replacement content. The new content may outperform the old content as it up-to-date and fresh, but there will of course be a backlog to create this and rank it. 

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How Long Does SEO Migration Recovery Take?

As  with any SEO project, there is no clear-cut time scale, and we often suggest a year of ongoing work to know if a strategy has worked. However, depending on the scale of the project, and the issues that need to be addressed, the first signs of recovery should be evident within a few months.

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The bespoke roadmap we create for you will provide timescales for work done, but we cannot promise results from that work.

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How Much Does SEO Migration Recovery Cost?

The cost for a migration recovery project is dependant on the size of the site that needs recovery and the amount of recovery work that is needed, and our roadmap will make this clear. However, to allow for predictable pricing, and budgeting, North West SEO works in price blocks via a £250 daily rate. An audit of your site will clarify how much work is needed, and the clients appetite will determine how much work we implement every month. Our SEO project pricing structure is designed to scale with the client's need.

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Why SEO Migrations Go Wrong

Migrations have multiple points of failure, making them notorious for undoing your hard-worked SEO efforts. Whether you are migrating to a new domain, or a new CMS, the SEO work is the same: ensure Google sees the changeover seamlessly. Migrations start to go wrong when the preparation stage hasn't been detailed enough.

 

Migrations involve taking a live site through to a staging site and then the staging site to the new live site. This means regular and thorough checking at each point, and ideally not progressing to the next phase until the current phase is signed off as okay from the SEO team. Unfortunately for SEOs and therefore SEO performance, deadlines often dictate how thorough a check can be, and sites progress to go-live without all the required checks.

 

At that point, its a matter of time before Google, and other search engine crawl the new site, and notice any errors, thereby impacting your SEO performance.

 

Many businesses will only know that a migration has affected their organic traffic performance once they see the negative impacts of rankings dropping or traffic suddenly dropping.  For any SEO specialist that comes in and troubleshoot and rectify post-migration issue, overseeing the recovery is very labour-intensive, but recovery can be managed if actioned in time.

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Our SEO Migration Recovery Experience

North West SEO has 10+ years of SEO experience in freelance, in-house and agency-side. Through those years migration preparation and post-migration maintenance were a regular project we worked on. As part of acquisition-led in-house SEO teams at Love Energy Savings, Crown Oil Group, and others, we have migrated websites to the in-house CMSs, we have migrated websites to new domains and when things didn't go to plan, we had to plan a recovery process. Read more about our SEO experience in our SEO case studies.

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Who Is North West SEO?

North West SEO is headed by Pana Markides, an SEO consultant based in Bolton. He has more than 10 years experience in SEO working for B2B and B2C clients in the energy industry and beyond, and has worked on e-commerce clients and lead-generating clients too. All SEO work by North West SEO is handled by Pana, and you can trust that road maps will be implemented in-house by North West SEO.

 

Contact us today for your free discovery call to troubleshoot your post-migration traffic drop.