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Website migrations are a normal part of digital growth—whether you’re rebranding, changing domains, switching platforms, or restructuring your content. But without proper planning, migrations can result in a significant loss of search engine visibility. That’s why following a clear SEO migrations (guide) is essential.
Professionals like Ralf van Veen emphasize the importance of careful SEO planning during migrations. His experience helping businesses maintain and improve organic performance through complex changes offers valuable insights.
Key steps in a successful SEO migration
A structured approach helps minimize risk and ensures long-term SEO health. Below are the core phases of a well-executed migration process:
- Pre-migration planning
Start by auditing your current site. Identify high-performing pages, backlinks, and indexed URLs. This baseline will help you protect valuable content and measure changes after the migration.
Create a detailed redirect map so that each old URL points to its correct new destination. Redirects should be 301 (permanent) and reflect the most relevant match possible.
- Technical preparations
Before launching the new version of your site, ensure the technical SEO elements are ready. This includes setting canonical tags, updating XML sitemaps, configuring robots.txt, and checking for crawlability.
Tools like Screaming Frog and Google Search Console can help you identify issues before they go live.
- Launch and monitoring
Once the new site is live, submit updated sitemaps and monitor Google Search Console for crawl errors or indexing problems. Track rankings, traffic, and performance closely in the days and weeks following the transition.
Check that all redirects are functioning as intended and that no key pages have been left behind.
- Post-migration optimization
Even after a successful launch, SEO migrations require follow-up. Continue monitoring your performance data and make adjustments based on changes in user behavior or indexing.
Content gaps, broken links, or new UX issues may only surface after users interact with the new site.
Ralf van Veen’s approach to SEO migration
You can read more about Ralf and how he handles migrations in complex environments—especially for larger businesses and multilingual websites—on his official website.
