So you have actually just migrated your e-commerce platform. A few weeks into the launch, you find something stunning: Regardless of carrying out technical due diligence, employing the very best development company, and investing a fortune on the migration, your traffic and Google rankings have actually dropped significantly. If this sounds familiar, you’ll wish to keep reading.With a number of technical components to think about, an e-commerce site migration can be a daunting task– evaluating integrations, potentially working with a new agency, and so on. While all aspects are necessary, one of the most neglected aspects to consider is online search engine optimization.Some platforms may consist of fundamental SEO features, but the bulk of the work depends on your digital marketing specialist to evaluate, carry out and validate. You definitely can not prevent this and expect your new shiny platform to keep and move your SEO juice immediately. Following is a summary of 12 important jobs to be carried out. 1. Plan Your Introduce and Cutover Date Start with a detailed task plan for your SEO migration.
There will be numerous groups included in a successful application– marketing, development, third celebrations– so having a task plan that includes job tracking and tasks is critical.Leverage Excel, Asana, JIRA, or any project management tool that suits your group. When creating your strategy and timelines, make certain to think about contract start/end dates(and auto renewal stipulations!)with your existing and new platform companies, in addition to your marketing schedule for the year. 2. Tidy Up Item, Category and Client data Information clean-up is among the most crucial actions you can take with respect to a migration. Like a good spring cleaning, having a well-organized dataset for migration will make the whole process a lot much easier to manage.Remove any old, outdated or inactive items and classifications. I recommend doing the same for consumer records too. If a client has not purchased from you in the last year or more, it would not make sense to move that person’s data.Of course, you’ll still want such consumers in your marketing automation pipeline( assuming they decided in ), so maintain backups of all these records. Utilize this opportunity to review and modify your product
material(title, descriptions etc ). More on this topic later. 3. Protect an SSL certificate *** Get SSL-certified! *** Google has been using the HTTPS procedure as a ranking signal given that 2014. It has taken a strong position towards PCI compliance enforcement, so any website that processes
transactions and is on the non-secured HTTP procedure will be marked as not secure.If you do not protect an SSL certificate, your Google rankings will decline significantly, and visitors will be shown a rather frightening blurb cautioning them to stay away. Making sure that your entire website is on HTTPS will increase customer trust and brand name loyalty with time.
4. Evaluation Meta Tags A migration initiative is a good time to revisit and evaluate the meta-tagging structure on your content and product information pages(PDP). After your new site is released, Google will crawl your site. This is an opportunity to make a good impression and potentially get
your rankings higher than they were before.The only way to increase that possibility is by following Google’s standards and finest practices for SEO and meta tags. So, as a guideline of thumb: Title Tags must be no more than 60 characters.Description Tags should be no more than 320 characters. In 2017, Google increased the meta description limit from 165 to 320.
This suggests you might now revamp your PDP and material page meta descriptions without feeling like you require to pack a lot of keywords within the 165 limit for
- the bots.Here’s an example with 304 characters as it appears on the Browse Engine Outcomes Page (SERP): 5.
Add Sitemap and Robots Files Guarantee your brand-new platform has”robots.txt “and”sitemap.xml”files at the root level. These files are crucial for bots to crawl and index your site.Ensure the sitemap file has a total list of all the URLs of your content, along with
all the item pages you wish to be publicly available. Likewise, make certain you have a technique of keeping this map updated every time
you include or get rid of products.Finally, be sure to submit the sitemap URL on your Google search console, and to any third-party prerender or cache services. 6.
Create a List of 301 Redirects Develop a list of 301 reroutes for your most active pages/URLs. You’ll desire to ensure you do not lose the SEO worth of these links when switching platforms.If you
do not want to map out and redirect whatever, then use Google Analytics to discover your top landing pages. These are pages individuals are hitting straight either through a post, online forum, promo or email campaign.Map out and 301-redirect only the pages
that have the most sessions. You can evaluate the 301 redirects by mimicing a user(or bot )checking out the previous URLs and confirming the responding status. 7. Track 404 Mistakes No matter just how much you plan, there most likely will be a couple of straggler
orphan pages that slipped your radar. These pages will throw a 404 mistake for bots and visitors attempting to land on them.You’ll desire to keep track of these extremely carefully during the very first month of your launch and triage them accordingly, with completion objective being no more 404 errors.Either direct these visitors to suitable pages on your new website, or develop a custom-made 404 page providing options to navigate your site and eventually discover what they’re searching for. Google Analytics uses a for 404 mistakes that you can import into your GA account. 8
. Optimize Your Images Google bots can not”see”your images, so the best way to have them index your images– for the search engine result, and specifically for the Image search tab– is
by making sure the images are kept on a publicly available URL(maybe on an AWS S3 container ). Considering that a migration is a chance to review all aspects of your website, consider image optimization strategies, such as relabeling images to contain your item title, making sure all images have ALT tags
— which not just assists with SEO
, however also with aesthetically impaired readers– and leveraging an image CDN that dynamically resizes and compresses images provided to the client browser and device. 9. Inspect Your Backlinks Throughout the years, you’ve most likely collected a variety of backlinks from marketing and social networks
efforts. As a part of the migration, you’ll probably need to know who is linking to you, and to exactly what page.For this, you’ll desire to go to your Google search console and click the< a href ="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/55281?hl=en "target= _ blank > Links to your website report. There, you’ll be able to review backlinks and make sure that they are either duplicated or redirected. 10. Enable Google Analytics and Browse Console Make certain to confirm and allow Google Analytics and Google search console(previously called “Web designer Tools”). Your new store will need the exact same setup actions and code snippets embedded as your previous site.In addition, established and test the< a href=https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6107169 target =_ blank > e-commerce tracking performance within your GA account. This is how you can determine your conversion rates and other key efficiency indicators. 11. Review and Update Footer Links It is a best practice to take advantage of your footer location for connect to your internal pages or external blog sites, online forums, etc.– yet these links often get ignored when you’re busy rigging up the other vital elements of your migration project.Evaluate all the links on your current footer to determine what makes good sense to keep or purge. Links on your homepage(and therefore the footer )do get higher crawl top priority by bots, which is one of the factors webmasters tend to dump a myriad of URLs in the footer.There’s a weighted algorithm at work here, so attempt to balance exactly what you put on the footer for the bot and for humans.
12. Resubmit Your URL to Google Finally, let
Google understand that you’re prepared for its bots to reindex your site!Visit Google’s Send URL tool for more information. Sara Hicks is cofounder and CEO of Response Commerce, based in Santa Monica, California.Attention Marketers: Create Certified Causes Fill Your Sales Funnel Instantly! Access the most thorough database of more than 30 million IT and Company Choice Makers. Precision and fulfillment guaranteed. No registration needed for more information
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