Migrating to a new platform can allow you to improve your website through new features and more modern functionality, but it also comes with risks. You don’t want your migration to leave your audiences in the dark, but that’s what could happen if SEO isn’t prioritised throughout this adjustment.

Why SEO matters during a migration 

As financial advisers, you’re always going to be in demand, a fact which puts you in a very competitive environment. That means that you can’t afford to lose any time to problems like broken links leading to a disused website or lost rankings - problems that stem from a migration that doesn’t consider SEO, and problems that can cause a drop in organic traffic.

Some of the common SEO pitfalls when migrating an adviser website are:

• Broken redirects. Not updating links to your website, leading to 404 error pages.
• Lost metadata. Failing to transport current HTML information about your website that improves its place in search results.
• Unoptimised content changes. Failing to adapt the content of your website for the new platform, leading to less visibility and a weaker user experience.
• Lacking a proper audit. Lacking thoroughness in your secure transfer of content, data integrity and SEO considerations.

Create a clear pre-migration plan

Careful planning before the migration can help you to tackle each of these website migration SEO risks. Auditing your current performance can help you to handle your domain change and SEO smoothly - there are several free online tools that can help you to do this, like Lighthouse. Benchmarking rankings and goal setting can enable you to track SEO performance between the old website and the new to allow you to monitor any discrepancies. Lastly, to counter the risk of broken redirects you should map out your existing URLs to figure out what you need to change, then you can take action through 301 redirects.

Of those links that remain, you want them to take users to the correct, new website and you want that redirection to signal to search engines that this move is permanent. This is exactly what 301 redirects do, and they’ll form a core part of your migration strategy. When implemented correctly, a 301 redirect can ensure that all of the ranking and indexing information of your prior website’s SEO are transferred as well as the user.

Retain high-value content and structure

The migration is an opportunity for improvement - both internally and in a way that’s more visible to your users. However, with that opportunity can come a temptation to rip out everything and start from the bottom, but that approach could needlessly hamstring elements of your SEO that currently works very effectively.

While you have to ensure that the content you do move directly across is optimised for the new platform, if you’ve already engineered your content and page layout structure to maximise SEO abandoning these entirely might only set you back.

Monitor performance after launch

Even after making sure that you’ve done everything on your SEO migration checklist, you don’t want to take your eye off the ball and assume problems won’t arise. You need to be vigilant, otherwise a lingering issue can sneak up on you and impact your visibility.

After migrating your financial services website, monitoring your analytics and rankings for potential errors in your strategy can help you to efficiently resolve any SEO problems before they become an issue.

When to get professional support

In some cases, perusing SEO tips for a website relaunch might be all it takes to pull off the migration effectively. However, when it comes to more complex websites that rely heavily on organic traffic, this move comes with a greater amount of pressure and difficulty. In those instances, it can be beneficial to work with website development experts so that you can be confident that this website migration will be an active aid to your brand.

SEO might feel like a separate consideration to the design and relaunch of your website in some ways, but treating it as an afterthought could seriously harm how smooth this migration ends up being. Protecting your search visibility throughout this shift means you don’t have to slow down and work to get back to where you were.

WEBPRO knows

53% of all trackable traffic to websites is attributed to organic traffic.