When it comes to Magneto migration, several factors must be called in to make sure the process is smooth, professional and effective. Magento 2 is a superior platform that offers tons of new and improved features for the next generation of digital commerce. These features directly affect the relation your customers have with your website, by improving their user experience and helping you optimize your store for better rankings on Google. If done the right way, you can benefit tremendously. However, if you leave lose wires, it can also lead to a catastrophic drop in traffic and sales.
This often involves certain SEO factors to make sure the website does not lose the digital footprint it previously had. Moreover, it also ensures many new features are compatible with the current state of the website, avoiding the need for custom integration. So as far as it is carefully vetted and executed, it is a task that is big but completely manageable. In this article, we will share 4 major SEO considerations that you must undertake during your Magento to Magento migration to make sure your website remains digitally robust and optimized for search engines.
Setup Up a Maintenance Window
The first step you must take to ensure your website remains available on Google and its rankings do not take a nose dive is by informing Google about its status quo. The best method to turn this around is by using a Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode extension to inform the visitors about the migration process. Such extensions help by displaying a maintenance page with a count-down timer that informs the visitor exactly when the website will be back on live and functional. This engages the visitors and encourages them to revisit the website.
There are a bunch of other features as well that you can use to your advantage. For example, you can engage the visitors by building anticipation about an upcoming product or service. You can add a subscribe form on the maintenance page and invite customers to sign-up to receive updates about the website and product promotions. Moreover, you can display social links to your social media handles to redirect customers and inform them about the migration process in detail.
This prevents loss of potential customers, preserves its online presence and keeps the website active from the SEO perspective.
Get Your Website Crawled for 301 Redirects
Before you start your migration it is imperative to crawl your site to validate your current URL structure. Many merchants often take this as a trivial detail and neglect this crucial SEO aspect during migration. If the current URL you have is going to be changed, you can easily match the new URLs with the old ones using 301 redirects
Different e-commerce platforms have different URL structures, and many are not SEO friendly. So this step is particularly important for those upgrading from platforms other than Magento as this may require a more complicated migration process.
Since every e-commerce platform has its own URL structure, all of them are not necessarily SEO friendly. But since the merchant is going from Magento to Magento, it will be a lot easier. Hence, you must crawl your website before the migration, map your URLs and implement 301 redirects. This help in making your website more SEO-friendly and you won’t lose any traffic during the migration process.
Manage Alterations in Content and Metadata
Changes in your website’s content, SEO metadata or structure will eventually affect its online presence in the long run. This usually happens during migration when structural alterations are made, especially in layered navigation. From the SEO perspective, retailers often forget to consider that static pages must be maintained and dynamic pages must not be indexed. This also applies to metadata since changes in it also result in traffic drop. To overcome duplication of content, whether it is product pages or other CMS pages, you can utilize canonical tags to prevent plagiarism which also damages page rankings.
Once you have checked all this, the next thing you must do is inspect your sitemap make sure any low-grade pages are not present in your XML sitemap.
Using an Ultimate SEO Tool to Automate Tasks
While you can do all this manually, from one step onto the next, there is also a much easier alternative that not only automates these SEO configurations but also comes loaded with other useful features to boost your website SEO. Extensions such as Ultimate SEO Optimizer are developed as an all-in-one SEO solution to tackle the potential backlash of Magento re-platforming. With this extension you can easily auto-create Meta titles, keywords and descriptions, generate SEO optimized tags for store images, auto-create XML and HTML sitemaps, use Google rich snippet tags, tackle content duplication with Hreflang tags, handle No index and No follow tags, and introduce canonical tags to your website.
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