seolounge
Imagine you’re earning $100,000 each month from your website. You decide it’s time for a new look and hire a great web developer or designer. But three months after the launch, you are only earning $50,000 a month. You have to let two staff members go and you are seriously worried that if this decline continues, you might go bankrupt. You feel angry at the web developer because they said they would keep your SEO.
The problem is that the web developer/designer is not an SEO expert. Yes, they should know their limitations. But it is also your responsibility as a business owner to understand that web designers/developers are not SEO experts. There is not enough time in the day to be an expert at both. Plumbers and electricians both work on your house, but a plumber is not an expert at electrics (and vice versa). They may have some basic knowledge that lets them get by. But would you put your electrical needs in the hands of a plumber? That could be deadly.
In the same way, you should not put your SEO needs in the hands of a web developer/designer because it could result in the death of your business.
What is SEO Recovery?
Your decline in the rankings often happens slowly so it can take 3-4 months to notice that the phone has stopped ringing and that it’s not just a phase. It will often take the same amount of time to recover as it took to decline. Google has to rebuild trust in your site. So, if it took three months to decline, it could take three months to come back. If it took longer, your recovery will take longer.
To recover the rankings of a site, we need to get as much information as possible from your old website by using the Wayback Machine. We then need to add the relevant information back to your site. Recovering SEO takes far longer than migrating it in the first place. Your bill will be much higher if you do the migration after the site goes live rather than before. If I asked you to use the Wayback Machine and find all the differences, you may not transfer the right things or know what needs to be changed. Why would you? You are not an SEO expert either.
An SEO expert in SEO migration will know exactly what it is about the current website that is helping it to rank. They will look at the URLs, the SEO titles, the H1s, and the page content. They will also look at the sidebars, footers, and backend settings to make sure everything that was helping SEO on the old site is transferred to the new site.
Not all sites need SEO migration, because they may not be relying on or getting traffic from Google. But for those that do need SEO migration, it will take 5-30 hours. In your new website costing, this is not going to be budgeted for – web developers won’t do 30 hours of work for free.
Yes, it is a pain to pay $1000 or more to keep your SEO. But if you end up losing $50,000 a month, it would have been well worth it. Even if you only earn $2000 a month from your site, it is worth paying $2000 to migrate your SEO, because without this you could end up earning $1000 or less for six months or more.
How to Migrate SEO
If you are a web developer or a very tech-savvy person, you can get my SEO Migration eBook on Amazon and do it yourself. The book goes through every step we take for our local family businesses in order to keep their SEO. If you’re not a web developer or confident with technology, get an SEO migration expert to do it for you.
These are some of the most common things that go wrong on a new site
- Address or main city you service no longer in the footer
- Links to your main service pages no longer in the footer
- List of locations you service no longer in the footer
- Change of domain name and removal of a keyword in the domain (with no contingency plan for doing enough SEO to make up for this)
- Unnecessary changes to URLs
- SEO titles changed to titles thought to be better, but are actually worse
- Settings in the SEO plugin not transferred across
- New sections in the new theme are not blocked from Google when they should be
- Sections of the theme that should be deleted have not been
- A section of blogs added on the home page when you are a service business
- Links to blog posts added in the sidebar or footer when you are a service business
- Business name missing from contact us page
- Page content and titles that were helping the site to rank have been removed
- And more …
“I don’t know if I need my SEO migrated”
Contact us for a free five-minute assessment of your site. We just need you to add our email to your Google analytics or search console so we can see where your traffic is coming from and let you know what your risk is.
