Well, there are people in this world who keep on changing their website platforms for reason or the other without knowing how this is going to affect its SEO. Yes you got it right.
If you change your website platform every now and then you will find drastic change in your website traffic. This can badly hurt your business in short as well as long term. In short term, it can hurt you because business will lose good amount of traffic gathered till now.
Talking about long term loss, it is really very hard task to get back those higher search rankings in Google instead of staying there with new website switch. Not all search traffic will give you conversions.
This will further affect all your online marketing strategies like as Re-targeting, direct traffic as well as future referral traffic sources. So, if you are planning to switch your website platform then these are the things that you must avoid:
Precautions to be taken while shifting the website from one platform to another:
- Broken Links: We are very well aware about the term 301 redirects. This is very widely used however several marketing agencies as well as website development companies fail to understand its importance or we can say its actual purpose.Google can re-index links pointing to your site. Changing the website platform will change its URL and then all of the links which were previously redirecting to your webpages will now break and as a result, link authority is lost.
Various tools can be used for the same. Among them, AHREF is a very helpful tool. One can also make use of Webmaster Tools to export links.
- Failing to Move Meta Tags as well as Content: While switching the website from one platform to another, people mostly fail to transfer meta information as well as content.This information is necessary on new platform as well. It is necessary to move all of them including meta titles, meta descriptions, H1tags , body content etc or else your web pages will be against Google.Yes, you can redo them but keeping them empty is a danger.
- Improper SEO Audit: This is one of the major issues that is seen during this switching process. One must compare the old platform with the new ones. This may look better on new site to avoid H1 tags and this may add value to the website however is not suitable and without them, website traffic can be affected. Proper SEO Audit must be done before switching the platform.Hence, go for a platform that supports them. Duplicate meta titles in every meta field is yet another issue, One can have H1 tags wrapping the bread crumbs. With such issues, Sites actually get down.
Take Away:
I advise you to avoid these issues with the simple tips offered here as this will save your website traffic and search rankings are well maintained. Work beforehand because once you lose rankings, it is hard to get them back.
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