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Why It’s a Must to Have Pre-migration Website Audits

When relocating from one place to another, you probably take the opportunity to pare down your belongings and reflect on what to bring to your new home. Migrating a website follows the same principle. During a website migration, admins and site owners must audit their pages and determine what they need to start again. 

A website migration is a chance to show search engines that you have improved your website’s structure and content. 

Why Audit before, Not after, a Migration

It’s crucial to evaluate your website before you move it—a pre-migration audit improves page quality and enables you to regain visibility faster. A search engine needs time to recrawl a website, detect changes, and re-index the page. 

There will always be a delay between your changes and the effects on your search visibility. So, if you wait until after you migrate to do an audit, you are only extending the time it takes for you to see improvements. Post-migration changes will only cause volatility and make it more challenging to diagnose technical issues on your website.

Following the Traffic Light System for Audits

A digital marketing agency will typically follow a traffic light system for auditing websites. This system provides a quick way to assess information on a website. When using this system, you put every page on your website under one of three categories—Kill, Combine, or Keep. You need to base your decision on performance data, not your opinion of the page. Here are things to keep in mind about each of these.

Low-Traffic and No-Value Pages: Kill

Pages that add little or no value and hurt your search ranking because of poor performance need to go. You have to be careful about this, though—you don’t want to rely only on performance data. 

For example, not many people will check out a website’s privacy policy page, but that is important for compliance, especially if you do business in certain regions. When evaluating performance data, consider the demand for content. Your overall ranking might take a dip when you have plenty of specialist content for smaller portions of your target audience. 

For instance, a college or university might have several web pages of research results. Though this content is essential to its audience, it isn’t very productive in lead generation. A solution would be to put it behind a log-in page so that students and faculty can access it. 

If you aren’t sure which pages to discard and which ones to keep, consult a digital marketing agency. Marketing professionals will have the tools and systems necessary for implementing smooth and successful website audits.

Low-Performing Content: Combine

You can combine pages that add some value but do not meet expectations. If you have multiple blog posts covering one topic, you could make one long “ultimate” guide incorporating all of them. Keeping separate posts means pitting your articles against each other, which splits your search ranking among several pages. For example, if your bakery goods review blog puts out a seasonal roundup of Christmas treats, you can combine all of your posts into one strong page.

High-Performing Content: Keep

Of course, you need to keep your best-performing pages—migrate posts that have generated plenty of traffic over the past 12 months. Besides looking at performance data, consider other factors. Keep pages that display industry events, terms and conditions of use, information on courses, portfolios, and the like. Although they might not receive as much traffic as other web pages, they are vital for brand building and serving your customers.

Conclusion

Ensure that your website rebounds quickly and powerfully with a website audit. An audit enables you to highlight technical issues, identify growth opportunities, and reclaim your website’s rankings and visibility. Teaming up with a digital marketing agency will ensure that your website migration proceeds as it should.

Nahr Development is the best partner for businesses building a future-proof and dynamic online presence. We are a digital marketing company in Cairo providing web development, SEO, UX/UI design, and much more. Request a free initial consultation today!

Nahr Dev
Nahr Dev
https://nahrdev.com
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