How to plan your E-Commerce and SEO migration | E-commerce

You have just migrated your e-commerce platform: a few weeks after the launch, you discover something shocking: despite technical technical diligence, hiring the best development agency, and spending a fortune on migration Google's traffic and rankings have dropped dramatically. If it sounds familiar, you'll want to keep reading.

With several technical elements to consider, an e-commerce site migration can be a daunting project – consider integrations, possibly hire a new agency, etc. Although all the elements are important, one of the most overlooked factors to consider is search engine optimization.

may include basic SEO features, but most of the work is for your digital marketing expert to evaluate, implement, and verify. You absolutely can not avoid this and expect your new brilliant platform to retain and migrate your SEO juice automatically. Here is a summary of 12 essential tasks to implement.

1. Schedule your launch and start date

Start with a detailed project plan for your SEO migration. There will be multiple teams involved in a successful implementation – marketing, development, third parties – so a project plan including task tracking and assignments is essential.

Leveraging Excel, Asana, JIRA or any project management tool suits your team. When creating your plan and timelines, be sure to consider the start and end dates of the contract (and auto-renewal clauses!) With your current and new platform providers, as well as your marketing schedule for the # 39; year.

2. Clean up product, category and customer data

Data cleansing is one of the most important steps you can take in migration. Like a good spring cleaning, having a well-organized data set for migration will make the whole process much easier to manage.

Delete all old, expired and inactive products and categories. I suggest doing the same thing for customer records too. If a customer has not bought from you for a year or two, it would be illogical to migrate that individual's data.

Of course, you will still want such customers in your marketing automation pipeline (assuming they've opted for it), so keep backups of all these records. Use this opportunity to review and revise the content of your product (title, descriptions, etc.). More on this subject later.

3. Secure an SSL certificate

*** Get SSL Certification! *** Google uses the HTTPS protocol as a ranking signal since 2014. In fact, it has taken a strong position towards the application of PCI compliance, so any site that deals with transactions and is on the HTTP protocol no secure will be marked as unsecured.

If you do not secure an SSL certificate, your Google ranking will drastically decline, and visitors will receive a rather scary message warning them to stay away. Ensuring your entire website is on HTTPS will increase customer trust and brand loyalty over time.

4. Examine meta tags

A migration initiative is the perfect time to revisit and evaluate the meta-tagging structure on your Content and Product Detail Pages (PDP). After launching your new site, Google will explore your site. It's an opportunity to make a good impression and potentially get higher rankings than before.

The only way to increase this probability is to follow Google's guidelines and best practices for SEO and meta tags. So, as a rule:

• Title tags must not exceed 60 characters
• Description Tags must not exceed 320 characters.

In 2017, Google has increased the meta description limit from 165 to 320. This means you can now PDP and meta-page content descriptions without having the impression that you need to stuff a bunch of keywords in the limit of 165.

Here is an example with 304 characters as it appears on the search engine results page:

5. Add Sitemap and Robots files

Make sure your new platform has "robots.txt" and "sitemap.xml" files at the root level. These files are essential for robots to crawl and index your site.

Make sure the sitemap file contains a complete list of all the URLs for your content, as well as any product pages you want to make available to the public. Also make sure that you have a method to keep this card up to date each time you add or delete products.

Finally, be sure to submit the Sitemap URL on your Google Search Console and all third party services.

6. Create a list of 301 redirects

Create a list of
301 redirects for your most active pages / URLs. You need to make sure you do not lose the SEO value of these links when you change platforms.

If you do not want to find everything and redirect everything, use Google Analytics for
find your best landing pages. These are pages that users view directly through a blog, forum, promotional campaign or e-mail.

Map out and 301: Redirect only pages with the largest number of sessions. You can test 301 redirects by simulating a user (or robot) visiting the previous URLs and
check the response status.

7. Runway 404 Errors

No matter how much you plan, there will likely be some orphan straggler pages that have slipped your radar. These pages will throw a 404 error for robots and visitors who are trying to land on them.

You will have to monitor them very closely during the first month of your launch and sort them accordingly, the end goal being over 404 errors.

You can either direct these visitors to the appropriate pages of your new site, or create a custom page 404 that allows them to browse your site and find what they are looking for. Google Analytics offers a
Report template for 404 errors that you can import into your GA account.

8. Optimize your images

Google bots can not "see" your images, so the best way to index them – for search results, and specifically for the Image Search tab – is to s & rsquo; ensure that images are stored on a public URL As a migration is an opportunity to revisit all aspects of your site, consider image optimization techniques, such as renaming images for contain the title of your product, ensuring that all images have ALT tags. not only helps SEO, but also visually impaired readers – and takes advantage of a CDN image that dynamically resizes and compresses the images provided to the client's browser and device.

9. Check your backlinks

Over the years, you have probably collected a number of backlinks from marketing and social media efforts. As part of the migration, you will probably want to know who you are linking to and what page.

For this you need to go to your Google search console and click on
Links to your site's report There you will be able to review the backlinks and make sure that they are replicated or redirected.

10. Enable Google Analytics and Search Console

Make sure to check and enable Google Analytics and the Google Search Console (previously called "Webmaster Tools"). Your new store will require the same configuration steps and code snippets as your previous site.

In addition, configure and test the
E-commerce tracking functionality in your GA account. This is so you can determine your conversion rates and other key performance indicators.

11. Review and update the footer links

It is recommended to use your footer to access your internal pages or your blogs, forums, etc. external – but these links are often ignored when you are busy rigging other critical aspects of your migration project.

Evaluate all the links in your current footer to determine what makes sense to keep or purge. The links on your home page (and thus the footer) get a higher priority from the bots, which is one of the reasons why webmasters tend to throw a plethora of bots. URL in the footer.

Balance what you put on the footer for the bot and for humans.

12. Return your URL to Google

Finally, let Google know you're ready for its bots to reindex your site!

Visit the Google site
Send the URL tool for more information.

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Sara Hicks is co-founder and CEO of
Reaction Commerce, based in Santa Monica, California.