Moving your Auto Dealer Website? Prevent Loss Of Traffic With This Checklist

 Site migration is a necessity when you move your Auto Dealer Website from HTTP to HTTPs, change your service provider, or change your domain name. This is a task which requires careful planning, since it affects your website’s organic traffic and ranking.

Here is a site migration SEO checklist that helps protect the ranking of your auto dealer website.

01. Check for a Migration "To-Do” list

Expect temporary loss of traffic during site migration, since Google takes time to process, change, and update your movement. 

However, SEO improvements such as fixing broken links, eliminating redundant pages, and content enhancements can also be done during site migration. Make use of this window and compile a "To-Do” list before site migration. 

02. Choose the Best Time for Migration

The temporary loss of website traffic shouldn’t affect your auto dealership. Avoid the migration process during busy holiday seasons when automotive sales shift to overdrive. 

Plan your migration during lean months when sales generally tend to be slack. 

03. Pre-migration Website Audit

It is important to move every page of your auto dealer website during the migration process. Crawl your website and make a list for future verification. 

This list can also be used to identify any redirects and crawling errors.  

04. Save Your Analytics

Save a copy of the Google Analytics data of your existing site before and after site migration. This will help you find which pages have lost traffic after the process. 

You can then focus on those particular pages, rather than the entire auto dealer website.

05. Map Old & New URLs

Your old and new URLs should match and appear the same. Else, Google will treat it as a completely different site and your website may lose ranking. 

Mapping the URLs in a spreadsheet will also help ensure that all the pages are migrated correctly. 

06. Update Internal Links

Internal links can be easily missed during the site migration process. Make sure to provide HTML links to your new site rather than to your old site. 

If you leave the internal links unchanged, it will slow down the site’s performance and your page rank will be impacted adversely.

07. Check for Duplicate Content Issues

If both the website versions are online, then it leads to duplicate content issues. Self-canonicalization should be in place to let the search engines know that the particular URL is the master copy of a page. 

This will avoid confusion and penalization of your auto dealer website.

08. Control Old Domain as Well

The old domain should ideally redirect to the new domain. If these redirects are not done, then the inbound links earned by the old website will be lost, which will adversely impact your auto dealer website ranking.

09. Manage Your PPC Campaigns & Other Platforms

It is important to update the new URL in your PPC campaigns as well as on other online platforms used to marketing your dealership. If there are no proper redirects then it could lead to a huge fall in the traffic, triggering a hit in website rankings. 

For more information about site migration SEO checklists, Click Here.