Church Website Migration SEO Services
What Is a Website Migration?
Churches perform many changes to their website. “Website Migration” is an extremely generic term that encompasses just about any large-scale change that can happen to a website, including transition in domain, hosting, design, content, CMS, or protocol (HTTP to HTTPS).
In less common scenarios in which your church is intending to move an exact replica of your existing site to a new host, domain, or CMS, there are still important SEO considerations. In such cases, please contact us for guidance and to find out how we can help with your migration.
A 301 Redirect Plan Preserves SEO Value
When your church migrates to a new website, it is extremely likely that there will be significant changes to your website content and structure. New content will probably be added, content may be located in different places, old content may be purposefully lost, and your URL structure may be organized in a new way.
As search engines like Google crawled, indexed, and sent users to your old church website, pages on your old website gained credibility and authority within the search engine, allowing them to be displayed to search engine users more often. We refer to this as ranking value. Following your migration to a new website however, what happens to this ranking value? Many of these pages probably now exist in new places, or have had their content shift to some degree. How is a search engine to know what relationship the pages on your old website have to pages to on your new website, and how should the ranking value of the old pages be carried forward? This is where 301 redirects come in.
If this step is not taken, the pages on your new church website will essentially be "starting from scratch" in the eyes of search engines like Google.
Having these 301 redirects in place will also allow users who have your old pages bookmarked or click an out of date link to be directed to the appropriate content on your new website.
How We Can Help
We offer 301 redirect planning and implementation services to maintain your church website SEO value during your migration. Additionally, launching a new website is the ideal time for SEO optimization, and thus a popular choice is to combine our 301 redirect planning and implementation service with our SEO crawlability service. This approach helps your church get maximum SEO value out of its new website right away!
301 Redirect Planning and Implementation
Our 301 Redirect Planning and Implementation services will ensure that the ranking value of important pages on your old church website is appropriately carried forward to your new church website.
- Perform an exhaustive crawl of your old website in order to identify each page and its corresponding SEO value. Note that this step must be taken while your old church website is still available.
- Carefully map each page with SEO value on your old church website to an appropriate counterpart on the new site.
- Implement the 301 redirects and verify they are functional once your new church website has gone live.
Please note for this service to be available, the platform of your new church website must support 301 redirects. While this is not often a concern, if you aren't sure, please ask us!
Getting Started
The best way to get started is to schedule a free consultation with us by clicking the button below. This will give us an opportunity to discuss the unique details of your migration, as well as address any questions you may have. Alternatively, you may simply contact us. We look forward to speaking with you!