Which content do you need to keep in a website migration?

A website migration is a good opportunity to improve SEO for the long term. If you build the new concept on current SEO know-how from the start, your on-page optimization after go-live is often ahead of your competitors'. At the same time, the migration puts the rankings you have today at risk. If you delete content that currently brings organic traffic, you lose that traffic and the revenue it generates.

The following steps help you find the important content on your old website and take it with you to the new one.

Which pages bring organic traffic today?

Some of your pages bring visitors from search right now. Often these are pages that seem unimportant from a business perspective and do not appear in the new concept. If they have no equivalent on the new website, their traffic is gone after the migration.

• Search Console. In the Performance report, choose the Pages tab and the longest date range, which is 16 months. You see clicks and impressions per URL from Google Search. The table shows a maximum of 1,000 rows. For large websites, get the full list through the API or the BigQuery export.
• Web analytics. In Google Analytics 4, use the Landing page report and filter on the default channel group Organic Search. There you also see conversions and revenue per landing page. Other search engines such as Bing are included as well.

For each of these pages, think about how it or an equivalent fits into the new structure.

Which pages have promising rankings or backlinks?

Besides pages with traffic, look at pages that rank well but barely bring clicks yet. Use a rank tracking tool or Search Console to find pages at around positions 7 to 15 for queries with relevant search volume. It can pay off to keep these pages and keep improving them after the migration.

In Search Console you also find pages with many impressions and few clicks. They bring little traffic today, but with the right optimizations they have potential.

Also check which pages other websites link to. Search Console shows this in the Links report, and Bing Webmaster Tools and specialized backlink tools add more data. How to export link data from Search Console and where its limits are is explained in the guide Export backlinks from Search Console.

Which PDFs and images bring traffic?

Do you have many PDFs with good content on your website, or do your images rank in Google Images? Then these files need extra attention.

PDFs. PDF views are missing from web analytics because PDFs have no tracking code. Search Console shows them in the Performance report like regular pages. The simplest option is to keep the PDF URL. If it changes, 301 redirect the old URL to the new one. If the content also exists as an HTML page, the PDF can point to the HTML page with a rel="canonical" HTTP header. Google explicitly supports this for files such as PDFs. We used to recommend creating an HTML version, redirecting the old PDF URL to it and linking a new, bot-blocked PDF from the HTML page. The canonical header makes this easier today.

Images. Web analytics does not reliably show visits from image search as organic traffic either. In the Search Console Performance report, set the search type to Image to see which pages get clicks through images. Google's site move guide says that embedded content such as images and videos must be moved just like all other content. The safest option is to keep the image URL and file name unchanged. If it changes, 301 redirect the old image URL to the new one and embed the image on the new page again.

How do you build the new structure around your most important pages?

If you cannot keep every page of the old website, sort the exported list by clicks. Usually a small share of URLs brings most of the organic traffic. In our experience, often no more than 40 percent of the URLs with traffic account for at least 90 percent of the clicks. Check this against your own data. Draw the line so that you cover at least 90 percent of your organic traffic.

Add the pages with promising rankings and backlinks, plus PDFs and pages with images that bring traffic. Build the new structure around this list. Ideally, you improve their content along the way and strengthen their internal links. How much traffic and revenue depend on these pages can be prepared for project management in a traffic forecast.

Do you really need new URLs?

Keep the old URLs wherever possible, especially for pages with organic traffic. URLs are often overrated. A user-friendly, descriptive URL is good, but constant changes help nobody. Once a page has a half-decent URL, stick with it for as long as possible.

How do you map old URLs to new ones?

301 redirects show users and search engines where a page has moved. That is exactly what they are for. Take all URLs that will not survive the migration and currently have traffic, promising rankings or backlinks. Assign exactly one new URL to each old URL. The content behind it is equivalent or better.

• Google treats many redirects to a single irrelevant target such as the home page as soft 404s. Redirecting several old pages to one new page only makes sense if the new page consolidates their content.
• According to Google, 301 and other permanent redirects do not lose PageRank.
• Sort the mapping by clicks so you check the most important pages first.

How to test the mapping before and after go-live is explained in the guide Testing redirects. The difference between the status codes is covered in 301 vs. 302 redirect. What else can go wrong in a migration besides missing content and redirects is described in the guide SEO risks in a website migration.

Should you update inbound links?

Yes, at least the most important ones. Google's site move guide recommends contacting the websites that link to your old URLs and asking them to update the link. A direct link does not depend on the redirect staying in place forever. Google recommends keeping the redirects themselves for as long as possible, generally at least one year. It takes work, but it pays off for your strongest links. As a side effect, more people hear about your new website.

Switch your internal links completely to the new URLs so that no paths run through redirects.

The full process before, during and after go-live is in the website migration checklist. How to check the new website before launch is covered in the SEO check before go-live.