HubSpot Migration: Avoid SEO Juice Dropoff and Plan a Fast Recovery

Migrating a website is almost always a stressful experience and usually takes longer than planned, no matter how prepared you are and how many times you’ve done it before. But it doesn’t have to be that way! if you are transitioning to HubSpot and, most importantly, if you have a good plan to migrate, you can solve any problems you run into and recover quickly from potential SEO loss.

If you are considering migrating your website to HubSpot CMS but losing SEO is a no-go for you or other vocal members of your team, fear not!

In this blog, we will help you to plan a smooth migration and get your website traffic back up to speed quickly.

How Easy is a HubSpot CMS Migration?

Pretty easy, actually!

HubSpot offers the HubSpot CMS Migration Service with their own specialists for free for any website under 20 pages, and they charge $20 per page after 20. This service includes migration of your content and design into HubSpot.

Keep in mind that this is not a redesign of your website nor an attempt to perfectly recreate your old site in a new platform. it’s simply a migration that will translate your design into a standard set of templates in HubSpot + a content migration. Your website’s look and feel will be there using HubSpot’s standards.

Generally speaking, a HubSpot migration should take 14-21 days depending on how complex and how many pages your website has.

Read all the details of what will be migrated and what will not.

Why Migrate to HubSpot?

Because it’s so easy to use!

Once you have your templates you can build pages and make changes at the editor level without the help of a developer.

If you are using your website to generate leads (please, start doing that if you are not!) you will be able to collect data directly to your CRM which is going to be available for your sales, service and marketing processes. All in one system.

HubSpot CMS is basically an enterprise-level platform at a lower cost that is feeding your CRM with qualified leads.

Yet, you still might be feeling anxious about migrating your website and definitely not looking forward to losing SEO. With some planning and strategy you can avoid a big loss and prepare for a fast recovery.

Avoid SEO Link Juice Drop Off

Before you start your HubSpot migration, take some time to preserve your SEO with the following tips:

Start with a Content Audit

Go over all your content and document the pages that have higher traffic and the ones that have more valuable content. Take this opportunity to identify content that is redundant and content that can be improved or updated. Assuming you already know your niche and keywords, you can document these items enough to start using topic clusters once you begin using HubSpot.

Map the old URLs

You will need to do some extra redirect work just to be safe. This can go along with your content audit. Document the URLs you will later redirect and, in the event of identifying an error later on, you have them handy to redirect.

Audit and Update Backlinks

Audit and document all links you have on other people’s websites that lead to your website. Contact the webmaster for any updates needed so you can continue receiving traffic from that source and do any redirects needed.

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Let Google Know

Google needs to crawl your website for it to be found. In order to do that, set up your Google Webmaster tool and submit your domain, and your XML sitemap so they know what to index. If you have told Google not to index any pages during migration (robots.txt) make sure to remove these restrictions afterward or add new ones if that’s the case.

Speaking of Google, update Google Search Console to redirect to your new site and regularly use this tool to identify error 404 that can be redirected in HubSpot.

Enable AMP in HubSpot (for Blog only)

AMP is a mobile-specific page format that loads almost instantly on a mobile device. This is a very important SEO and navigation issue often overlooked. In HubSpot, you have the ability to enable Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on your blog posts and quickly load content and improve the mobile experience of your visitors.

Consult and Document Your Traffic From Google Analytics

This will help you have a clear understanding of which pages lost SEO and be able to plan accordingly.

Star the Migration During Your Downtime

Migrating your site during a downtime will reduce the impact of SEO loss. Look for a time of the year, day of the week and time in which business is typically slow, for a safer migration.

Create a Recovery Plan

You already have a pretty solid plan to preserve as much SEO as possible during your HubSpot migration, but you are eager to get back to the same numbers you were before. Start using HubSpot’s SEO tools ASAP. Here’s how:

Topic Clusters: You have your keywords, you know your niche, you just worked on a content audit, so it’s time to deploy all that into topic clusters.
Review your pages in HubSpot and make sure they are optimized:
- Do they all have meta description at the right length?
- Do your pictures have ALT text?
- Are all links on your pages working properly?
- HubSpot will show your where to optimize if you are missing something, do it immediately for mobile and desktop
Use HubSpot’s SEO Recommendations: this tool will show you where the issue is and how to fix it. Create the habit of doing this task every week
Improve Page Speed: And keep the habit of doing so weekly

For the following four weeks, double your attention on monitoring analytics to identify where your efforts are working and what pages still need improvement.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading!

Are you ready to get started with HubSpot CMS? Great!

Read our 'All About the HubSpot CMS' post that will give you a quick primer.

Also, check out our other HubSpot CMS features where we delve into history, features, and benefits:

*If you want to have a quick chat with a HubSpot CRM expert, feel free to book a call below.