indiaseobriefs

Every CMS migration I have been called in to rescue had the same story: the new site looked better, launched on time, and lost thirty to sixty percent of organic traffic within three weeks. Nobody on the project had done anything obviously wrong. The loss came from four or five things that are invisible until traffic drops, and all of them are cheaper to prevent than to fix.

This is the list I work through before any Indian B2B site changes platform.

Freeze the URL structure, or map every single change

The safest migration keeps URLs identical. If the new platform forces a change – and platforms often do, adding or dropping a trailing slash, moving /products/x to /product/x, replacing IDs with slugs – then every old URL needs a one-hop 301 to its true equivalent. Not to the homepage, not to the category, to the equivalent page.

Build that map as a spreadsheet from a crawl of the live site before launch. Include every URL that has a backlink or has received a single organic visit in the last twelve months. On a B2B site this is usually a few hundred rows, which is a day of work, and it is the single highest-return day in the whole project.

The staging robots.txt is the classic own goal

Staging sites are blocked from crawling, correctly. Then the staging build is promoted to production and the block comes with it. The site goes live, looks perfect, and is invisible. I have seen this survive a week because everyone was checking the design rather than the file.

Check yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser within five minutes of going live. Not later.

Content that quietly did not come across

Migrations lose content in undramatic ways. A field that existed in the old CMS has no equivalent in the new one, so the specification table on every product page silently becomes empty. FAQ blocks that were custom-coded do not survive a theme change. Long descriptions get truncated to a character limit the new platform enforces.

Spot-check your ten most valuable pages against an archived copy, word for word. On a B2B site the missing content is almost always the technical detail – which is exactly the content that was earning the long-tail traffic.

Metadata and schema get rebuilt from templates

New platforms generate title tags and meta descriptions from a template. That template is generic, and it will happily overwrite the hand-written titles that took somebody a month. Export your existing titles and descriptions before migration and re-import them after. The same applies to structured data: if the old site had Organization, Product or FAQ schema and the new theme does not, you have removed it without deciding to.

Internal linking collapses in the rebuild

In-body contextual links are usually the first casualty of a content migration, because the copy gets pasted in as plain text. A B2B site with a well-built internal linking structure can come out the other side with almost none, and the pages that depended on it lose their support. Check a sample of body copy for live links, not just for text.

Launch-week monitoring, not launch-week celebration

For the first fourteen days after go-live: watch Search Console coverage daily for a spike in 404s and in “Crawled – currently not indexed”, submit the new sitemap and confirm it processes, watch server logs or the crawl stats report to see that Googlebot is finding the new URLs, and keep the old analytics comparison open so a drop is visible on day two rather than week four.

Most migration damage is fully recoverable if it is caught in the first fortnight. The expensive cases are the ones discovered a quarter later, by which point the old URLs have been de-indexed and the links pointing at them have stopped passing anything.

What to do if you are already past launch and down

Do not start rewriting content. Crawl the old sitemap, find everything that now 404s or redirects to the wrong place, fix the redirect map, restore the missing on-page content and metadata, and give it three to four weeks. In most cases the recovery is close to complete, because the rankings were not lost on merit.

Deep Bhardwaj has walked several Indian B2B sites through this both before and after launch; the pre-launch version costs a fraction of the post-launch one. Details at https://deepbhardwaj.com/seo-expert-in-india/.

Related reading: Mumbai manufacturers and exporters: turning a product catalogue into pages that rank covers the catalogue content that migrations most often drop.