Watch our video below for a discussion with Bill and Carl about SEO juice, and how to avoid losing ground when you move your website to a new host:
Are you a vet practice owner or veterinarian (or both) looking to migrate your website to a new website provider/marketing agency? Are you worried this move will affect your site’s SEO “juice” and essentially undo all the progress it’s made over the years?
After all the work (and money) that’s gone into your website, we get why you’re concerned. Luckily, if you make the move to a capable, knowledgeable marketing agency, you can be confident that your website will remain intact and perform well immediately after it’s transferred over.
What’s SEO Juice?
SEO juice is the authority and SEO value your website has accumulated over the years according to Google. This authority refers to the overall trustworthiness and presence of your website, a collection of everything from on-page optimization and keyword research to code and local SEO. Many different elements contribute to your website’s “juice” and will continue to do so even after the site migrates.
Ways to Keep Your SEO Juice
To ensure that you don’t lose any SEO value during the website transfer process, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Done right, your transfer shouldn’t be causing your website to lose anything, unless the provider you’re switching to doesn’t offer as many services as your last provider. Businesses switch providers all the time, and we know they wouldn’t do this if it negatively impacted their website.
- A quality agency and website provider will make sure all your assets are transferred over correctly and efficiently so you can be up and running as soon as possible. Agencies also often work with a business’s previous provider to guarantee a seamless transfer. You won’t have to worry about incurring any Google penalties.
- It’s important to maintain your original domain when you switch to a new website provider. If you change your domain, this could affect the back links to your site, which would all direct users to your old domain instead. This will hurt traffic to your website.
- Your new website provider follows best practices for SEO to improve your ranking and increase your online presence.
In sum, transitioning to a new provider should help you improve your business, because their goals will align with yours and they’ll do everything possible to see you succeed.
What if I Need to Change My Domain? 
If your website domain needs to change, whether because you’re re-branding your practice, merging other sites or starting from scratch, it’s imperative to keep your page authority intact. Your new domain’s website needs to resemble your old domain’s site as closely as possible. A temporary decrease in site traffic should be expected, but as Google crawls your new website, traffic should go up once more.
Your new website provider should know about 301 redirects, which ensure that anyone who lands on your new website is directed to the right page. These redirects transfer authority to your new website and prevent people from getting misdirected.
What the Right Marketing Agency Will Do for Your Website
Finding the right marketing agency to host and maintain your website is crucial. You’re placing not just your practice, but also your business, in their hands. If the agency you choose lacks knowledge and experience, your website can lose all its rankings very quickly.
They’ll make all the necessary redirects to your new site
The right agency for your vet practice won’t skip out on doing proper redirects from your old site to your new one. This prevents 404 errors, which will harm your rankings (especially if you have a site with lots of pages). You’ve probably stumbled onto a 404 page error yourself a handful of times, and you know how frustrating that can be!
They’ll do the research
The right agency will do the proper link research, which means finding out which pages your existing links (or link “juice”) are going to, and create proper redirects on your new website.
They won’t put your reputation at risk with cheap hosting
The right agency doesn’t rely on cheap, shared hosting. With shared hosting, your website could end up on the same server as controversial websites promoting pornography, gambling, etc. While your website might be a totally separate entity from these other sites, shared hosting can still harm your site rankings by association.
They’ll back you up
The right agency won’t miss crucial steps to back up your old website for its transfer to the new hosting server. This is especially important for sites built in WordPress or another database-driven content management system.
The bottom line
If you want to hold onto (or improve) your website’s rankings and reputation, you need to work with an agency that has demonstrated experience, knowledge, and authority. They can provide you with examples of their work, showing you clients who rank well in their market. And you can be one of them.
Why You Should Work with InTouch
At InTouch, we treat our clients’ websites with the same care and attention that we treat our own. Because your success is our highest priority, it’s only natural for us to regard every website we build and/or host as something valuable and unique. We know how to help our clients make an easy, low-stress website transfer that preserves all their assets and gets them up and running on their new server without a hitch.
If you’d like to know more about what to expect with a website migration and how we do it, get InTouch by calling (800) 493-9003!