How to Upgrade Your Website Content Before a Site Migration

A site migration is the perfect time to assess the current state of a website’s content. Does it need to be refreshed, optimized or replaced? Do you need new content?

A migration forces you to take a good look at what’s working and what isn’t—an opportunity that doesn’t come around too often.

In this guide:

• Conducting a Content Audit
  • Run Analytics Tools
  • Create a Spreadsheet
  • Prioritize Pages
• Improving Content Readability
  • Evaluate Content Relevance
  • Check for Accuracy and Update Facts
  • Assess the Quality and Structure
• Writing New Content
• Optimizing the Content
  • Meta Tags
  • Internal Linking
  • Heading Tags
  • Keyword Optimization
  • Image Optimization
  • Alt Attributes
  • Video Optimization
  • Structured Data Markup with Schema
  • Other Structured Data
  • Social Meta Tags
  • URL Optimization
  • Fully Qualified Links
• Tracking and Optimizing Content After a Site Migration
  • Track Key Metrics
  • Conduct Regular Content Audits
• Final Thoughts
• Quick Solutions
• FAQ: How Do I Optimize Website Content to Support a Smooth and Successful Site Migration?
• About Us

Conducting a Content Audit

A content audit is the process of evaluating the content on a website to identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. A typical process may look something like this:

Run Analytics Tools

Using analytics tools, you can get an inventory of all the webpages on a site and the key metrics for those pages. Tools like Google Analytics, SEOToolSet and Screaming Frog are all useful here.

Create a Spreadsheet

Document the URLs you need to investigate and include data for each URL like engagement metrics and ranking data.

Prioritize Pages

Next, you’ll create a plan of action for those webpages. You might organize the project in chunks, focusing first on top-performing pages and then on other types of webpages.

Here’s an example of how you might categorize the content initiative:

Top performers: Focus on refining the most important pages first. These are pages with high rankings, traffic and engagement or those crucial to your brand, products or services.

Potential performers: Identify pages that could rank higher or attract more traffic with improvements. Enhance content on these pages, combine similar topics into long-form guides, and use 301 redirects as needed.

Irrelevant pages: Handle outdated or irrelevant content by redirecting to related topics, the home page or removing the page entirely. See: How to Remove a Webpage.

Related: How do I determine which outdated content to keep, update or remove?

Improving Content Readability

One of the big initiatives before a site migration will be to refresh the copy on your main pages and the supporting content throughout the site such as on your blog.

So next, look critically at each piece of content and consider the following:

Evaluate Content Relevance

Start by assessing whether each piece of content’s topic is still relevant to your audience and business goals.

Ask yourself:

• Is this topic still relevant to our target audience?
• Does this content align with our current business objectives and branding?
• Has there been a shift in industry trends that makes this content outdated or irrelevant?

If the content is no longer relevant, consider removing it or redirecting it to a more pertinent page. If it’s still valuable, evaluate its accuracy and effectiveness.

Check for Accuracy and Update Facts

Next, scrutinize the accuracy of the information:

• Are the statistics, facts and data up-to-date?
• Have there been recent developments or new research that should be included?
• Are there any outdated references, such as old events, obsolete technologies or past predictions?

Update any outdated information to ensure your content remains credible and informative.

Assess the Quality and Structure

Evaluate the overall quality and structure of each piece:

• Is the content well-organized and easy to read?
• Does it have a clear purpose and message?
• Are there any gaps in the information that need to be filled?

Consider whether the content could benefit from a rewrite or restructuring to improve clarity. Sometimes, a minor update is good enough; other times, a complete overhaul is needed.

For more on how to boost your content quality using Google’s E-E-A-T principles, see: 6 Steps to Boost Your E-E-A-T Factor This Year.

Writing New Content

Sometimes you will need to create new content ahead of a site migration, for instance, to fill in content gaps or enhance your SEO strategy.

Here are some examples of when new content may be necessary:

• New industry trends. If the business has seen significant changes or when there are emerging trends that the existing content does not address.
• Expanded service offerings. If the business has introduced new products or services, you need content that highlights these offerings.
• An evolving audience. If the audience’s needs and preferences have evolved, and your current content no longer meets their needs.
• Search intent gaps. If you have gaps in your content, you can identify these and build topics into SEO silos. Use keyword research to understand how your target audience is searching, then map those queries to core topics and supporting subtopics. This approach improves visibility across a wider range of queries and supports stronger internal linking across your site.
• Localized content. If you’re expanding into new geographic markets, creating localized content that speaks directly to these new audiences can improve your local SEO and attract more region-specific traffic.

When you create new content strategically, you can enhance your site’s visibility and search engine rankings, which sets a solid foundation for the migration.

For more tips on creating quality content, see: Crafting High-Quality SEO Content: A Comprehensive Guide.

Related: How do I identify and close content gaps effectively before a site migration?

Optimizing the Content

Once the content has been refreshed, you’ll want to make sure every page is optimized with basic SEO best practices.

Meta Tags 

Meta tags are pieces of HTML code on a webpage that describe its content. They include title tags and meta descriptions.

These tags live in the “head” section of a webpage and help search engines understand what the page is about. They can also influence how your page appears in search engine results.

For more on this topic, see:

• Why Does Google Change My Webpage Title? (And What To Do About It)
• Do Meta Descriptions Matter Anymore?

Internal Linking

Internal links are hyperlinks that connect one page of a website to another page within the same domain. These links come in various forms, such as main navigation menus, footer links, contextual links within content and links to related content.

Internal linking offers many benefits, including improved user experience and engagement, and helping search engines crawl and index a site’s content more efficiently.

As you optimize your pages ahead of a site move, consider best practices like those outlined in: A Jam-Packed Guide on Internal Linking for SEO.

Heading Tags

Headings structure a webpage’s content, helping users and search engines understand how information is organized. Use headings to segment topics and subtopics in a logical, scannable way. We recommend ensuring the first heading tag is an <h1>, followed by <h2>, <h3>, etc., like a table of contents. Use CSS for font styling and avoid using heading tags for navigation elements.

For detailed guidance, see: What Are Heading Tags and Why Are They Important to SEO?

Keyword Optimization

Optimizing for search intent first requires using keyword research to identify themes, then building comprehensive content. When thinking about keyword inclusions, you’ll want to use natural language, related entities and semantically connected terms. This helps search engines better understand context and can improve visibility across a broader set of queries.

For more details, read: How a WordPress SEO Plugin Can Help You Optimize Your Content with Keywords.

Image Optimization

Images enhance content and provide additional ranking opportunities, but they can slow page load times. There are many ways to optimize images for SEO, such as resizing images, using descriptive file names with keywords and leveraging plugins for WebP or AVIF formats.

For more tips, see: How to Improve Google Image Search Ranking.

Alt Attributes

Alt attributes describe images for the vision-impaired and improve accessibility, which is a ranking factor for Google. Ensure every image has accurate alt text and use empty alt attributes for decorative images.

More information can be found in Google’s Accessibility Guidelines.

Video Optimization

Videos enhance engagement and provide SEO benefits. There are a lot of ways to optimize videos for search by following some of the best practices in this article: Quick Beginner’s Guide to Video Marketing and Optimization.

Structured Data Markup with Schema

Structured data helps search engines understand page content, strengthening a page’s relevance for a search and potentially enhancing SERP listings with rich snippets. There are countless schema types to choose from for any given webpage.

For further reading, see: What Is Structured Data and Why Is It Important For SEO? And: The Power of Schema Markup: Boost Your SEO and Website Visibility.

Other Structured Data

In addition to schema markup, you can structure your data with HTML tables, lists, breadcrumbs and TL;DR summaries to enhance readability and featured snippet potential.

Social Meta Tags

Social meta tags control how content appears when it’s shared across platforms, and can boost its engagement. Most platforms, including Facebook and LinkedIn, rely on Open Graph tags, while X uses X Cards and Pinterest supports its own rich pin metadata.

URL Optimization

URLs should be descriptive, short and contain keywords. Use dashes instead of underscores. Proper URL structure aids SEO and user experience.

Fully Qualified Links

Use fully qualified links (starting with https://) instead of relative URLs to avoid crawl issues and ensure clarity for search engines. For a detailed comparison, read: Absolute vs. Relative URL Linking.

Tracking and Optimizing Content After a Site Migration

After executing your site migration, the next step is to monitor and track the performance of your content. This helps you identify any issues that might have arisen during the migration process.

Track Key Metrics

Assuming you already have Google Search Console and GA4 properly set up, you’ll monitor key metrics such as:

• Rankings: Keep an eye on your keyword rankings to see if there are any significant drops or improvements.
• Organic traffic: Check for changes in organic traffic. There will be fluctuations initially and in the long term, a site migration should improve traffic levels.
• Bounce rates and session duration: Evaluate user engagement by monitoring engagement rate, engaged sessions and average engagement time (GA4).
• Conversion rates: Track conversion rates to ensure that your content is moving visitors down the marketing funnel.

You can also track user behavior and get feedback by using heatmaps like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity to see where users click, scroll and spend the most time.

Additionally, collect customer feedback directly through surveys or direct comments to understand user experience.

Related: How do I track and address content performance issues after a site migration?

Conduct Regular Content Audits

Audit your content regularly to make sure it remains optimized and relevant. This includes checking for outdated information and opportunities to update and enhance the content.

Remember, ongoing content optimization and vigilance are key to long-term success post-migration.

Final Thoughts

A site migration is an opportunity to strengthen your content strategy. During this process, you can align content to search intent, build comprehensive topic coverage and maintain strong technical foundations.

Start your migration content strategy out on the right foot:

Contact Us for an SEO Content Strategy Session

Quick Solutions

• How do I determine which outdated content to keep, update or remove?
• How do I identify and close content gaps effectively before a site migration?
• How do I track and address content performance issues after a site migration?

FAQ: How Do I Optimize Website Content to Support a Smooth and Successful Site Migration?

The key to optimizing content for a site migration is to treat it as both a content strategy initiative and an SEO preservation effort.

Start by identifying why the migration is happening and how it will impact your content.

Are you restructuring your site, consolidating pages or expanding into new topics? Defining this upfront ensures your content strategy aligns with business goals.

Before the migration, conduct a comprehensive content audit to evaluate what is performing well and what needs to be improved, consolidated or removed.

Focus on search intent, topic coverage and overall content quality rather than simply preserving existing pages.

This is also the time to identify content gaps and opportunities to build stronger topic clusters that support your core pages.

As you prepare for migration, map old URLs to new ones and ensure that high-value content is preserved through proper 301 redirects.

Update internal links so they reflect the new site structure and reinforce key topic relationships.

Optimize on-page elements such as titles, headings and metadata to align with current search intent and improve clarity.

During the migration, validate that all content is accessible, indexable and properly linked.

Monitor for issues such as broken links, missing pages or incorrect redirects that could impact performance. After launch, use tools like Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console to track engagement, rankings and indexing.

Post-migration, continue refining your content based on performance data.

Update underperforming pages, expand high-value topics and maintain a regular audit process to ensure your content remains relevant and aligned with search behavior.

Action Plan

1. Define content goals and how they align with the migration.
2. Conduct a full content audit (performance, quality, relevance).
3. Identify pages to keep, update, consolidate or remove.
4. Map search intent to key pages and topic clusters.
5. Identify content gaps and plan new content.
6. Create a URL mapping and redirect strategy for all content.
7. Update internal links to reflect the new structure.
8. Refresh titles, headings and metadata based on intent.
9. Ensure content is accurate, up to date and aligned with brand messaging.
10. Validate that all content is crawlable and indexable on staging.
11. Test redirects and internal linking before launch.
12. Monitor performance in GA4 and Google Search Console after launch.
13. Fix broken links, redirects and indexing issues quickly.
14. Compare post-migration performance against benchmarks.
15. Continuously update and expand content based on performance data.
16. Conduct ongoing content audits to maintain relevance and performance.

About Us

During the past 30 years, Bruce Clay Inc. has empowered enterprises of all sizes to leverage the power of the search engines, paid media and the web. All marketing strategies and campaigns for businesses interested in growing their digital footprint are designed by Bruce Clay and our team of marketing professionals. If you would like additional information on Bruce Clay, Inc., you can learn more about the company here.

Bruce Clay is founder and president of Bruce Clay Inc., a global digital marketing firm providing search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media marketing, SEO-friendly web architecture, and SEO tools and education. Connect with him on LinkedIn or through the BruceClay.com website.

See Bruce's author page for links to connect on social media.