Ecommerce Website Migration: Pre-Launch SEO Checklist

  • Technical & On-Page Review

  • Make sure your team lead/dev team hires a UX consultant/contractor. There is too much money on the line to "think" you know what your customers want from a design standpoint. This affects SEO and beyond.

  • Implement meta noindex, nofollow tag on all pages to avoid crawling of pages

  • Add Disallow: / to robots.txt file to block robots from crawling site

  • Make sure rel next prev canonical tag is implemented on paginated pages (side note: yes Google deprecated this recently, but it is still recommended for other search engines)

  • Review JavaScript handling: test as Googlebot to see if images, header tags, content appears

  • Review all schema types and test with Google\'s rich snippet testing tool

  • Review meta tags (via site crawl and testing with user agent Googlebot): title tags, h1 tags, meta descriptions; make sure you port over from old site to new site - DO NOT PERFORM KEYWORD RESEARCH AND CREATE NEW TAGS UNLESS IT\'S A NEW PAGE.

  • Review alt text implementation: run site crawl

  • Get a list of any "junk" urls and query parameters to add to Google Search Console and robots.txt file

  • Run a test order of Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Adobe, or whatever analytics platform you use to make sure data is being passed properly

  • Make note of internal site search settings you need to adjust in analytics before launch

This checklist was created by rachelmfredrickson

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