SEO strategies when replatforming

Any time you migrate from one system to another, there will be a period where search engines need to catch up and understand how your content and site structure has changed.

Completing certain SEO tasks during your migration will start you in the best possible position post-launch. Your goal is to minimize the drop in organic traffic during your migration, and actually increase your organic traffic in the short - medium term.

Benchmark your existing metrics

To understand any impact to your organic traffic, it’s important to benchmark it prior to switching over. This will help you identify if there is a problem, and if so, where it’s coming from. 

Prior to migrating, review: 

  • Google Analytics
    • Identify what percentage of your traffic is from “Organic Search”. The higher this percentage is, the more attention you need to pay to your SEO strategy. Anything above 70% is at higher risk of being impacted from a poorly planned SEO migration. 
    • Identify your highest-performing landing pages by looking at Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Give these pages particular attention and keep changes to a minimum for the initial migration. 
    • Identify your highest-performing landing pages by looking at Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Give these pages particular attention and keep changes to a minimum for the initial migration. 
  • Google Search Console 
    • Identify your highest-performing keywords and their associated landing pages. If they are brand related, you have a lower risk during migration as you will likely to continue to rank. Non-branded keywords like “shoes”or “red dresses” are higher risk and should be given more attention.

Depending on your perceived risk during migration, consider consulting with an SEO partner for advice on how to mitigate any severe drop in organic traffic after the initial migration. 

Drive traffic via advertising and marketing

One tactic that can mitigate any dip is bolstering organic traffic with new visitors sourced through paid advertising, social, PPC and other marketing efforts.

Examples include:

  • Leverage new social campaigns to boost new traffic with the launch of your store over a period of one to three months.
  • Email marketing announcements to re-engage past customers to come back and purchase from your new store with a discount or added incentive.
  • Targeted PPC campaigns for high converting organic search phrases to improve visibility for buyers with purchase intent in search results.

Re-upload your sitemap

Once your site is live, let search engines know about the changes to your site so they can begin the process of re-indexing by uploading your new sitemap. 

Manage duplicate content

Watching for duplicate content is important, especially if you are planning on splitting content across different platforms. For example, if you decide to keep a third party blog in operation while migrating content to Shopify, you may run into duplicate content.

Another aspect of this is to ensure you’re not duplicating products with the same content on the store. This can impact SEO performance, so it’s recommended that you write unique content for each product listing. If you have multiple products with duplicate content you can rearrange the content in a unique format.

Canonical URLs ensure that search engines don’t penalize a website when different URLs point to the same content or webpage. A canonical URL refers to an HTML link element, with the attribute of rel="canonical" (also known as a canonical tag), found in the <head> element of your theme. It specifies the preferred URL to be indexed to search engines. Learn more about why canonical URLs are important and how to implement them.

You should also password-protect or take down your old store to ensure it doesn’t continue to be indexed by search engines and cause duplicate content issues.

Monitor 404s and dead-ends

Post launch, it’s a good idea to monitor when a user is reaching a 404 page. It can mean that a page was missed in your initial redirect setup—which is bad for users and your search rankings. 

You can do this directly in Google Search Console under the “Coverage” section or by using a 404 monitoring app:

Both applications offer 404 monitoring, and the ability to create redirects via built-in tools. That said, it’s best practice to use the native redirects tool in Shopify to create your 301 redirects.

Popular SEO tools

To help you plan and execute the SEO strategies and minimize the impact of replatforming on your organic traffic, you can use some of the following tools, apps, and services.


Shopify apps

  • Traffic Control makes it easy to create redirect on your Shopify store
  • Transportr creates redirects and monitors 404 errors after launch
  • Plug-in SEO is an all-in-one app for managing SEO optimization
  • Smart SEO helps automate SEO tasks 
  • SEO Manager makes it easier to implement SEO measures
  • SEO Doctor helps you optimize your images for SEO

Keyword research tools

  • SEMRush helps with SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing
  • Ubersuggest is a keyword discovery tool to find profitable SEO keywords 
  • Ahrefs is a SEO toolset to optimize your website and research keywords 
  • MOZ offers keyword research and backlink analysis tools

Link monitoring tools


Further reading


Hire a Partner

The Shopify Plus partner directory has verified experts to assist with SEO migration and strategy. 

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