How to Keep Your SEO Rankings When Moving to Carrot

Carrot is known for the edge it can give you with your SEO rankings. Our platform is performance optimized to load fast, look good on all devices, and convert your website visitors to leads. Our Content Tools make it easy to create pages that will bring you organic search traffic, and our SEO Tools help you to track and improve your rankings. Countless real estate professionals and small business owners have moved over from other platforms to Carrot and increased their rankings even more.

But, what if you’ve been working hard on your SEO for your non-Carrot site and you want to make sure you retain (and improve) your SEO rankings when you transition your website over to Carrot?

This page will walk you through how to move your site over to Carrot and the steps you should take to ensure the highest chance of not negatively impacting your rankings in the process.

What happens with your rankings when you move your website?

Anytime there is a major change to a website that is ranking well in Google there tends to be a short-term impact while Google re-evaluates the website and makes a new determination on where it thinks the website should rank for certain keywords.

If the transition is done right (which we’ll walk through below), we usually see little short-term impact (a slight change for a few weeks or perhaps even a month or two) and a positive impact long-term.

When is the best time to move my site?

No matter how well you follow our transition process you should be prepared to see short-term volatility in your rankings (usually dropping a handful of spots and bouncing around for several weeks until it resettles near where it was before).

If possible, you may want to consider migrating your website during a typically slow period for your business. If your business has times of year when you usually generate more traffic or leads, don’t move your site during the busy season.

The steps to take to ensure a great transition

It’s important you follow these steps closely to give yourself the best chance to keep and improve your rankings as you transition to Carrot. In basic terms, we’re going to replicate the on-page SEO (content, title tags/descriptions, URL slugs, etc.) of your currently ranking pages to your Carrot site.

What about my backlinks? Will they transition too?

Great question! There are 2 parts of SEO that impact your Google rankings:

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Step 1: Research / Prep Phase

Create a simple spreadsheet or document for storing your basic research/info including a list of your current top 10 Google rankings and the pages currently ranking.

ℹ️ You can use useful tools like Google Search Console or Ubersuggest to discover these OR you can use an effective manual process too, outlined below.

For the manual process, simply go through each page of your site and read the SEO page title tag for the page. Then go to Google and type in the title tag and see where it ranks.

Ex: You have a page with a page title of “Sell My House Fast Knoxville Tennessee’s – ABC House Buyers”. Go to Google and search for the primary keyword that page is trying to rank for. In this case, it’s “sell my house fast Knoxville”. Type it slowly to see what comes up for the Google suggestions and tap the one most similar to your title tag. See if you rank on page 1 or page 2. Click some of the similar related searches Google gives you and see if your site shows up on page 1 or page 2. Do this for each of the main keywords.

NOTE: This is manual. If you have more than 20 pages you believe are ranking well you may want to use a tool like the ones mentioned above.

Go through each page ranking in the top 10 and make sure you document this info in your spreadsheet for each keyword you’re ranking for:

• The keyword
• The current Google ranking
• The URL ranking for that keyword
• The page title tag and meta description for each page

Review each of those ranking pages to determine if the content on those pages is still relevant and if it’s content you want to move over to your Carrot site.

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Step 2: Starting Your Carrot Site – The Build-Out Phase

Look at your list of high ranking pages (top 10) you found in your research that you want to retain the rankings for, and build out those pages on your Carrot site.

This process is all about duplicating any important ranking pages you want to retain rankings to ensure the content, site title, and meta description look the same (or improved) to Google.

You should proceed in the following order:

• Copy and paste the content from your old site onto a page on your Carrot site and make sure to use the same H1, H2, H3, H4 headings.
• Ensure the URL slug is exactly the same. If there will be ANY changes to the URL, you’ll need to set up 301 redirects which are like mail forwarding, but for your website’s pages. (This is very important. If the URL changes without proper 301 redirects, your ranking will go away.)
• Ensure the page title tag and meta description are exactly the same if it’s a top 3 ranking page. If it’s Position 4-10 we suggest also using the exact same page title tag; however, there may be an opportunity to improve the title tag to increase rankings further.
• Review all pages, URLs, and the site structure to double-check everything is set
• Look through each page to double-check the URL slugs, and page titles/descriptions are the same. And review the content to ensure the content on your high ranking pages is the same. Long-term, you can continue to refine the content on those pages to increase rankings further. But right now isn’t the time for large content changes.
• Connect your domain name to your new Carrot site
• You’re all set! Be sure to track your rankings for those pages you want to maintain rankings for in your Carrot Keyword Rank Tracking Tool so you can see any changes.

After you make the switch, you’ll likely see some volatility in your rankings for several weeks. For extremely competitive phrases, you may even see volatility for 4-12 weeks. However, if the right steps were taken you should see your rankings re-solidify where they were OR improve and stabilize. Long-term you’ll see a ranking improvement from being on the Carrot platform from our high performing tech stack.

Don’t get worried if you see rankings on a weekly basis change a lot. It’ll stabilize. Often times, if done correctly, you’ll see no change at all.

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Conclusion

At Carrot, we focus on performance above all else. More top real estate investors and small business owners have moved their sites over to Carrot and seen ranking increases than any other platform in the industry.

We focus on having the best tech stack (page speed, site structure, security, automatic free SSL, etc.) so you can focus on being the best entrepreneur possible – while we focus on the tech.

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Need it done for you?

If you don’t want to do the work yourself, we have a service that can do this for you called our Concierge Setup. In this service, we move your site over so it retains or improves your current rankings AND we also dial in the branding, site design, credibility, etc. to further help your site stand out and convert visitors into leads at an even higher rate.

We take all of the work off of your hands for you. Simply reach out to ask about our Concierge Setup service.

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Learn more:

• Learn the basics of SEO
• Join Carrot’s Official Evergreen Marketing Community on Facebook