SEO Migration Workplan

Crucial: This Excel file will be our 'Source of Truth' in Phase 5. Ensure you crawl as Googlebot Smartphone and disable JavaScript rendering if the site loads quickly without it, to see the raw code.

Why this matters: a "zero authority loss" plan that never looks at the external link profile has the biggest gap right where it counts. Any URL with backlinks gets top priority in the Phase 3 redirection matrix — losing one of these costs more than losing ten orphan pages.

Use it for: risk-weighting the Phase 3 redirect QA and the Phase 2 meta/schema pass — the pages on this list get checked first and checked twice.

Action: Open the source code of the homepage, search for "application/ld+json" class="yoast-schema-graph" and save that code block intact in a text file.

Why the change: "URL must be identical" only holds for a true mirror migration. Here the structure intentionally changed to support the new positioning — so the safety net is a complete, deliberate URL-by-URL map (feeding Phase 3), not an identical-routes rule.

Why this matters: two pages competing for the same head term split ranking signals instead of stacking them. Set the target keyword per page once, here, so the meta/H1 work above doesn't accidentally create the cannibalization it's meant to prevent.

Goal: the site should feel instant and effortless to read. Faster pages and clearer reading directly improve engagement signals (lower bounce, longer dwell time) that feed back into rankings.

Selection criteria: excellent on-screen legibility at body sizes, few weights needed (lighter payload), good language coverage, and clean rendering on both desktop and mobile.

Implementation: self-host or preload the font with font-display: swap, subset to the characters actually used, and limit weights — this avoids layout shift (CLS) and render delay (LCP), which are ranking factors; the font choice itself is not.

Why this matters: a from-scratch rebuild is the easiest way to silently drop the analytics tag — losing data continuity on an SEO project is exactly the kind of gap a client notices first.

Implementation: Depending on where the HTML is hosted, this is done via .htaccess (Apache), nginx.conf (Nginx), or a _redirects / vercel.json file for modern platforms.

At launch: make sure the .vercel.app subdomain is taken down or redirected to the production domain — left live, it's a permanent duplicate-content competitor to the real site.

Optional: temporarily resubmit the old sitemap.xml in Search Console alongside the new one right after launch — it speeds up how fast Google discovers the 301s instead of waiting for organic recrawl.

Note: Do not include URLs in the sitemap that will be redirected (301) or have Canonical tags pointing elsewhere. Only clean Status 200 URLs.

Why this matters: the site toggles DE | EN. Without hreflang, the two language versions compete with each other and Google can serve the wrong one to Zürich's German-speaking locals or English-speaking expats.

Zero Error Tolerance: If you see a 404 or 500 HTTP error on this list, you must pause, go to the redirection rules (Phase 3), and fix it immediately before Googlebot reads it.

Pass criteria: Lighthouse Performance and SEO scores in the green (90+) on mobile, LCP < 2.5s, CLS < 0.1. Any template below target gets optimized and re-tested before sign-off.