SEO migration.A new site without the traffic drop.
Most sites lose between a third and a half of their organic traffic after a redesign, and take months to recover. Not because the new site is worse, but because nobody mapped the URLs.
What you get
What happens before, during and after.
Ninety percent of a migration is done before launch. After launch you are only putting out fires, and there need not have been any.
Before launch
A snapshot of where you stand and a URL map. Without these you cannot even tell afterwards what was lost.
- An inventory of every existing URL and how it performs
- An old URL -> new URL map, one to one
- A list of the pages that bring traffic and links
- A snapshot of rankings and traffic before the move
- A check on the new structure before it is frozen
On launch day
The order of the steps matters. The wrong order can wipe out a week of indexing.
- Putting the 301 redirects in place
- Checking robots.txt and noindex tags
- A new sitemap submitted to Search Console
- Checking the canonical tags
- A fast check on the pages that matter most
The first 30 days
This is where you catch the mistakes that were invisible before launch.
- Daily error monitoring in Search Console
- Watching the new URLs get indexed
- Traffic per page compared with the old site
- Fixing the redirects that are missing
- A report on where things stand after 30 days
Special cases
A domain change, a site merge and a platform move each have their own traps.
- A change of domain and branding
- Merging two sites into one
- Moving to a different platform
- Adding or removing language versions
- Moving from http to https
How it runs
How a migration runs.
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Week 1
Inventory and measurement
Every existing URL, its traffic, its rankings and its links. This is the only moment when any of that can still be measured.
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Week 2
The URL map
Every old URL gets a new one. Anything with no successor gets a decision, not silence.
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Launch day
The switch
Redirects, sitemap, an indexing check. Never launch on a Friday afternoon.
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30 days after
Monitoring and fixes
A daily check in the first week, then weekly. A report comparing before and after.
Who this is for
Who it works for, and who it does not.
It makes sense if:
- You are building a new site or redesigning the one you have
- You are changing domain, platform or URL structure
- You are merging two sites or dropping a language version
- You have already migrated, lost traffic, and need it salvaged
It does not make sense if:
- Your site has no organic traffic to lose
- Only the look is changing - the URLs and the content stay the same
If you have already migrated and dropped, it is still worth getting in touch. Most of it usually comes back, but every month you wait takes something off that.
Frequently asked questions