Technical SEO
Site Migration SEO Without Losing Rankings
Change platform, design or domain without losing organic traffic.
Migrations are the single most common cause of catastrophic traffic loss, and almost every case is preventable. The damage is usually done by decisions taken weeks before launch, not on launch night, which is why being involved early matters far more than being available on the day.
You probably need this if
- You are replatforming, redesigning or changing domain
- A previous migration lost traffic that never came back
- URL structure is changing and no redirect map exists
- Nobody has benchmarked current rankings before the change
What you get
- Pre-migration benchmark of rankings, traffic and indexed URLs
- Complete URL-to-URL redirect map, reviewed rather than pattern-generated
- Content and metadata parity checks between old and new
- Staging environment audit before launch, including robots and canonicals
- Launch-day checklist and intensive post-launch monitoring
How we approach it
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Benchmark first
Record current rankings, traffic and the full indexed URL inventory, because without a baseline you cannot prove what was lost or recovered.
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Map every URL
Build a one-to-one redirect map and review it manually, since pattern-based rules reliably miss the edge cases that carry the most links.
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Audit staging
Check the new build before launch, particularly that staging robots directives do not ship to production, which is a depressingly common outage cause.
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Monitor intensively
Watch crawl, index and rankings daily for the first fortnight so problems are caught while they are still cheap to fix.
Site Migration SEO: common questions
How much traffic will I lose in a migration?
A well-planned migration should see a temporary dip of ten to twenty percent recovering within four to eight weeks. Losses beyond that, or that fail to recover, indicate a fault rather than a normal settling period.
Do I need redirects if URLs are not changing?
If URLs genuinely stay identical, no. But verify carefully, because trailing slashes, case sensitivity, protocol and parameter handling often change during a replatform even when the paths appear unchanged.
How long should redirects stay in place?
At minimum one year, and preferably permanently. Google needs repeated crawls to transfer signals fully, and external links to old URLs may persist for years. Removing redirects early discards the authority you paid to preserve.
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Find out what is actually holding you back
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