SEO Migration Services That Protect Every Ranking You've Earned
A website migration done wrong can wipe out years of SEO work overnight. We've seen businesses lose 50–80% of their organic traffic from poorly handled migrations. Our SEO migration process ensures every ranking, every redirect, and every link is preserved.
What Is an SEO Migration?
An SEO migration is the process of preserving your search engine rankings and organic traffic during a major website change. This includes platform migrations (e.g., moving to WordPress), website redesigns, domain name changes, URL restructures, HTTPS upgrades, and site mergers. Without proper SEO migration planning, search engines treat changes as new pages rather than updated versions of existing ones — causing rankings to drop, traffic to plummet, and revenue to fall.
When You Need SEO Migration Services
- Platform change — moving from Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, or a custom CMS to WordPress (or between any platforms)
- Website redesign — new design with changed URLs, navigation, or content structure
- Domain change — moving to a new domain name or consolidating multiple domains
- URL restructure — changing your URL hierarchy or slug formats
- HTTPS migration — moving from HTTP to HTTPS (if not already done)
- Site merger — combining multiple websites into one
- Subdomain changes — moving content between subdomains and subfolders
Our SEO Migration Process
Pre-Migration (4–6 Weeks Before Launch)
1. Full site crawl and benchmark. We crawl your entire existing site, document every URL, and benchmark current rankings, traffic, and conversions for every page.
2. URL mapping and redirect plan. We create a comprehensive 1:1 redirect map from every old URL to its new equivalent. No page left unmapped. No blanket redirects to the homepage.
3. Content audit. We identify your highest-value pages (by traffic, rankings, and backlinks) and ensure they're prioritised in the migration plan.
4. Backlink inventory. We document every external link pointing to your site and ensure redirect chains preserve link equity.
5. Technical specification. We create a detailed technical brief for your development team covering redirects, canonical tags, schema markup, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and server configuration.
Migration Execution
6. Staging site review. We review the new site in staging before it goes live — checking URL structure, internal links, canonical tags, meta data, schema, and page speed.
7. Launch day monitoring. We monitor the migration in real-time, checking redirects fire correctly, Google Search Console picks up the changes, and no critical pages return 404 errors.
Post-Migration (8–12 Weeks After Launch)
8. Redirect verification. We test every redirect to ensure it's working correctly with proper 301 status codes (not 302s or redirect chains).
9. Indexation monitoring. We monitor Google Search Console for crawl errors, indexation issues, and coverage reports until the new site is fully indexed.
10. Traffic and ranking monitoring. We track organic traffic and keyword rankings weekly, comparing against pre-migration benchmarks to catch and fix any drops quickly.
11. Backlink recovery. We identify any broken inbound links and contact webmasters to update them where possible.
What Can Go Wrong Without SEO Migration Planning
These are real scenarios we've seen from migrations done without SEO involvement:
- Blanket homepage redirects — every old URL redirected to the new homepage, destroying page-specific rankings
- Missing redirects — old URLs returning 404 errors, causing immediate ranking drops
- Redirect chains — old URL → intermediate URL → final URL, diluting link equity
- Content removal — pages that ranked well removed from the new site without redirects
- URL changes without mapping — new URL structure with no redirects from old URLs
- Canonical tag errors — new pages canonicalising to the wrong URL
- Noindex tags left on — staging noindex directives carried into production
Every one of these costs traffic, rankings, and revenue. All are preventable with proper planning.
Protect Your Rankings During Your Next Migration
Whether you're redesigning, replatforming, or restructuring — talk to us before you start. The cost of SEO migration planning is a fraction of the revenue you'll lose without it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much traffic loss is normal during a migration?
A well-planned SEO migration typically sees a 10–20% traffic dip in the first 2–4 weeks as Google recrawls and reindexes the new site. Traffic should recover to pre-migration levels within 4–8 weeks, often exceeding them if the new site is technically superior. A poorly planned migration can result in 50–80% traffic loss that takes 6–12 months to recover — if it recovers at all.
How much does an SEO migration cost?
SEO migration services typically range from $5,000 to $15,000 depending on site size, complexity, and the type of migration. Sites with more than 1,000 pages, multiple domains, or complex URL structures sit at the higher end. This is a one-off project cost, not a monthly retainer — though we recommend ongoing SEO support after migration to maximise recovery. View our pricing page.
Should I involve an SEO agency before or after my migration?
Before — ideally 4–8 weeks before launch. The most critical SEO migration work (URL mapping, redirect planning, content auditing) happens before the new site goes live. Engaging an SEO agency after a migration has gone wrong is recovery work, which takes longer and costs more. Prevention is always cheaper than cure.
Can I change my URL structure during a migration?
Yes, but only with proper redirect mapping. Every old URL must redirect to its new equivalent with a 301 redirect. Changing URL structures without redirects is the single most common cause of post-migration traffic loss.