Move your site without losing your search traffic
Migrations are where sites lose years of SEO equity overnight. We plan the redirects, test staging, watch launch day and monitor recovery so your rankings, traffic and AI citations make the move with you.
Why it matters
Every migration changes something search engines rely on: URLs, templates, internal links, rendering or the domain itself. Done carelessly, it can cut organic traffic sharply and take months to recover. Done well, it can be a chance to fix long-standing technical debt.
We join early, benchmark what you have, map every URL that matters to its new home, crawl staging before launch, and monitor indexing and traffic afterward until performance has settled.
What we look at
Before launch
- Benchmark of rankings, traffic and top URLs
- URL-to-URL redirect mapping
- Staging crawl against the live site
- Template, metadata and schema parity checks
Launch & after
- Launch-day redirect and indexation checks
- robots.txt, sitemap and Search Console updates
- Daily, then weekly monitoring
- Recovery report and fixes for anything missed
What you receive
Redirect map
Every legacy URL with traffic or links mapped to its new destination, with status codes.
Launch checklist
Pre-launch, launch-day and post-launch checks with owners.
Recovery report
Traffic, rankings and indexation compared with the benchmark, plus fixes for any gaps.
How it runs
Benchmark
Record traffic, rankings and top pages before anything changes.
Map
Build and review the redirect map.
Test
Crawl staging and compare it against the live site.
Launch
Verify redirects, sitemaps and indexing on launch day.
Monitor
Track recovery and fix anything that slipped.
This is for you when…
- You are replatforming, redesigning or going headless
- You are changing domains or merging sites
- You are restructuring URLs or consolidating content
- A recent migration lost traffic and you need to recover it
Look elsewhere when…
- You need the migration itself built (we work alongside your developers)
- Launch is days away and nothing can change (we can still help with damage control)
Site Migration SEO questions
When should SEO get involved in a migration?
As early as possible, ideally two to three months before launch while URLs and templates can still change. Involving SEO after launch usually means fixing problems instead of preventing them.
Will we lose traffic after migrating?
Some short-term movement is normal while search engines recrawl the new URLs. With a complete redirect map and parity between old and new templates, most sites recover within weeks. Gaps in redirects or missing content are what cause lasting losses.
What about redirect chains from past migrations?
We flatten them. Every legacy URL should redirect once, directly to its final destination, with a 301 status code.
Do migrations affect AI citations?
Yes. Assistants and AI Overviews cite specific URLs. If those URLs break or redirect poorly, citations can drop. We include your most-cited pages in the redirect map and monitoring.