seo migration agency
Choosing an SEO migration agency
What to compare, what the engagement models actually cost you in flexibility, and the six questions that tell you within one call whether a provider has run migrations before or has only read about them.
- Definition
- An SEO migration agency — An SEO migration agency is a firm that takes responsibility for protecting organic search performance across a website move, usually providing both specification and implementation capacity. The distinguishing feature is scope of resourcing rather than method: an agency can staff parallel workstreams, where an individual consultant cannot.
What this page is
This is a buying guide, not a pitch. If you are comparing providers for a migration, the useful thing is a way to tell them apart — so most of this page is criteria you can apply to anyone, including us.
The honest framing: an SEO migration agency and an individual consultant do broadly the same work. The difference is resourcing, not method. Agencies staff parallel workstreams and cover absence; consultants give you direct access to the person doing the work. Which one fits depends on your engineering capacity and your timeline, not on which is better.
Where migration proposals hide their gaps
Three patterns come up repeatedly in proposals that later disappoint.
Scope written in hours rather than artifacts. “40 hours of technical SEO support” is not comparable to anything. Ask for the list of documents you will receive. A provider confident in their process will give you one; a provider selling capacity will resist, because artifacts create accountability.
Success defined as “monitoring”. Monitoring is watching. Migration coverage is producing the redirect map before launch and holding the go/no-go gate. A proposal heavy on dashboards and light on pre-launch deliverables is describing observation, not prevention.
No stated position on delaying launch. This is the sharpest test in the list. Migrations go wrong when a launch date meets an incomplete redirect map and nobody is willing to say so. Ask what would make them recommend a delay. The specificity of the answer tells you whether they have been in that room.
The engagement models, honestly compared
Full-service means the provider both specifies and implements. It suits large sites on compressed timelines where internal engineering is fully committed to the build. It costs more and it adds a coordination layer between the person who understood the scope and the person doing the work.
Specification-and-QA means the provider produces the maps, diffs and runbook, and your team implements. It is cheaper, it keeps implementation with the people who know the codebase, and it requires your engineers to have genuine capacity during the migration window. This is the shape most of our engagements take, and it is the one described on the core service page.
Second-opinion review is a fixed-scope read on someone else’s plan. It is the right call when a plan already exists and you want to know whether it holds up before committing the launch date. That is essentially what the migration audit is.
What we do and do not offer
We work as a small practice, not a large agency. That means direct access to the person doing the work and no account-management layer, and it also means a real capacity ceiling — we cannot staff four parallel workstreams on a compressed timeline, and we will say so rather than take the work and subcontract it.
If that is the shape you need, an agency is the right answer and we would rather tell you that early. If what you need is specification, QA and someone accountable for the technical gates while your team implements, that is exactly the engagement described on this site. The consultant-led framing covers what that looks like week to week.
Before you brief anyone
Run the diagnostic on the homepage first. It takes an afternoon and produces a number: how many of your traffic-carrying URLs have no named destination on the new site.
Walking into a provider conversation with that number changes it completely. Instead of a generic scoping discussion, you get a specific one about a known gap — and you will be able to tell immediately which providers engage with the number and which talk around it.
| Model | What you get | Where it strains | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency | Parallel workstreams, implementation capacity, holiday cover, a named account contact | The person who scoped it is often not the person doing it; layers add latency | Large site, tight timeline, limited internal engineering capacity |
| Consultant | Direct access to the person doing the work; decisions made in one conversation | One person is a single point of failure and a hard capacity ceiling | You have engineers who can ship and need specification and accountability |
| In-house | Full context on the business, the codebase and the politics | Migrations are infrequent, so the experience rarely exists internally | You migrate often enough that the knowledge stays current |
| Existing SEO agency | Continuity, and they already know the site | Migration work is a different discipline from growth work; assume nothing | They can name a redirect-map owner and describe their parity process |
When an agency is the right shape
- The migration is large enough to need more than one person working in parallel.
- You need implementation capacity, not only specification and review.
- The timeline is fixed and compressed, so throughput matters more than cost.
- Internal engineering is fully committed to the build itself.
When it is the wrong shape
- Your engineers can implement, and what is missing is the specification and QA.
- The site is small enough that one experienced person covers it comfortably.
- You already have an agency whose migration process you can describe in detail.
- You mainly want accountability from one named person rather than a team.
Six questions to ask before you sign
Ask these on the first call. The answers separate providers who have run migrations from providers who have read about them, and none of them require you to be technical.
- 01
Who produces the redirect map, and in what format?
The answer should be a specific person or role and a row-per-URL spreadsheet. "It is handled as part of the process" means nobody owns it.
- 02
What does your parity check compare, field by field?
You want to hear titles, canonicals, meta robots, internal link counts and structured data. A provider who says "we crawl both sites" has not described a check.
- 03
What is your hop-count budget for redirects?
The right answer is one hop, two as a temporary exception. If the number has never been considered, chains will ship.
- 04
How will you measure success after launch?
Listen for a matched cohort comparison against a frozen pre-migration benchmark. Week-over-week traffic comparison is not a measurement method.
- 05
Who is on the call on launch day, and for how long?
Migration problems surface in the first hours. A provider whose involvement ends at sign-off is selling a document, not coverage.
- 06
What would make you tell us to delay the launch?
Every experienced provider has a threshold. One who has never considered delaying has either never seen a migration go wrong or was not accountable when it did.
Deliverables
What this engagement hands over
-
Discovery
Comparable scope document
A written scope you can put side by side with another provider’s, listing artifacts and gates rather than hours. Scopes that cannot be compared are usually written that way on purpose.
-
Discovery
Named owner matrix
Who is accountable for each artifact across your team, your engineers and us, so nothing sits in the gap between two organizations.
-
Staging QA
Go/no-go criteria
The specific conditions that have to be true before launch proceeds, agreed in advance rather than negotiated under deadline pressure.
Questions people ask before starting
What should an SEO migration agency deliver?
At minimum: a pre-migration benchmark, a redirect map with one row per URL, a crawl parity diff between staging and production, a launch-day runbook, and recovery tracking against the benchmark. If a proposal does not name those artifacts, ask what you are buying instead.
How much do migration SEO engagements cost?
Enough that it should be scoped rather than quoted from a rate card. The variables are URL count, how many taxonomies have to be reconciled, whether log access exists, and how much time remains before launch. Our engagement shape and minimum useful scope are written on the pricing page.
Should we use our existing SEO agency for the migration?
Possibly. Ask them who owns the redirect map and what their parity process compares. Clear answers with named owners mean you are covered. "We will review the site after launch" is a monitoring arrangement, not migration coverage, and the difference matters.
Can two providers work on the same migration?
Yes, with a clean split. One party takes migration mechanics, the other keeps content and ongoing strategy. What fails is two parties making technical recommendations to the same engineers in the same sprint, because contradictory instructions get resolved silently by whoever ships.
How long before launch should we appoint someone?
Six to ten weeks gives room to influence the URL structure, which is where the largest decisions are. Later than that and the work becomes protection rather than shaping. Three weeks out is still worth doing, with a narrower and more honest scope.
What size of company do you work with?
Companies where organic search is a material channel and the URL inventory is large enough that redirect mapping cannot be done by hand. That covers a wide range of sizes. Below that threshold, the honest answer is usually that your team can handle it with a checklist.
Start with the launch date
Tell us what is changing and when. We will tell you what is realistic in the time available before anyone discusses scope.
- Reply
- Typically within one business day.
- Hours
- Monday to Friday, 9am–6pm US Eastern.
- First call
- Scoping, not a pitch. No deck.