Website migration SEO services

Who this page is for

If you are replatforming, changing domain, restructuring URLs or consolidating two sites, and organic search sends traffic that matters to your business, this is the engagement built for that. Website migration SEO services exist because a migration compresses a year of technical risk into a single release, and the release date is usually set by people who are not thinking about crawl budget.

This is not a growth engagement. It has one measurable objective: the traffic you have before the migration is still there after it.

Why migrations lose traffic even when the plan looked fine

Migrations rarely fail on strategy. They fail on completeness. A redirect map that covers 94% of URLs sounds close to done, and in practice it means the remaining 6% — usually the deep, old, link-heavy pages nobody remembers — return 404s or land on a homepage catch-all.

The pattern repeats across almost every recovery project:

• The URLs that carry the most external links are rarely the URLs with the most traffic, so a map built from a traffic export alone misses them.
• Redirect rules written as patterns look complete until you test individual URLs against them, at which point the exceptions appear.
• Staging QA gets compressed when the build runs late, and parity checking is the first thing dropped because nothing is visibly broken.
• Nobody owns the decision about pages that have no equivalent on the new site, so the decision defaults to a catch-all at the last minute.

Each of these is preventable with a document and a deadline. That is most of what this engagement is.

What we take responsibility for

We own the specification and the verification. Your team owns implementation and the release itself.

That split matters. Handing implementation to an outside party mid-migration adds a handover cost and a communication path exactly when neither can be afforded. Your engineers already know the codebase, the deploy pipeline and the edge configuration. What they usually do not have is someone whose entire job is to know which of the ten thousand URLs actually matter and why.

The technical scope page sets out the crawl, redirect, log and rendering work in more depth. If you want to see the sequencing before talking to anyone, the phase-gated checklist is published in full.

The measurement problem nobody warns you about

Here is the part most migration plans get wrong, and it costs more arguments than it should.

After launch, the instinct is to compare this week’s traffic to last week’s. That comparison is close to meaningless. Google recrawls a site over days to weeks depending on its size and crawl frequency, so the first two weeks of post-launch data mix recrawled pages with pages Google has not looked at yet. Week-over-week movement in that window tells you almost nothing about whether the migration worked.

What does work is a matched cohort comparison: take the specific set of URLs that existed before, follow each to its new destination, and compare performance for that same set of pages before and after. If a URL 301s from A to B, its performance is the performance of B, not the absence of A.

Do that and the picture resolves quickly. Losses concentrate in identifiable cohorts — a template, a section, a set of pages that lost internal links — rather than appearing as a vague site-wide decline nobody can act on.

Working alongside an existing agency

Roughly half of these engagements run alongside an incumbent SEO agency, and the split that works is a clean one. They keep content, links and ongoing strategy. We take migration mechanics until 90 days after launch, then hand back.

What does not work is two parties both making technical recommendations to the same engineering team during the same sprint. Contradictory instructions land on one developer, that developer picks one, and nobody finds out which until something breaks. If your agency already has a named owner for the redirect map and a documented parity process, you may not need this at all — and we will tell you that rather than sell around it.