Before you invest in SEO during a site migration

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Before you spend anything on SEO during a site migration, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

What to watch for

Crawl the old site and keep the list. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The short version

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about SEO during a site migration before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Crawl the old site and keep the list — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.