A practical checklist for SEO during a site migration
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Run through this the next time SEO during a site migration comes up.
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
The checklist
- Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects
- Crawl the old site and keep the list
- Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking
- Someone is named as the owner
- There is a date to review it again
Why this earns attention
Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
What this looks like day to day
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. 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
- Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.