SEO during a site migration: the questions we get asked most

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The questions about SEO during a site migration that come up most often on our calls.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Do we need to care about this?

Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How do we know it is working?

Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.