SEO during a site migration, explained without the jargon
Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Here is SEO during a site migration without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
The short version
Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
Why people complicate it
Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.
Crawl the old site and keep the list. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
Where to go from here
Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
The short version
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
- 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
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.