SEO during a site migration: what to get right first

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you only fix one thing about SEO during a site migration this quarter, make it the first item below.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Start here

Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Then this

Crawl the old site and keep the list. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Eventually

Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

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
• 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.