Getting started with SEO during a site migration
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. A short on-ramp to SEO during a site migration for teams who have not touched it before.
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
Why this earns attention
Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Crawl the old site and keep the list
- Change one thing and measure it
Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
How to tell if yours is fine
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.