Five mistakes teams make with SEO during a site migration
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit SEO during a site migration.
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.
Where it usually goes wrong
- Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
- Assuming someone else already owns it
- Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects
- Crawl the old site and keep the list
- Never checking whether the fix actually worked
Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
What to do next
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.