What to ask your agency about SEO during a site migration
It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on SEO during a site migration, these questions are worth asking early.
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
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. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
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. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
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
- 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.