The real cost of ignoring SEO during a site migration

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Nobody bills you for neglecting SEO during a site migration. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

Crawl the old site and keep the list. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Making it stick

Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

What this looks like day to day

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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.