A short guide to SEO during a site migration

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Everything we would tell a client about SEO during a site migration in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Why this earns attention

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. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

How to approach it

Crawl the old site and keep the list. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What to watch for

Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

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
• 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 want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.