Signs it is time to revisit SEO during a site migration
The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. A few signals that SEO during a site migration is due some attention.
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.
The signals
- Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
- The answer depends on who you ask
- Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects
- Crawl the old site and keep the list
Where to start
Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
The short version
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. 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
- Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects — 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.