SEO during a site migration for small teams

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Most advice about SEO during a site migration assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to keep

Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

How to approach it

Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What this looks like day to day

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
• 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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.