Why SEO during a site migration matters more than it looks

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. SEO during a site migration is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Why this earns attention

Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Crawl the old site and keep the list. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The mistakes we see most

Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.