When SEO during a site migration is worth the effort

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. SEO during a site migration is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

When it is worth it

Most traffic drops after a relaunch come from missed redirects. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How to decide

Expect a dip and measure against it rather than panicking. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

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
• Crawl the old site and keep the list — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.