SEO & Organic Growth
Site Migration
We plan, run, and monitor your domain, platform, or URL change to protect organic visibility. No one can remove all the risk, but you go in knowing where it sits.
The problem
The new site is about to launch and no one can tell you what will happen to organic traffic.
Migrations usually start life as design or development projects, and SEO gets a call in the final weeks. By then, URL structure and content scope are frozen. Old pages left out of scope take their links and rankings with them.
A redirect list alone won't cover you either. Dropped content, copy moved behind JavaScript, and broken structured data can all do damage, and one noindex tag carried over from staging can become a crisis. Google itself says to expect temporary fluctuation. The realistic goal is to keep it measurable and short.
You may recognize this
- A redesign is on the calendar and no URL inventory exists.
- Some page types have been dropped from the new site.
- A merger or rebrand means the domain will change.
How we work
Baseline and URL inventory
We crawl the full old site and combine that with Search Console, GA4, backlink, and sitemap data. A crawl alone misses orphan pages that earned traffic in the past.
Redirect mapping
Every old URL gets its closest new match. We avoid chains, don't send unrelated pages to the homepage in bulk, and hand developers the map in a testable format.
Staging QA
We crawl the password-protected staging site and compare titles, canonicals, structured data, and internal links against the old site. Checking robots.txt and noindex before launch is its own step.
Launch runbook and monitoring
We write go/no-go criteria and a rollback plan, and domain moves use the Change of Address tool. Logs and 404s get daily checks in the first weeks. Redirects stay live for at least a year, as Google recommends.
What we deliver
- URL inventory and scope decision
- Tested redirect map
- Staging QA report
- Launch runbook and rollback plan
- Post-launch monitoring reports
How we measure
- Redirect coverage of valuable URLs, which confirms pages with traffic or links made the move.
- Clicks by page group against baseline, which show quickly where losses are.
- Continuity of conversion tracking, which confirms you can still see business outcomes.
A university moves to a new CMS
Illustrative scenario: a private university wants to move its sprawling site to a new CMS. The inventory finds old PDFs and program pages on faculty subdomains that still earn traffic. They're added to scope, redirects are validated department by department, and launch moves outside the enrollment period.
Common questions
Will we lose traffic?
Temporary fluctuation is normal even in a well-run migration, and no one can promise zero loss. Preparation is the main factor in how large the risk is and how long recovery takes.
When should SEO join the project?
Before scope and information architecture decisions are made. Once design and URL structure are locked, the options shrink and the fixes get expensive.
Should we change the domain and redesign at the same time?
Separate them if you can, since a combined launch makes it hard to tell what caused a drop. If the business needs both at once, we increase testing and monitoring.
Before we work together, let's think together.
Requests are answered by the founder.