SEO migration services that protect the rankings you already earned
Most traffic lost in a migration was avoidable. Our SEO migration services plan the URL mapping, redirects, and technical parity before launch, then watch the data closely afterwards so problems get caught in days rather than quarters.
Planning a replatform, redesign, or domain change? Talk to us before you launch, not after.
What are SEO migration services?
SEO migration services are the planning and technical work that preserve your search visibility when your site changes substantially: a new platform, a new design, a new domain, a new URL structure, or a move to HTTPS. The core of it is making sure every URL that had value still resolves, still points somewhere relevant, and still carries the authority it earned.
Here is the uncomfortable part. A migration is one of the few SEO events that can undo years of work in a single afternoon. Rankings that took eighteen months to build can disappear over a weekend because a redirect map was never written, or because someone shipped the new site with the staging robots.txt still blocking crawlers.
The good news is that almost all of it is preventable with planning. Migrations that go badly are nearly always migrations nobody planned for.
You need a migration plan if you are doing any of these
Changing platform
Moving between WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, or a custom build. URL structures rarely match, and the defaults almost never preserve your existing paths.
Redesigning your site
Even on the same platform, a redesign usually changes URLs, page structure, internal links, and content depth. All four affect rankings.
Changing domain
Rebranding, merging two sites, or moving from a country domain. The highest-risk migration of all, and the one most often done without a plan.
Restructuring URLs
Reorganising categories or flattening a hierarchy. Sensible for users, quietly destructive if the old paths are not mapped to the new ones.
Moving to HTTPS
Rarer now but still mishandled, usually by redirecting everything to the homepage instead of matching each page to its secure equivalent.
Merging or splitting sites
Consolidating brands or separating one. Both need careful decisions about which page inherits the authority of which, and what gets retired.
Why migrations lose traffic
In our experience the same handful of mistakes account for most of the damage, and every one of them is avoidable.
No redirect map. The single biggest cause. Old URLs either 404 or get bulk-redirected to the homepage, which search engines treat as a soft 404 and which passes almost nothing on. Every old URL needs a specific, relevant destination.
The staging site blocks crawlers, and nobody removes it. A noindex tag or a disallow rule in robots.txt ships to production. The site vanishes from search within days, and the cause often goes unnoticed for weeks.
Content gets quietly trimmed. Designers shorten pages for aesthetics, and the copy that was actually ranking disappears. The page looks better and performs worse.
Nobody watches afterwards. Migrations are treated as finished at launch. Problems that would take an hour to fix in week one get discovered in month four, by which point the rankings are gone and recovery is slow.
How our SEO migration services run, in three phases
The work that protects your rankings happens mostly before anything goes live, and the work that saves you happens in the weeks after.
Benchmark and map
We record exactly what you have now so there is an objective reference point if anything moves later.
- Full crawl of the existing site and a record of every indexed URL
- Benchmark of rankings, traffic, and conversions by page
- Identification of your highest-value pages and their backlinks
- A one-to-one redirect map from every old URL to its new destination
- Review of the new site on staging for content parity, metadata, and schema
Ship carefully and verify immediately
Launch is a checklist, not a moment of hope. We verify the things that silently break sites.
- Confirm robots.txt and meta robots allow crawling on production
- Test the redirect map in bulk and fix anything returning 404 or chaining
- Submit updated XML sitemaps and, for a domain move, file the change of address
- Verify analytics and Search Console are tracking the new site properly
Monitor while it settles
Some ranking movement is normal for a few weeks. Knowing which movement is normal and which is a problem is the whole job.
- Daily crawl-error and index-coverage checks in the first fortnight
- Ranking and traffic comparison against the pre-launch benchmark
- Fixing redirect gaps as real 404s appear in the logs
- A recovery plan if any high-value page drops, rather than waiting it out
Real numbers from real client work
Technical care during builds and rebuilds sits underneath these published case studies.
SEO migration services sit inside technical SEO
Technical SEO
The parent programme covering crawlability, indexation, architecture, and everything search engines need from your site.
Fix my technical SEO →Website speed optimization
A rebuild is the ideal moment to fix performance properly, rather than carrying old problems onto a new platform.
Speed up my site →Schema markup
Structured data is routinely lost in migrations. We rebuild it so your rich results survive the move.
Add my schema markup →What our SEO migration services include
Every engagement is scoped to your migration type, but these are the deliverables that come as standard. You get the artefacts, not just the advice, so your developers have something concrete to build against.
Full URL inventory
A crawl-based record of every indexable URL on your current site, cross-checked against Search Console, analytics, and your backlink profile so nothing valuable is missed.
One-to-one redirect map
A spreadsheet mapping every old URL to its new destination, ready for your developers to implement. This is the single most important deliverable in any SEO migration.
Pre-launch benchmark
Rankings, organic traffic, conversions, and indexed page counts recorded before launch, so any post-launch change can be measured objectively rather than argued about.
Staging site audit
A technical review of the new build before it goes live: metadata, headings, internal links, structured data, canonicals, and content parity against the pages that currently rank.
Launch-day checklist
The sequenced list of checks that get run the moment you go live, covering robots directives, redirect testing, sitemap submission, and analytics verification.
Post-launch monitoring
Daily crawl-error and index-coverage checks for the first fortnight, then weekly reporting against your benchmark until performance has clearly settled.
The SEO migration checklist
Whether you work with us or handle the migration in house, work through this before you launch. Most lost traffic traces back to something on this list being skipped.
Before launch
Crawl and archive the current site. Record rankings and traffic by page. Identify your top pages by traffic, conversions, and backlinks. Build the redirect map. Check content parity on staging. Confirm metadata and structured data carry across. Verify canonical tags point to the new URLs.
At launch
Remove staging noindex tags and robots.txt disallow rules. Test redirects in bulk for 404s and chains. Submit updated XML sitemaps. File a change of address for domain moves. Confirm analytics and Search Console are recording the new site. Spot-check your highest-value pages manually.
First two weeks
Check index coverage and crawl errors daily. Watch server logs for 404s from real traffic and patch redirect gaps. Compare rankings against benchmark. Confirm the new sitemaps are being read. Watch for unexpected canonical or duplicate-content warnings.
First three months
Track recovery against benchmark weekly. Investigate any page that has not recovered within six weeks. Rebuild internal links to important pages. Reclaim backlinks pointing at old URLs where publishers will update them. Confirm structured data is still validating.
How much do SEO migration services cost?
SEO migration services are normally priced as a fixed-scope project rather than a monthly retainer, because the work has a clear beginning and end. Three things drive the number.
Site size
A twenty-page brochure site and a twenty-thousand-URL store are different jobs. URL count drives how long inventory, mapping, and redirect testing take, and that is the bulk of the work.
Migration type
A redesign on the same platform and URLs is the simplest case. Changing platform is harder. Changing platform and domain together, or merging two sites, is the most involved.
How early you involve us
Being brought in during design is cheaper than being brought in the week before launch, because prevention takes less time than diagnosis and recovery.
The honest way to think about cost is against what you stand to lose. If organic search brings in a meaningful share of your revenue, a migration that goes wrong can cost more in a single quarter than a decade of doing it properly. That is the comparison worth making, not the project fee in isolation.
We quote after reviewing your current site and your plans for the new one, because quoting before that is guesswork.
Common questions about SEO migrations
Some short-term fluctuation is normal for two to six weeks while search engines recrawl and reassess. A well-planned migration recovers to previous levels and often improves, because the new site is usually faster and better structured. Significant lasting losses are a sign of a planning failure, not an inevitability.
Typically two to six weeks for a straightforward platform or design migration, and up to three months for a domain change on a large site. Recovery speed depends heavily on how quickly search engines recrawl, which is why sitemap submission and internal linking matter so much immediately after launch.
Yes, and this is a common reason people contact us. We audit what went wrong, usually finding missing redirects, blocked crawling, or lost content, and build a recovery plan. Recovery is slower than prevention would have been, but most of it is retrievable if you act rather than wait.
No. Search engines treat irrelevant homepage redirects as soft 404s and pass on very little value. Each old URL should point to the closest equivalent new page. If genuinely no equivalent exists, a relevant category page is the next best option, and letting it 404 is sometimes more honest than a bad redirect.
As early as possible, ideally while the new site is still being designed. Most damage is decided by choices made before development starts, particularly URL structure and how much content each page keeps. Being brought in the week before launch limits us to damage control.
It is a fixed-price project scoped by site size and migration type. A small brochure site changing design is straightforward. A large store changing platform and domain at once, with thousands of URLs, is a bigger piece of work. We quote after reviewing your current site and your plans.
Get SEO migration services in place before launch
We will review your migration plan, flag the risks to your highest-value pages, and show you what needs to be in place before anything goes live.
Plan my migration- Redirect mapping
- Pre-launch review
- Post-launch monitoring