SEO Migration Service

Redesigning your website, moving to a new platform or changing your domain can wipe out rankings you've spent years building, along with the traffic, leads and sales they bring in. My SEO migration service is there to stop that happening, so you don't end up with a fancy new website that no one can find. I plan the move with you and stay with it until things settle after launch.

It's a paid service, and you work with me directly from the first call to the final checks.

What Happens to Your SEO When You Migrate

An SEO migration is any significant change to your website's domain, platform, URL structure or design that can affect how Google crawls, indexes and ranks it. Without a plan, pages drop out of search, links pointing at old URLs lead nowhere, and your rankings and traffic can fall with them.

You're probably facing one of these:

• A full website redesign
• A move to a new platform or CMS
• A change of domain
• A rebrand or restructure that changes your URLs

My SEO Migration Service

My SEO migration service covers the four things that decide whether your rankings survive a move: auditing and benchmarking the current site, mapping and redirecting old URLs to new ones, testing the new site before launch, and monitoring performance once it's live. Every migration is scoped as a one-off project.

• Pre-migration audit and benchmarking
• URL mapping and redirect planning
• Technical testing on the staging site
• Post-launch monitoring

I've been an SEO specialist since 2019, and technical SEO is the part of the job I enjoy most. Migrations sit alongside audits and strategy work in my SEO service, and I also take them on for agencies and freelancers on a white-label basis if you need an extra pair of hands on a client rebuild.

Here's what working with me looks like:

• A free discovery call first, to understand what's changing, your goals and your timeline.
• Direct access to the person doing the work.
• Plain English. I'll explain what I'm checking and why, and be upfront about the risks.
• A reply within 24 hours at the latest.
• Pricing that's bespoke to your project, based on the scope of the migration.

If you'd like ongoing SEO support once the new site has settled, I also offer monthly retainers, and every client gets a custom Looker Studio report and a monthly meeting.

I've also written up the process as a step by step guide. Have a look at my SEO migration checklist if you'd like to see it laid out in full.

The Migration Process: Before, During and After Launch

A migration runs in three stages, the same shape as Google's official guidance on site moves.

Before Launch

I start by crawling your current site to get a full list of URLs, then benchmark it: traffic, rankings, indexed pages and which pages have backlinks pointing at them. That gives us something to measure the new site against. If your site has never had a proper health check, an SEO audit covers a lot of the same ground and is worth doing first.

Next comes the URL map, the most important document in the whole migration. Every old URL gets a new destination, or a clear decision that it doesn't need one:

Google recommends server-side permanent redirects, such as a 301 or 308. Each old URL should point straight to its final destination. Google advises against redirect chains and says to keep any chain short, ideally no more than three hops.

One shortcut to avoid is sending every old URL to the homepage. Google warns that redirecting lots of old URLs to one irrelevant page might be treated as a soft 404, and soft 404 pages are excluded from Search. Pages with a genuine replacement get a 301 to that page, and pages with no replacement should return a 404 or 410.

During the Build: Checking the Staging Site

Staging sites are usually hidden from Google while they're being built, and a block left in place after launch can stop the new site being indexed. Before go-live I check the staging site for:

• noindex tags that will need removing at launch, listed page by page
• robots.txt rules blocking pages or the whole site
• Canonical tags pointing at staging URLs or old URLs
• Structured data carried across from the old templates
• Redirects from the URL map, tested before they go live

Using robots.txt and noindex together can backfire. Google says that if a page is blocked by robots.txt, the crawler will never see the noindex rule, so the page can still appear in search results.

After Launch

On launch day I check that the redirects fire and land on the right pages, that new URLs return a 200 status, and that any noindex or robots.txt blocks from staging have gone. The new sitemap goes into Search Console, with both the old and new sites verified there. If you've changed domain, the Change of Address tool in Search Console tells Google about the move.

Then I monitor rankings, traffic, crawl errors and indexing over the following weeks. Google says it can take a few weeks or more for a medium-sized site before the new URLs replace the old ones in search, and visibility can fluctuate while that happens. Some movement is normal, and I won't promise your rankings will never move. The aim is to protect the business your site already brings in.

If you've changed domain, keep the old one registered and live. Google recommends keeping redirects in place for at least a year so it can transfer all the signals to your new URLs, and those redirects only work while the old domain is there to serve them.

Website Redesign and SEO

A redesign on the same domain still counts as a migration. New templates, navigation, page content and internal links all change how Google reads your site, even if every URL stays the same, and redesigns often change some URLs too.

It gets the same before, during and after treatment, scaled to how much is changing. The earlier I'm involved the better, ideally before the designs and page structure are signed off, because it's much easier to keep a page that ranks well than to win its rankings back later.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is SEO Migration?

SEO migration is the process of protecting your search rankings and traffic through any significant change to your website, such as a new domain, platform, URL structure or design. It covers benchmarking the old site, redirecting old URLs to new ones, testing before launch and monitoring afterwards.

How Much Does an SEO Migration Cost?

Every migration is priced as a one-off project, so there's no set price list. The cost depends on how many pages you have, what's changing and your timeline. Book a free discovery call and I'll give you a bespoke quote.

Do I Need to Keep My Old Domain Live After a Migration?

Yes, for at least a year. That's how long Google recommends keeping redirects in place so ranking signals pass to your new URLs. Your redirects depend on the old domain, so letting it lapse or cancelling the hosting behind them breaks every one.