SEO Support for Website Migrations

A website migration can involve changing your design, CMS, domain name, URL structure or site architecture. While these changes might make sense from a development, branding or UX perspective, they can also have significant SEO implications.

Over time, your existing website has built up search engine rankings and authority. Individual URLs may have earned inbound links, developed strong internal link signals and established themselves in Google's index. A successful migration needs to make sure as much of that SEO value as possible is carried across to the new website.

Launching a redesigned, rebranded or relocated website without considering SEO can result in:

• Significant drops in organic traffic if valuable existing pages are removed or changed without considering their current SEO performance.
• Loss of rankings for important searches if URLs, content, internal links or other signals change during the migration.
• Crawling and indexing issues that prevent Google from efficiently discovering and indexing the new website.
• Lost authority from inbound links if old URLs aren't correctly redirected to the most relevant pages on the new site.
• Changes to site architecture and internal linking that inadvertently make important pages less prominent or harder for search engines to discover.

The best time to consider SEO is before the new website is launched, not after rankings and traffic have already dropped.

I'll work alongside your developers, designers and other stakeholders throughout the migration to identify potential SEO risks, provide clear recommendations and check the new website before and after launch.