Not every website migration we’ve worked on started with us running it.
Sometimes we arrive afterwards. A business has launched a new site, things haven’t gone to plan, and they need someone to diagnose why their organic traffic has dropped and help them rebuild. It’s some of the most revealing work we do, because seeing the consequences of migration SEO done poorly teaches you so much about what actually matters.
This article covers both ends of that experience. First, what we found when we came in to fix a migration that had gone wrong and what the recovery looked like. Then, what a migration looks like when SEO is properly embedded from the start, before a single line of code is written.
Part One: What a failed migration actually costs and how we rebuilt it for Havwoods
Havwoods Accessories is a specialist with over 40 years in the flooring industry. They are the number one supplier of flooring accessories and machinery to the building trade, serving everyone from world-class architects to individual flooring contractors. Their product range spans hardwood flooring seals, lacquers, oils, underlays, sanding products, mouldings, adhesives, and more.
They came to us after a drop in traffic following a website migration that had been completed before we were involved.
That phrase “drop in traffic following a migration” is one of the most telling sentences we hear when a new client comes through the door for help. It almost always means the same thing: the migration was managed as a technical build project rather than an SEO project. Redirects were incomplete or incorrectly mapped. Pages that had been earning organic traffic for years either vanished from Google’s index or were redirected to loosely related pages with no real URL equity passing through. Content was updated during the migration, adding further variables for Google to reassess simultaneously. And nobody was monitoring Search Console closely in the days immediately after launch.
By the time a business notices the traffic drop, it’s usually been building for two or three weeks, which means the issues have already had time to compound.
When we audited the Havwoods site, we found exactly what we expected. A number of pages couldn’t be crawled by search engines at all. Search trends had evolved and much of the content was out of date. Landing pages needed substantial work to reflect current keyword targeting and to give the site a genuine chance of ranking for the commercial terms that mattered most to the business.
The fix required working at every level simultaneously. Technical SEO to restore crawlability to pages that had become invisible to Google. Deep keyword research, refreshed from the current search landscape rather than relying on what had worked years ago. New on-page copy across key landing pages, improving user experience, brand messaging, and SEO potential together, because these things aren’t separate. And new PPC campaign builds for key product lines including Bona, Portamix, and Wirbel, because recovering organic traffic takes time and the business still needed leads while the organic work played out.
The results, once the foundations were restored and the work had time to take effect, were significant. Organic transactions increased by 62%. Organic revenue increased by 399% year-on-year. On the PPC side, conversions grew by 55% year-on-year while cost per acquisition fell by 21%; better results at lower cost, which is what happens when you’re targeting the right keywords with the right messaging.
The 399% revenue growth is the number clients tend to focus on, and understandably so. But the more instructive figure, for understanding what a migration done poorly actually costs, is the baseline it was measured against. That baseline was depressed by the migration damage. The recovery required months of careful, layered work across technical, content, and paid channels before the site was performing the way it should have been all along.
All of that cost could have been avoided.
Part Two: What we do differently: the Designlab migration
Designlab is a leading mentor-led UX and UI design training provider. They offer aspiring designers the skills, mentorship, and experience to build careers in UX and UI; competing in a market crowded with design schools, coding bootcamps, and professional education platforms all targeting the same career-switching audience.
When Designlab came to us, they needed two things: ongoing SEO and content support to grow their organic presence, and specialist SEO support for a safe migration to an entirely new website domain. These weren’t separate workstreams that could be managed independently. They were deeply connected, because the value of any content we produced for the new site depended entirely on the new domain inheriting the authority built up on the old one.
This is the crux of domain migration SEO, and where most migrations fail. When you move to a new domain, you’re asking Google to recognise that your new address is the same entity as your old one, and to transfer the ranking signals it has associated with your old URLs across to the new ones. The mechanism for this is the 301 redirect, and how you build and implement your redirect map determines whether Google gets that message clearly or misses it entirely.
When we are running the migration, rather than arriving to fix someone else’s, the work starts long before the new site is built.
We audit the existing site first. Not just the pages that are obviously generating traffic, but the full URL inventory: the deep product pages, the older blog posts, the category structures that may have built equity quietly over years without anyone tracking them closely. Every URL that carries ranking value needs to be accounted for. The redirect map we build from that audit is comprehensive by design, not by assumption.
We also get involved in the content architecture decisions before they’re made, because decisions about URL structures and information hierarchy have direct SEO consequences that are very difficult to unpick after the fact. A CMS migration that restructures the URL scheme, for instance, creates new redirect mapping work that didn’t need to exist. A page hierarchy redesign that buries previously accessible content deeper in the site structure affects crawlability. These decisions are fine if they’re made with SEO input. They become problems if they’re made first and reviewed later.
For Designlab, we also built out an extensive content strategy running in parallel with the migration work. Long-tail blog articles targeting high-intent searches by their prospective students, on-page improvements to commercial landing pages, and targeted PR outreach to secure contributing article opportunities in influential UX publications including Smashing Magazine and UX Mag. We timed this work deliberately, so that the new domain was not only arriving with its historical authority intact but was also actively generating fresh relevance signals from the moment it launched.
We monitored Search Console from day one of the new site’s life. Post-launch monitoring is one of the most neglected steps in a migration. It’s not enough to launch correctly and assume everything has worked. Issues that surface in the first week; indexation gaps, crawl anomalies, ranking fluctuations on key pages, need to be caught and addressed immediately, before they have time to compound into something more damaging.
The migration was smooth. The content we produced ranked competitively for target commercial keywords. And at the first strategy review, conversions for Designlab’s UX Bootcamp Leads had risen by 31%. That 31% conversion uplift didn’t come from a particularly clever conversion rate trick. It came from the fact that the migration worked, which meant the SEO foundation was stable, which meant the content could do its job, which meant the leads could flow. Each step depends on the one before it.
The real cost of treating migration SEO as an afterthought
Havwoods and Designlab represent the two most common migration experiences we encounter. One arrived with damage that needed to be repaired. The other was planned correctly from the start and avoided the damage entirely. The outcomes aren’t just different in degree, they’re different in kind. Recovery after a failed migration requires working backwards: diagnosing what broke, restoring what was lost, rebuilding what should never have needed rebuilding. It takes longer, costs more, and involves months of suppressed organic performance that directly affects the business’s bottom line.
A migration handled correctly produces none of that. It produces a new site that launches with its authority intact, its content indexed quickly, and its commercial pages ready to build on immediately.
The difference between the two isn’t luck or complexity. It’s when the SEO work starts.
If you have a migration planned; a domain change, a CMS switch, a significant site rebuild, a rebrand , the right time to talk to us is now, before the build begins. Not after.
Get in touch with the Koozai team.
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