SAFE SEO Migration Method™

Website migration SEO protects rankings, organic traffic, and crawl equity when a website changes structure, platform, domain, or URL patterns.

A quality SEO migration won’t significantly impact your website’s organic SEO traffic in the long term. However, a poorly executed migration can harm your website’s SEO significantly and result in a drop in rankings, which is why it is so important to invest in the services of an SEO specialist who is experienced in website migrations. A poor migration can result in things like broken redirects, duplicate content, and unindexed pages, all of which will hurt your website’s SEO

Utilising the expertise of an SEO during a site migration is incredibly important. Why? Because you’ll want to protect your organic visibility and make sure your new website allows your brand to grow further.

In our experience, migrations are very often rushed to meet business objectives and the digital marketing impact is considered too late in the process. As a result, problems occur during and after the migration that could well have been avoided if the time was taken to investigate. The knock-on effect of poor planning/management may mean you encounter things like 404 page errors, incorrect linking and slow page loading speeds.

All these contribute to plummeting visibility in the search engines, which equals less website traffic and lower conversions. So, after all your hard work migrating your website, you’re met with disappointing and sometimes detrimental results. If there’s one piece of advice we could offer if you’re starting work on a site migration, it’s to get an experienced SEO involved as soon as possible. You’ll save yourself so many problems in the long run!

Recovery time varies by migration type, site size, and execution quality. A study on domain migrations reported long average recovery periods and that a material share did not return to pre-migration levels.

Missing redirects, redirect chains, robots or noindex mistakes, broken internal links, lost metadata, and failing to submit updated sitemaps are frequent causes of traffic loss.

This one really depends on the size of your website, how much content it has and what you want to move over to the new website. A website with less than 100 pages is going to take substantially less time to migrate than a website made up of several hundred or even thousands of pages. Depending on the size of the website and the scope of the project, you can expect it to take anywhere from a month to a few months for a website migration to be fully completed. This is because time is needed to plan, develop a staging site, audit, implement and monitor the migration to ensure nothing goes wrong.

The answer to this one is ‘it depends'. The cost of a website migration can differ depending on the size of the website, the scope of the project, the quality of the service provider and the services required. In all cases, we'd recommend investing early in the process to ensure it's done correctly rather than opting for a “cheap” route, and having to retrospectively fix issues several times over - stalling, or even worse ruining your organic performance in the process. This always ends up costing more.
Get in touch for a quote on your website migration or for our migration consultancy rates.