Traffic protected
Less than 5% traffic loss on a well-run migration.
Six-phase process. Baseline, URL mapping, schema preservation, staging audit, launch, monitoring.
07 · Migration SEO · seo-consultant.co
Migration SEO.
The riskiest work in SEO,
done right.
Replatforms, redesigns, rebrands, domain changes. The process that protects organic rankings, pipeline value, and a decade of compound investment through a change that most agencies treat as a developer's problem. Pre-launch baseline, URL mapping, 301 strategy, schema preservation, eight-week post-launch monitoring. From £3,500.
<5%
Typical traffic loss across managed migration
6 wk
Pre-launch prep window
8 wk
Post-launch monitoring included
Pre-launch window
6w
Minimum. Compressible to 4w with higher risk.
Post-launch monitoring
8w
Daily monitoring. Same-day regression response.
The core risk
Letting the old domain lapse three months post-rebrand is the most expensive single decision a marketing team can make.
Replatform · Redesign · Rebrand · Domain change · Recovery
Why migrations fail
The four migration types,
and how each one breaks rankings.
Migration SEO sounds technical, but the failure modes are almost always organisational. A developer measures success as a launch without errors. SEO measures it differently: no ranking position lost, no organic page disappearing, no canonical pointing at the wrong URL, no schema block silently dropped. Those lenses rarely overlap with what a developer checks on launch day.
Replatformsa.
URL pattern drift burns three years of indexed link equity in a single deployment.
Replatforming means moving from one CMS or framework to another. The classic failure mode is URL pattern drift. Shopify uses /products/[handle]; a Next.js build might use /shop/[slug]. If that change goes live without a 1-to-1 redirect map, every product URL Google has indexed for the last three years becomes a 404. We see 30 to 60% organic traffic loss in week one when this is missed, and full recovery typically takes four to nine months.
URL mapping · 1-to-1 redirects · no redirect chains · link equity preservation
Letting the old domain lapse three months after a rebrand is the most expensive single decision a marketing team can make.
— rebrand migration principle
Redesignsb.
URLs stay intact, but schema and template signals are silently eroded.
A redesign typically keeps URLs intact but rebuilds the templating. The failure mode shifts to schema and template-level signals. The new design ships without the JSON-LD blocks the old templates emitted, the H1 hierarchy changes, or breadcrumb structure disappears. None of these break any tests, but they erode rankings over four to twelve weeks as Google re-evaluates the templates.
JSON-LD · H1 hierarchy · breadcrumbs · schema preservation
Rebrands · Domain changesc.
Old domain lapse and hreflang reciprocity — the two most expensive oversights.
A rebrand involves a domain change. Letting the old domain lapse three months after because “everyone uses the new URL now” collapses the equity transfer. Domain changes to regional properties add hreflang reciprocity failure: if the .com links to .co.uk via hreflang en-GB but .co.uk does not link back, Google does not honour the relationship and cannibalisation follows. We see this fail on roughly half of all multi-region launches we review post-fact.
Old domain maintenance 18m · hreflang reciprocity · GSC change-of-address
The process
Six phases. Fourteen weeks.
Most rankings preserved.
A migration SEO engagement runs on a six-phase calendar. The pre-launch window is six weeks, launch is one week, post-launch monitoring runs eight weeks, total fifteen weeks. We can compress to twelve in a hurry; we have done it in nine, but the loss-prevention probability drops materially below that floor.
Phase 1 — Baselinea.
Full crawl, Search Console export, rank snapshot — the artefact everything is measured against.
Full Screaming Frog crawl of the existing site, Search Console sixteen-month export, Ahrefs backlink profile, rank-tracker snapshot of every commercially relevant query, schema inventory of every JSON-LD block currently emitted. Without it, recovery becomes guesswork.
Screaming Frog · Search Console 16mo · Ahrefs · schema inventory
Phase 2 — URL mappingb.
Every URL mapped to its closest-intent equivalent. No redirect chains.
Every URL in the existing crawl is mapped to its closest-intent equivalent on the new site. The output is a versioned spreadsheet with old URL, new URL, redirect type, and confidence score. Edge cases (paginated categories, faceted URLs, parameterised search) get explicit treatment. No URL is mapped via a redirect chain — every redirect is a single 301 hop.
1-to-1 redirect map · single 301 hops · edge case coverage
Any issue found in staging is cheap to fix. The same issue post-launch is not.
— staging audit principle
Phases 3–6 — Schema to monitoringc.
Schema preservation, staging audit, launch checklist, eight weeks post-launch monitoring — daily.
Phase 3: every JSON-LD block catalogued and a port spec written. Hreflang reciprocity mapped URL-by-URL. Phase 4: full staging crawl, render-vs-source HTML check on every template, schema validation.Phase 5: scripted launch checklist alongside the dev team — robots, sitemap, GSC change-of-address, redirect smoke tests on 200 URLs.Phase 6: eight weeks daily monitoring. Any regression not resolved inside 72 hours is investigated and fixed the same day.
JSON-LD · hreflang · staging crawl · launch checklist · 8w daily monitoring
Pricing
Migration pricing,
scoped to complexity.
Migration SEO is project-priced rather than retainer-priced because the scope and duration are bounded by the engineering work. The price floor is £3,500 for a single-language, single-region migration of up to ~5,000 indexable URLs with no domain change. From there, complexity additions price as follows:
- Domain change: +£1,000 (GSC change-of-address, dual-domain monitoring, redirect maintenance plan).
- Multi-language hreflang: +£1,500 per additional language pair beyond the first.
- Catalogue restructure: +£2,000–£5,000 depending on URL count over 10,000.
- Multi-property consolidation: +£3,000–£6,000 for merging two or more sites into one.
- Recovery engagement (post-failure): bespoke quote, typically £4,500–£12,000 depending on traffic loss and time elapsed.
Most clients also retain us for an eight-week post-launch monitoring window at £950–£1,800/month. That is where 90% of preventable ranking issues surface and get fixed inside hours rather than weeks.
What is migration SEO and when do I need it?
Migration SEO is the discipline of preserving organic search rankings, traffic and pipeline value through any change that alters the structure of your site. Four scenarios qualify: replatforming (e.g. Shopify to Saleor, WordPress to Next.js), full redesigns where URL structure or templating changes, rebrands that change the domain or naming, and consolidations where you merge two or more properties into one. Any of those without a migration SEO plan typically loses 20 to 70% of organic traffic in the first eight weeks. With a plan, the loss is usually under 5% and recovers inside three months.
How long before launch should we engage you?
Six weeks before the planned go-live is the sweet spot. That gives time for a baseline crawl, full URL inventory, redirect mapping, schema preservation review, hreflang audit if you run multi-region, a staging-environment audit, and a pre-launch dry run. We can compress to three weeks if necessary, but at that pace we cut competitive deconstruction and post-launch playbook prep, both of which are valuable. Engage us after launch and we are doing recovery, which is more expensive and slower than prevention.
How do you actually preserve rankings during a migration?
Five disciplines. One: a pre-launch crawl baseline so we know exactly what currently ranks and where. Two: a 1-to-1 URL mapping spreadsheet, every old URL pointed to the closest-intent new URL, with no chain redirects. Three: schema preservation, every JSON-LD block re-emitted on the new URL because lost schema is a slow ranking decay rather than a fast one. Four: a launch-day checklist (robots.txt, canonical correctness, sitemap submission, GSC property changes, hreflang refresh). Five: an eight-week post-launch monitoring window where we watch crawl logs, Search Console data, and rank tracking daily, fixing regressions inside the same day.
What kinds of migrations have you handled?
WordPress to Next.js (most common, usually for performance and developer experience), Magento to Shopify, Shopify to Saleor, Wix to WordPress, custom legacy CMS to headless. Domain changes from .co.uk to .com, brand consolidations where two acquired companies become one site, regional split-outs where one .com becomes a .com plus .co.uk plus .ca. Catalogue restructures where a 40,000-product e-commerce site changes its category architecture. Multi-language hreflang corrections where the previous setup leaked rankings between en-GB and en-US.
Do you only do the SEO part or can you ship the migration?
Both. Most engagements are SEO-only — your developers ship the migration, we own the rankings discipline. We write the URL mapping spec, the redirect rules, the schema migration plan, the GSC playbook, and we monitor post-launch. For Next.js and WordPress builds we can also ship the migration end-to-end through our web design service, which is simpler when SEO and engineering need to be in lock-step. The split is roughly 70% SEO-only, 30% full-build.
What does a migration SEO engagement cost?
Project pricing based on scope. A standard mid-size migration (up to ~5,000 indexable URLs, single language, no domain change) is £3,500. Add complexity — multi-language hreflang, domain change, catalogue restructure, multi-property consolidation — and pricing rises to £6,000–£15,000 depending on URL count and architectural depth. Most clients also retain us for an eight-week post-launch monitoring window at £950–£1,800/month, which is the period when 90% of preventable issues surface.
What happens if rankings drop after launch despite the plan?
Some volatility is normal. Google takes four to eight weeks to re-crawl, re-index, and re-evaluate the new URL set. A 10 to 20% short-term dip in the first three weeks is common, and recovers as Google processes the redirect map. What is not normal is sustained loss after week eight. If we hit that, we pull the post-launch monitoring data, identify the specific failure (commonly: redirect chains we missed, a forgotten canonical, a robots directive change), fix it, and re-submit. Recovery is fastest when the diagnostic happens fast, which is why post-launch monitoring is the highest-leverage line item in the budget.
Can you recover a migration that already went badly?
Yes, and it is more common than the prevention work. The pattern: a developer pushed a redesign live without a redirect map, or with a flat catch-all redirect to the new home page. Rankings collapse 40 to 80% inside two weeks. We do an emergency baseline-versus-current crawl, build the missing redirect map retrospectively, fix the schema, hreflang and canonical mistakes, and submit the corrected sitemap. Recovery is typically 80 to 95% of pre-migration position inside ten to fourteen weeks, depending on how much link equity was burned in the gap.
Migration SEO reviews
Verified clients, real migrations, measurable outcomes.
★★★★★Verified
WordPress to Next.js migration on a £4M e-commerce site. Six-week prep, daily monitoring for eight weeks post-launch. Total organic loss across the migration window: 3.1%. Fully recovered by week ten. The redirect map alone was worth the fee.
James Crane
★★★★★Verified
Shopify to Saleor migration with a catalogue of 12,000 SKUs and a category restructure. Syed flagged six things our developers had not accounted for, including a faceted-URL trap that would have generated 200,000 indexable URLs of duplicate content. Avoided.
Priya Mehta
★★★★★Verified
Rebrand and domain change from co.uk to .com. Pre-launch baseline, 4,800-line URL mapping spreadsheet, hreflang refresh, and the GSC change-of-address playbook. Less than 5% traffic loss across the change, recovered in seven weeks.
David Whitman
★★★★★Verified
Recovery engagement, not prevention. Previous developer launched a redesign with a flat redirect-to-home rule. We had lost 64% of organic. Hired Syed for emergency recovery. Restored 91% of pre-migration position inside twelve weeks.
Aisha Rahman
Brief us · Migration
Migration coming up? Tell us when.
Send the launch date, the platform you are moving from and to, and the rough URL count. One-day reply, written by Syed.
08 · Let’s talk
Ready to protect rankings through your migration?
A short introduction, your site URL, and what you’re trying to achieve. If it’s a fit, we’ll book a 30-minute call.
Free £500 SEO audit included with any web dev or SEO package · no card required