🚧 Redirects That Miss the Long Tail
The homepage and top pages get mapped; the four thousand older URLs quietly earning long-tail traffic and holding backlinks get left to 404, and all the value they carried disappears with them.
Hire a leading UK-based
SEO Migration Consultant
A website migration can undo years of SEO progress in a single afternoon - I've been brought in to clean up after enough of them to know exactly how it happens.
My SEO migration services make sure your rankings arrive at the new site with you.
100+ brands helped£20M+ added revenuePublished author & SEO speaker
SEO Migration Consultant
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SEO Migration Services
Driving Protected Rankings 📈
Website Migration SEO, Done Before It's Urgent
Redesigns, replatforms, domain changes, consolidations - every one of them rewrites the signals Google has spent years learning about your site. Handled properly, traffic dips briefly and recovers stronger. Handled as an afterthought, businesses lose half their organic revenue and spend a year getting it back. The way I see it, SEO should be a priority in any migration and never an afterthought - because if you only bring it in after rankings have dropped, you'll wish you'd dealt with it sooner.
The difference is entirely in the preparation. Full crawl and benchmark of the current site before anything changes. A redirect map that accounts for every URL that has value - not just the ones in the navigation. Parity checks on staging so the new templates don't quietly drop the content, internal links or structured data doing the ranking work. And a launch-day checklist so nothing ships broken.
I've guided migrations across WordPress, Shopify, Magento, Wix, Webflow, headless builds and custom platforms - whatever you're moving between, I've seen the failure modes.
“Itamar's SEO expertise has been an invaluable part of our continuing process to bring new optimization functionality to the Wix platform. His clear understanding of how 'Search' works along with a crisp conception of what is vital in creating a well-performing site is evident in everything Itamar does.”
How Migrations Go Wrong
Post-migration traffic drops almost always trace back to one of these - and all of them are preventable.
🎭 New Templates, Missing Signals
The redesign looks better but the H1s changed, the internal links vanished into a JavaScript menu, and the structured data didn't survive the rebuild. Google re-evaluates the site as if it were new - because to Google, it is.
🚀 Launching Without a Benchmark
If nobody crawled and recorded the old site, nobody can say what was lost or prove what needs restoring. That's why benchmarking comes first on every migration I work on.
What do my SEO migration services involve?
Pre-Migration Benchmark
Full crawl, rankings and analytics snapshot of the current site, so nothing valuable is invisible when decisions get made.
Redirect Strategy & Mapping
One-to-one redirect mapping for every URL with traffic, rankings or links - the core of a safe migration.
Staging & Parity Checks
Pre-launch review of the new site's templates, content, internal links and structured data against the benchmark.
Launch-Day Support
The go-live checklist executed and verified: redirects, robots, sitemaps, canonical tags and indexing.
Post-Launch Monitoring
Daily tracking of rankings, crawl behaviour and errors in the critical weeks after launch, with fast fixes.
International Migrations
Multi-locale consolidations and hreflang moves handled without regions losing their rankings.
Already Migrated and Lost Traffic?
If the migration already happened and your traffic went with it, speed matters - the longer the broken signals sit, the more Google's picture of your site resets. A recovery engagement starts with a forensic comparison of the old and new sites: what URLs were lost, which redirects are missing or wrong, and what the new templates dropped.
Most post-migration losses are recoverable if the causes are found quickly and fixed properly. It's work I've done many times - get in touch and I'll tell you honestly what's recoverable.
SEO Migration FAQ
What is an SEO migration?
Any significant change to your website that alters its URLs, platform, design or domain - a redesign, replatform, rebrand or consolidation. SEO migration is the work that carries your rankings safely through that change: benchmarking, redirect mapping, parity checks and post-launch monitoring.
Will we lose traffic during a migration?
A brief dip while Google recrawls is normal; a lasting drop is not. With proper preparation most sites recover within weeks and often perform better afterwards, because migrations are a chance to fix long-standing structural problems at the same time.
When should SEO get involved in a migration?
Before the new site is built - ideally at the planning stage. The most expensive migration mistakes are baked into new templates and URL structures months before launch, when they're cheap to prevent and miserable to unpick afterwards.
Can you work with our developers or agency?
Yes, that's the standard setup. Your team builds; I provide the redirect maps, requirements and checks, review staging before launch, and monitor after go-live. Developers generally appreciate having exact specifications rather than vague SEO worries.
We've already lost rankings after a migration - can you help?
Usually, yes. Post-migration recovery starts with comparing the old site against the new to find exactly what was lost or broken. The sooner it's diagnosed the better the outcome, so if the drop already happened, don't wait for it to fix itself - it won't.
Get in touch
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