A redesign, platform change or domain move is one of the fastest ways to lose search traffic, and most of that loss is avoidable. I plan the move with you, check it before and after launch, and fix what slipped through.
Case study · US healthcare technology company
When you need it
- You are planning a redesign, a new CMS or a move to a JavaScript framework
- You are changing domain, URL structure or moving to HTTPS
- Traffic or leads dropped after a launch and nobody is sure why
- Old content went missing during a past migration
What is included
- A crawl and a baseline of rankings, traffic and important URLs before anything changes
- A URL map with a 301 or 410 decision for every old URL, and no redirect chains
- Staging checks: indexing rules, canonicals, internal links and what Google sees after rendering
- Launch-day checks on redirects, robots.txt, sitemaps and status codes
- Post-launch monitoring in Search Console, and recovery work for content lost in an earlier move
Frequently asked questions
Should old pages redirect or return 410?
If a close replacement exists, a 301 redirect passes visitors and signals to it. If the content is gone for good with no equivalent, a 410 tells search engines to drop it. Every URL gets one of the two, decided on purpose.
How long should a migration be monitored?
Watch closely for the first few weeks, then keep checking Search Console until indexing and traffic settle. Bigger sites take longer.
Start with a technical SEO audit of the current site, and set up analytics and tracking before launch so you can compare before and after. For an example, read the healthcare technology migration case study. If you are running the move in-house, my SEO migration checklist sets out every check before, during and after launch.
Planning a migration?
Send me the current site, the new platform and your launch date. I will tell you what I would check first.