digital marketing services sagar sethi

What can go wrong in a migration

  • A website migration is one of the riskiest moments in SEO.
  • The classic pattern is brutal.
  • The site moves, everything looks fine on the new version, and then traffic starts falling.

Website migration SEO services exist to stop that cliff from happening. I work alongside your developers and your platform decisions so the move protects what you have built, and I stay after launch to recover anything that slipped.

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Pre-migration audit

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URL inventory

I build a complete inventory of your current URLs, every page that earns traffic, rankings or enquiries. Not every page on the site matters, and treating them all the same is how migrations go wrong.

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Redirect map

For every URL that must survive, there is a 301 redirect map. Each old URL gets mapped to its closest equivalent on the new site, page by page, not domain-wide.

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Crawl baseline

Before the move, I crawl the site and record a baseline: which pages are indexed, which URLs carry traffic, what the current rankings look like and what the key search terms are. This baseline is the reference point after launch.

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Migration day playbook

  • The migration playbook is written before the move and it is specific to your site.
  • It lists the order of operations, the people responsible for each step, the rollback plan if something fails, and the checks that must pass before the old site is turned off.
  • Migration day is coordinated, not improvised.
  • After launch, every redirect gets tested.

Post-migration recovery and monitoring

  • The weeks after a migration decide whether it succeeds.
  • I monitor indexation, rankings, traffic and errors against the baseline, and I fix what slips.
  • The monitoring is structured and ends when the numbers stabilise at or above the baseline.

Part of post-migration recovery is chasing the long tail of small problems that only surface in the data.

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Redesign versus migration

  • It is worth being precise about what counts as a migration.
  • A lighter redesign that keeps URLs intact is lower risk, but it still deserves the same engineering discipline.
  • One common misunderstanding is that a migration is finished when the new site is live.
  • Another part of the process that does not get enough attention is the content itself.

Clients I Have Worked With

Altez Building Inspections

More than 150 keywords on Google's first page, with monthly enquiries up from 9 to 135.

Dynaflow

Monthly enquiries up 520% in the first year; products now sold in 43 countries.

Eastlink Espresso

Monthly site visits up 692%, total enquiries up 83% to 354 a month.

Frequently Asked Questions

A website migration is any significant change to your website that affects how search engines understand it: a new domain, a platform change, a hosting move or a structural redesign. In SEO terms, it is the process of moving your site while protecting your rankings, traffic and indexation.
You should not, if the migration is engineered properly. Rankings are lost when URLs change without redirects, when redirects point to the wrong pages, or when the move is not monitored after launch. With a pre-migration plan, a proper redirect map and post-launch recovery, a migration protects what you have built.
Yes. Domain changes are the highest-risk migrations because every URL moves at once. I build the complete redirect map, coordinate the cutover and monitor recovery until the new domain stabilises at or above the old one's performance.
A 301 redirect map is a page-by-page list of old URLs and their new destinations. Each old URL is permanently redirected to the closest equivalent page on the new site. It is the difference between preserving your ranking and traffic and losing both to a blanket homepage redirect.
A simple platform move with a prepared site can be done in days. A complex migration with thousands of URLs, a domain change and a structural redesign can take several weeks from planning to full recovery. You get a timeline after the pre-migration audit, based on your actual site.
Yes, closely. I coordinate the SEO side of the migration with your developers: the redirect implementation, the DNS sequencing and the post-launch fixes. You do not have to translate between SEO and development, because I speak both.

Planning a Website Move and Worried About Rankings?

If you are planning a website move and want to protect what your current site has earned, book a free 30-minute Strategy Session. We will look at your migration plan and the risks in it before anything goes live. No pitch deck, no obligation.

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Book a free 30-minute Strategy Session

Tell me a bit about your business and we can dial in a strategy that fits.

    Sagar Sethi, expert online marketing consultant providing innovative marketing strategies