Website Migration SEO Support
All ServicesLaunching a new website is exciting. It’s a chance to refresh your brand, improve your user experience, and show off your new visual identity. But from an SEO perspective, it is also the most dangerous time in your business’s digital life.
If a migration is mishandled, years of hard-earned organic authority can vanish overnight. We’ve seen it happen too often: a brand launches a beautiful new site, but they forget the technical SEO foundations. The result? Rankings tank, traffic disappears, and the phone stops ringing.
A website migration isn’t just about design; it’s about data preservation. At Platform81, we bridge the gap between your developers and your marketing goals. We ensure that when you move house, you don’t leave your reputation behind.
The Traffic Drop Risk
To Google, a new URL is effectively a new page with zero history. If you change your website structure without telling search engines exactly where the old content has gone, Google assumes you have simply deleted your high-ranking pages and started from scratch.
This disconnect is a recipe for disaster. You lose the “link equity” (authority) you’ve built up over years. Our primary goal during a migration is traffic retention. We meticulously map out your existing site architecture to ensure that every ounce of value is transferred safely to the new platform.
The 301 Redirect Strategy
This is the backbone of any successful migration. A 301 redirect is a permanent “forwarding address” for the web. It tells Google: “This page used to be here, but now it is here. Please pass all the credit to the new location.”
If your developers simply launch the new site without a comprehensive redirect map, your users (and Googlebot) will hit a wall of 404 Error pages. We manage the entire redirection strategy. We crawl your old site to find every single URL that has value—including hidden ones you might have forgotten about—and map them strictly to their most relevant counterpart on the new site.
Pre-Launch Staging Checks
The worst time to find an SEO bug is after the site has gone live. By then, the damage is already being done. We get involved early, auditing your Staging Site (the test version) before the public ever sees it.
We check for the classic migration killers: accidental noindex tags (which tell Google to ignore the site), broken internal links, slow load times, and missing metadata. We stress-test the new structure to ensure it is technically sound.
Post-Launch Monitoring
The day you flick the switch is not the end of the project; it’s the start of the most critical phase. Even with perfect planning, “teething problems” can occur when a new site meets the live web.
On launch day and in the weeks following, we monitor Google Search Console like hawks. We look for crawl errors, traffic fluctuations, and indexing issues. If Google gets stuck on a specific section of the new site, we identify it and fix it immediately. We provide the safety net that ensures your recovery is fast and your rankings are protected.
How can Platform81 help?
Many web development agencies are brilliant at design and code, but they aren’t SEO specialists. They focus on how the site looks, not how it ranks.
Platform81 offers specialist SEO consultancy that runs alongside your build. We collaborate with your developers (whether internal or external) to ensure SEO is baked into the code, not bolted on as an afterthought.
We handle the technical heavy lifting, the spreadsheets, and the testing, giving you the confidence to launch your new site without the fear of a digital blackout.
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Frequently Asked Questions
When should we involve an SEO agency in a migration?
As soon as possible. Ideally, before a single line of code is written for the new site. If you involve us at the start, we can advise on the URL structure and hierarchy to save headaches later. If you bring us in a week before launch, we are simply damage control. The earlier, the better.
Will I lose traffic when I launch a new site?
It is normal to see a small, temporary fluctuation in rankings (often called the “Google dance”) as search engines re-crawl and re-assess your new site. However, a significant, long-term drop is not normal and usually indicates a technical failure. Our job is to minimise that fluctuation and get you back to growth mode as quickly as possible.
What if we are changing our domain name (rebranding)?
This is the highest-risk type of migration. Google treats a domain change with extreme caution. We need to use specific tools (like the Change of Address tool in Search Console) and be even more rigorous with our redirects to convince Google that the new brand is the same entity as the old one.
Can’t we just use a plugin to handle redirects?
For a very small blog, maybe. For a business website? Absolutely not. Automated plugins often guess where the redirects should go, or they slow down your site speed. We create manual, line-by-line redirect maps to ensure 100% accuracy and preserve your site performance.
Does a migration affect our Google Ads?
Yes. If your Google Ads point to URLs that no longer exist (or redirect slowly), your ads will be disapproved, or your Quality Score will drop, costing you money. We ensure your paid search team has the new URL list so they can update their landing pages the moment the site goes live.
Do you work with our developers?
Yes. We speak their language. We don’t just send vague complaints; we send technical specifications and actionable tickets. We act as a partner to your dev team, helping them deliver a better product.