What our SEO migration services cover
Website migration SEO is an umbrella term for very different projects, and each one breaks in its own way. These are the moves we handle, with the specific risk each carries:
- Replatforming and CMS moves. WordPress to Webflow, Magento to Shopify, custom stack to anything. CMS migration SEO is mostly a URL-pattern problem: every platform generates paths differently, and a store that silently changes /product-name/ to /products/product-name/ orphans every backlink those pages ever earned.
- Redesigns. The URLs may survive, but templates change. Headings get rewritten, internal links vanish from the new navigation, and content gets trimmed by designers who don't know which paragraph was doing the ranking. We diff every template old-vs-new before it ships.
- Domain changes and rebrands. Domain migration SEO layers change-of-address handling, brand-query management and outreach to your most valuable linking pages on top of the redirect work. Expect a longer stabilization window than a same-domain move: Google re-evaluates trust on a new domain, not just addresses.
- Site consolidations. Two sites merging into one, or a subdomain folding into the main domain. The equity math is favorable when the mapping is page-to-page, and brutal when everything redirects to the homepage.
- URL restructures. New category trees, dropped date folders, cleaned-up slugs. The least visible change to stakeholders, and the most redirect volume per page of any migration type.
Across all of them the deliverables are the same discipline: a full URL inventory, a one-to-one redirect map, parity checks on titles, content, schema and internal links, a staging crawl behind auth, and daily monitoring after cutover. Not a plugin and a prayer.
A word on what usually gets missed. Redirect maps built from the CMS page list skip everything the CMS doesn't know about: parameterized URLs that rank, paginated category pages, image and PDF assets that carry backlinks, old campaign landing pages, hreflang'd locale variants. Our inventory merges the crawl with Search Console, analytics and the backlink profile precisely because the CMS export alone misses the URLs that matter most, the ones earning links and traffic outside the neat sitemap.
What an SEO migration costs, and what moves the price
There is no honest flat rate for SEO website migration services, because the workload lives in variables you can count. Here is what we actually price on:
- URL count. A 200-page services site and a 40,000-URL store need the same steps but wildly different hours. Redirect mapping is the line item that scales hardest.
- Template count. Parity checks run per template, then per exception. Twelve consistent templates audit fast; a decade of one-off landing pages does not.
- The platform pair. WordPress to WordPress is routine. Magento to Shopify changes URL logic, faceted navigation and canonical behavior all at once, and the audit has to cover every difference.
- Whether URLs change. A redesign that keeps every path is the cheapest migration there is. A rebrand with a new domain and a new structure sits at the opposite end.
- Who implements. If your developers place the redirects and we verify, the budget stays lean. If we manage implementation end to end, expect more hours and fewer surprises.
We price the SEO migration plan as a fixed-scope project after the inventory crawl, not before, because guessing scope is how agencies end up cutting corners mid-project. Be skeptical of very cheap offers: at low price points the redirect map is usually one wildcard rule, and wildcard rules are exactly how equity dies. An enterprise SEO site migration with multiple markets or six-figure URL counts needs a longer pre-launch runway and a dedicated monitoring period, not a bigger discount.
One more cost lever nobody prices in: the launch date. A migration pushed live to hit an arbitrary deadline, with the redirect map half-verified, costs more in recovered traffic than any agency fee. If the staging crawl fails sign-off, the honest recommendation is to slip the date, and we have made that call with clients more than once. Delaying a launch by two weeks is a calendar problem; relaunching into a 30% organic decline is a revenue problem.
Launch week, hour by hour
Cutover is a supervised event, not a deploy-and-hope. The sequence:
- Hour zero. Redirects verified live against the full inventory, not a sample. Old and new sitemaps submitted together so crawlers can walk the change. Recrawl requested for the money pages first, everything else after.
- Days 1-3. Server logs watched for 404 spikes and redirect chains. The classic launch killer gets checked twice: a noindex or robots.txt disallow carried over from staging. It sounds too basic to happen; it is the single most common cause of post-launch craters we see.
- Weeks 1-4. Daily indexation counts against the inventory, rank tracking on priority keywords, traffic parity per template against the pre-launch benchmark. Anything that deviates gets triaged the day it appears, while the fix still costs a developer-hour.
The expected shape of the graph: a single-digit dip while Google digests the change, then recovery over several weeks. The recovery playbook exists to separate that normal turbulence from a real fault, so nobody panics on day four and nobody sleeps through a genuine problem either.
Evidence beats vibes here. Before launch we archive a full crawl of the old site, per-URL traffic and per-keyword positions; after launch every check compares against that archive, not against memory. When something does deviate, the diagnosis is specific: which template, which URL group, which redirect rule. That is also why we ask for server log access up front. Analytics shows you what users did; logs show you what Googlebot did, and during a migration the second question is the one that predicts the next four weeks.
When to bring in a migration partner, and who needs one
An SEO migration strategy loses leverage with every sprint the build advances. Three engagement windows, in descending order of usefulness:
- Before the new site is designed. We can still influence URL structure, navigation and which pages exist at all. Site migration SEO at this stage is cheap because nothing has to be undone.
- Before launch. The structure is fixed, but the redirect map, staging crawl and parity checklist still catch most disasters while they cost hours instead of quarters.
- After launch, when the graph already fell. Recovery: rebuild the old inventory from crawl archives and analytics, fix the map, restore internal links. It works, but it always costs more than prevention would have.
Who needs this most: anyone whose revenue enters through organic pages. E-commerce stores replatforming a catalog, where category pages carry years of link equity. SaaS companies mid-rebrand, where the marketing site rides on the old domain's history. Lead-generation sites where five money pages produce most of the pipeline; lose two in a bad migration and the sales team feels it within a month. If nobody in-house has done this before, buying SEO migration services for one project is cheaper than learning redirect mapping on your own traffic. For smaller teams, one embedded SEO website migration consultant through the build is usually enough.
Why SEOBRO guards migrations differently
Most agencies sell an SEO migration service as a technical checklist. We treat it as asset protection, because we measure SEO in leads, not sessions. That changes the order of operations: the pages that produce demo requests, quote forms and phone calls get mapped first, verified first and monitored hardest through launch week. A blog tag archive can 404 for a day without consequence; the page ranking for your highest-intent commercial keyword cannot.
The muscle behind the checklist is the same team that runs our technical SEO service: log-file analysis, crawl-budget behavior, JavaScript rendering, schema parity. Migrations are where that knowledge stops being theoretical. Over 10+ years and 100+ clients across the USA, UK and EU we have ranked 200,000+ keywords in the top 3, and plenty of that equity has already survived a replatform or redesign under our watch.
Two honest caveats. No SEO migration agency can promise zero fluctuation: Google recrawls at its own pace, and a brief dip while indexation settles is physics, not malpractice. What we promise instead is that nothing gets lost to a mechanical error, an unmapped URL, a redirect chain, a noindex that slipped into production. And a migration will not fix rankings that were weak before it. If the baseline is the problem, we will say so before you spend money moving it. How that discipline plays out in practice is documented in our cases.
The engagement ends with a parity report, not a shrug: every inventoried URL accounted for, redirect status verified, rankings and traffic per template compared against the pre-launch benchmark, and a short watch-list of anything still settling. You keep the inventory and the map. If you migrate again in three years, the hardest artifact is already built.
