SEO Migration Service: What It Covers and How to Buy It

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What a competent migration engagement does

1. Inventory everything before anything changes. Crawl the live site, pull every URL that has received search impressions or clicks in the last year from Search Console, add every URL with inbound links, and reconcile all three lists. Migrations fail on the URLs nobody remembered, which are almost always old pages that still earn links or traffic quietly.
2. Map old to new, one to one, and get it signed off. Every retained URL needs a destination and every retired URL needs a decision: redirect to the closest equivalent, or return a clean gone status deliberately. Bulk redirecting everything to the homepage is the classic failure. The map should be a reviewed spreadsheet, approved by someone who knows the content.
3. Test on staging before launch, not in production. Run the redirect map against staging, check status codes and chain lengths, verify canonical tags, robots directives and structured data survived the rebuild, and confirm the new templates render for crawlers. Google's own guidance on site moves with URL changes describes the sequence; the testing step is the one most often skipped for schedule reasons.
4. Launch in a controlled window, then watch daily. Avoid launching before a holiday or a peak trading week. Submit updated sitemaps, monitor crawl stats, index coverage and status code errors daily for the first fortnight, and keep a rollback decision point. Recovery is possible; discovering the problem six weeks later usually is not, cheaply.

When you need a migration service and when you do not

You need one whenever URLs change at scale, the domain changes, two sites merge, or a platform replacement will regenerate the URL structure. You probably do not need a dedicated engagement for a visual refresh that leaves URLs, page content and templates intact, though even then it is worth a short review, because redesigns frequently delete text that was doing the ranking without anyone intending to.

The most under-recognised case is a content consolidation: merging an acquired site, or collapsing a sprawling blog into fewer pages. Those look like content projects and are actually migrations, with the same redirect and mapping requirements and the same failure modes.

What it costs and how it is priced

Migration work is usually quoted as a fixed-scope project, sized by URL count, template count and complexity, with an optional monitoring retainer covering the weeks after launch. The cost drivers are the number of URLs to map, whether more than one source site is involved, whether international configuration is in play, and how much of the testing the provider must do versus your engineering team. A domain change with a few hundred pages is a different order of work from merging three catalogues of tens of thousands.

Compare quotes on deliverables rather than hours: the URL map, the redirect specification, a pre-launch test report, a launch-day checklist and a defined monitoring window. A quote that names all five is comparable. A quote that promises migration support is not.

How to judge a provider

Ask for a redacted redirect specification and a pre-launch test report from a previous migration. These are the working documents of the trade and they are far more revealing than a case study. Ask what the largest migration they have run was, what went wrong on it, and what they changed afterwards. Everyone who has run several has a story; a candidate with no failures has either not run many or is not being candid.

Ask who is on call during launch and for how long afterwards, and confirm that a rollback plan exists and that someone with production access has agreed to it. Ask, finally, what they expect from your engineering team, in hours and in specific tasks. Migrations go wrong at the seam between the plan and whoever implements it, and a provider who has not scoped your side of the work has not scoped the project.

Questions people actually ask

How much traffic should we expect to lose?

A well-executed migration commonly shows a short dip while search engines reprocess the new URLs, followed by recovery within weeks. Sustained loss is a sign of a mapping or implementation problem, not an inevitability. Anyone who tells you a large permanent drop is normal is describing their own track record.

When should the SEO provider be involved?

Before the URL structure is decided, which usually means before design is finalised. Bringing them in during the final week reduces the engagement to damage control, because by then the decisions that cause migration losses have already been made and paid for.

How long should redirects stay in place?

Treat them as permanent infrastructure. Search engines eventually update their index, but inbound links and bookmarks persist for years, so removing redirects after a few months quietly discards accumulated authority and sends real people to error pages.

Can our development agency handle it instead?

Sometimes, if they have run migrations before and will produce the same deliverables: a reconciled URL inventory, an approved mapping, a pre-launch test report and a monitoring plan. The risk is not competence in general, it is that redirect mapping is nobody's named responsibility until after launch.

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