SEO Migration

Corndel moved their entire site to a new CMS while we ran the SEO side. Domain authority held at 40 through the switch and has since risen to 50. Referring domains went from 328 to 324, which is noise rather than loss. The migration also surfaced more than 2,000 monthly click opportunities the old structure had been hiding.

AlumierMD was harder, because it was three territories at once. We kept site health above 95 through the move, organic clicks rose 7.5%, and click-through rate rose 25.8% as the new templates started earning better listings. The US and Canadian domains held their authority alongside the UK one.

Both of those ran to the same five stage plan, and the order matters more than any single step. Crawl and record the old site before anything changes, because you cannot prove what you preserved if you never measured it. Map every URL, including the ones nobody remembers. Build the redirects as a spreadsheet you can test rather than a rule in a config file. Launch and monitor either side of the switch. Then spend the following month recovering the things that always slip, because something always slips.

The failure mode we see most often in sites that come to us after a bad migration is not a missing redirect. It is a redirect chain three or four hops long, pointing at a page that no longer covers the topic the original page ranked for. The link still resolves, so nobody notices for a quarter, and by then the rankings are gone.

What we will not do is promise zero movement. Traffic dips of a few weeks are normal on a large replatform, and an agency guaranteeing otherwise is either not being straight with you or plans to blame the dev team. What we commit to is the plan, the monitoring and the recovery work, and a number you can check against the one we recorded before the switch.

Matt scopes and runs migrations personally.

If you are choosing an SEO migration agency, ask for two things before you sign anything: the before crawl from a migration they ran, and the traffic graph either side of the switch. Any agency that has done this properly keeps both, because they are the only evidence that the work held. If they cannot produce them, you are paying for a redirect spreadsheet and a hope.