Migrate Without Losing the Organic Traffic You Spent Years Building

Forrester research shows site migrations lose 10-30% of organic traffic without proper planning. For enterprise sites generating millions in organic revenue, that loss translates directly to the bottom line.

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10-30%

of organic traffic is lost during site migrations without dedicated SEO planning -- for enterprise sites generating $10M+ in organic revenue, this represents $1-3M in annual revenue at risk

Forrester, 2022

Migration Planning

Enterprise site migration planning covering URL mapping, redirect strategy, crawl budget preservation, and risk mitigation for platform moves, domain consolidations, CMS transitions, and rebrands at scale.

What's Included

Everything you get with our Migration Planning

Complete URL Inventory and Redirect Mapping

Every URL on the current site cataloged with its organic traffic, backlink authority, ranking keywords, and mapped to its new destination -- ensuring no page with SEO value is lost, orphaned, or redirected to a generic fallback

Crawl Budget Impact Modeling

Pre-migration analysis of how the new URL structure, redirect chains, and architecture changes will affect crawl budget allocation -- identifying issues that would cause Googlebot to waste resources on low-value pages while missing critical content

Pre-Launch SEO Validation

Comprehensive pre-launch audit of the staging environment: redirect accuracy, internal linking preservation, hreflang continuity, structured data validation, and canonical chain verification across every page and language version

Post-Migration Monitoring Plan

Monitoring framework that tracks indexation, ranking, and traffic recovery after launch with predefined thresholds that trigger investigation and intervention when performance deviates from expected recovery patterns

Rollback Contingency Plan

Documented rollback procedures for critical scenarios: if organic traffic drops below defined thresholds within specific timeframes, the team has pre-planned steps to reverse the migration or implement emergency fixes

Our Migration Planning Process

Current State Inventory

We crawl and catalog every URL on the current site with its organic traffic, backlink profile, ranking keywords, and business value. This becomes the master reference for redirect mapping and the baseline for post-migration performance comparison.

URL Mapping and Redirect Strategy

Every URL is mapped to its destination on the new platform. Pages with organic value get one-to-one redirects. Consolidated pages get redirect logic that preserves the most equity. Eliminated pages get redirects to the most relevant alternative. No page with SEO value redirects to a homepage or category fallback.

Architecture and Crawl Budget Analysis

We model how the new site architecture affects crawl budget allocation, internal link equity distribution, and indexation patterns. We identify structural changes that could suppress performance and recommend architectural adjustments before development is finalized.

Pre-Launch SEO Audit

We audit the staging environment against the migration plan: every redirect verified, internal links tested, hreflang annotations validated, structured data confirmed, canonical chains checked. Issues are documented with specific fix instructions for the development team.

Launch Support and Post-Migration Monitoring

We monitor Search Console, analytics, and rankings in real-time during and after launch. Predefined alert thresholds trigger immediate investigation when metrics deviate from expected patterns. We continue monitoring for 90 days post-launch to ensure full organic recovery.

Key Benefits

Protect millions in organic revenue during platform transitions

Enterprise sites often generate $5-50M annually from organic search. A 10-30% traffic loss means $500K to $15M at risk. Comprehensive migration planning with URL-level redirect mapping, crawl budget modeling, and pre-launch validation keeps organic performance intact through the transition.

Avoid the 12-18 month recovery period from botched migrations

When enterprise migrations go wrong, the organic traffic loss compounds. Rankings drop, click-through rates decline, backlink equity dissipates through broken redirects, and competitors capture the demand you vacated. Recovery takes 12-18 months even with aggressive remediation. Proper planning avoids this scenario entirely.

Migrate with confidence using pre-launch validation

Our pre-launch audit of the staging environment catches redirect errors, broken internal links, missing structured data, and hreflang problems before they affect live traffic. Your team launches knowing that every SEO element has been verified, not hoping that nothing was missed.

Preserve backlink equity that took years to accumulate

Enterprise domains accumulate backlinks from thousands of referring domains over many years. When URLs change without proper redirect mapping, that equity is lost page by page. Our URL inventory maps every backlink to its new destination, ensuring authority flows to the correct pages on the new platform.

Research & Evidence

Backed by industry research and proven results

Search as Primary Channel

68% of online experiences begin with a search engine -- site migrations that damage organic visibility directly reduce the largest digital acquisition channel for most enterprise organizations

BrightEdge (2019)

Organic Traffic Value

SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social -- losing even 10% of this channel during a migration represents a traffic loss that cannot be offset by scaling other organic channels

Conductor (2023)

Frequently Asked Questions

How far in advance should migration planning start?

Ideally 3-6 months before launch for large enterprise sites. The URL inventory and redirect mapping phase alone takes 4-8 weeks for sites with hundreds of thousands of pages. Starting early means SEO requirements can be built into the new platform architecture rather than bolted on after development is underway.

What types of migrations carry the most SEO risk?

Domain changes (rebrand or consolidation) carry the highest risk because they require the most redirects and reset domain authority signals. Platform migrations with URL structure changes are next. CMS transitions that maintain URL structures carry lower risk but still require validation of technical SEO elements like structured data, canonical tags, and rendering behavior.

What happens if organic traffic drops after migration?

Our post-migration monitoring framework includes predefined response playbooks. Minor drops (under 5%) within the first two weeks are expected as Google recrawls and reprocesses. Drops exceeding our threshold triggers trigger investigation into specific causes -- broken redirects, indexation issues, crawl budget problems -- with remediation plans executed within 24-48 hours.

Do you handle the redirect implementation or just the planning?

We deliver the complete redirect map and technical specifications. Implementation is typically handled by your engineering team since they control the platform. We provide implementation validation -- testing every redirect after deployment -- and work directly with your engineers to resolve any issues found during QA.

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Protect Your Organic Revenue During Migration

Get a migration plan that maps every URL, models crawl budget impact, and validates every redirect before launch -- so your organic traffic survives the transition.