How much organic revenue is actually at risk if the migration goes wrong?

It depends on how much of your revenue is tied to organic traffic, but the answer is usually more than people expect. A botched migration can wipe 30-60% of organic visibility in a single deployment, and recovery is measured in months, not days. The risk compounds with scale – an ecommerce site with thousands of indexed product pages or a financial services brand with high-authority content pages has significantly more to lose than a 50-page corporate site. We quantify the exposure before work begins so leadership understands exactly what’s at stake and why the investment in specialist oversight is justified.

Our development team says they'll handle the SEO side - do we actually need external support?

Development teams are excellent at building the new platform. What they typically lack is the SEO-specific experience to know where migrations fail. Redirect mapping at scale, server log validation, crawl budget management, staging environment indexation, hreflang transfer for international sites – these are specialist requirements that sit outside most engineering workflows. The most common pattern we see is being brought in after launch to fix problems that could have been prevented with pre-migration planning. The cost of getting it right from the start is a fraction of the cost of recovering from a migration that went wrong.

We're on a fixed launch date - can you work within that timeline?

Yes. Most migrations operate on fixed timelines driven by commercial deadlines, contract renewals, or rebrand launch dates. We work backwards from your go-live date to build the migration plan, prioritising the highest-risk elements first. What we won’t do is tell you everything is fine if the timeline doesn’t allow for critical SEO requirements – if redirect mapping for 50,000 URLs needs four weeks and the team has scheduled two, that’s a conversation for leadership before launch, not after. Realistic planning upfront prevents expensive post-launch recovery.

How long does it typically take for organic traffic to recover after a migration?

Even a well-executed migration will see a period of volatility as search engines recrawl and reindex the new site. For a straightforward platform change with clean redirect mapping, expect two to six weeks before traffic stabilises. Domain migrations take longer – typically six to twelve weeks for the authority transfer to settle. Large-scale international consolidations can take three to six months across all markets. The critical difference is between planned volatility that recovers on schedule and unplanned losses caused by errors that compound over time. We monitor daily post-launch and flag anything that deviates from the expected recovery curve.

What does your involvement look like alongside our existing agency and dev team?

We act as the SEO authority within the migration project, not as a replacement for your development or agency team. In practice, that means owning the redirect strategy, reviewing technical requirements against the new platform, running pre-launch validation, and providing the migration plan your teams execute against. We sit in the project standups, review staging deployments, and escalate risks to leadership when something needs a decision. Post-launch, we monitor recovery metrics and flag issues in real time. The goal is that your existing teams have clear SEO requirements from day one, not a retrospective audit after something breaks.

SEO Migration Services

Rebranding, replatforming, or consolidating domains is high-stakes for organic revenue. We provide the technical oversight that ensures your new site launches cleanly and your existing visibility transfers with it, not disappears.

Discuss Your Migration

WHAT WE DELIVER

SEO Migration Services

We don’t just protect what you have. We use the migration as an opportunity to strengthen organic visibility so the new site launches in a better position than the old one.

End-to-End Migration Planning
Detailed pre- and post-migration planning that covers every technical and operational requirement. A clear roadmap your SEO, engineering, and product teams can execute against with confidence, not a checklist they have to interpret.

Redirect Mapping That Preserves Equity
Complete redirect mapping with full documentation, ensuring the link equity, rankings, and authority your pages have earned transfers cleanly to the new URL structure. Every redirect decision tied to commercial value, not just technical completeness.

UAT Testing & Pre-Launch Validation
Full user acceptance testing across templates, functionality, tracking, and SEO-critical elements before anything goes live. Catching the issues that cause post-launch panic before they reach production.

Performance Monitoring & Risk Tracking
Comprehensive reporting throughout the migration to track indexing, rankings, traffic, and risk indicators in real time. Giving leadership visibility into migration health so decisions are based on data, not gut feel.

Stakeholder Communication & Alignment
Keeping product, engineering, marketing, and leadership aligned throughout the migration process. Clear communication that ensures everyone understands the timeline, risks, and their responsibilities.

Contingency Planning & Risk Mitigation
Comprehensive risk assessment and fallback plans for when things don’t go as expected, because they rarely do. Issues identified and addressed before and after launch so recovery is fast, not reactive.

Domain Acquisition & Due Diligence
Supporting domain acquisition decisions with SEO due diligence, integration planning, and risk assessment. Ensuring the domain you’re buying or migrating to won’t inherit hidden problems.

SOUND FAMILIAR?

SEO Migration Scenarios

Most migration engagements start with one of these situations. In practice, it’s often a combination of several at once.

^{DOMAIN REBRAND}You’re moving from brand.co to brand.com and need the domain change handled alongside a full site redesign.

You’re rebranding and the domain is changing. This is the highest-risk migration type because it touches every part of the digital ecosystem: SEO, CRM, paid media, social, and email. You need someone who has managed these before and knows where things go wrong.

^{CONTENT CONSOLIDATION & URL RESTRUCTURE}Your redesign involves consolidating content, creating new pages, and restructuring every URL on the site.

It’s not just a domain move. Content is being merged, removed, or rewritten. The URL structure is changing entirely. Without precise redirect mapping and careful planning, years of organic equity can be lost in a single deployment.

^{POST-INVESTMENT CONSOLIDATION}You’ve secured funding or acquired brands and need to consolidate multiple legacy sites into one domain.
Series A, PE acquisition, or brand rollup. Multiple legacy sites with their own traffic, authority, and backlink profiles need to come together under one roof. The risk is high but the growth potential is significant if the migration is handled correctly.

^{PLATFORM REPLATFORMING}You’re moving from one ecommerce platform to another and can’t afford to lose product page visibility.
Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus, Magento to BigCommerce, or a custom build to a headless CMS. The platform changes but your product, category, and transactional pages need to carry their rankings through the transition.

^{INTERNATIONAL DOMAIN CONSOLIDATION}You’re merging geo-specific sites into a single .com and need international SEO signals handled precisely.
Multiple country-specific domains being consolidated into one. Hreflang setup, redirect mapping, content consolidation, and geo-targeting all need to be correct or you’ll lose market visibility across every region simultaneously.

^{MULTIPLE SCENARIOS AT ONCE}Your migration combines several of the above, which is often the reality.
A rebrand, a platform change, a content restructure, and a domain consolidation happening in the same project. When organisations evolve their brand, technology, content, and domain strategy simultaneously, you need a single point of SEO oversight across all of it.

Discuss Your Migration

Frequently asked questions

Have questions?
We have answers.

Have more questions?
Speak to our founder, Carl

Book a call

How much organic revenue is actually at risk if the migration goes wrong?
It depends on how much of your revenue is tied to organic traffic, but the answer is usually more than people expect. A botched migration can wipe 30-60% of organic visibility in a single deployment, and recovery is measured in months, not days. The risk compounds with scale – an ecommerce site with thousands of indexed product pages or a financial services brand with high-authority content pages has significantly more to lose than a 50-page corporate site. We quantify the exposure before work begins so leadership understands exactly what’s at stake and why the investment in specialist oversight is justified.
Our development team says they'll handle the SEO side - do we actually need external support?
Development teams are excellent at building the new platform. What they typically lack is the SEO-specific experience to know where migrations fail. Redirect mapping at scale, server log validation, crawl budget management, staging environment indexation, hreflang transfer for international sites – these are specialist requirements that sit outside most engineering workflows. The most common pattern we see is being brought in after launch to fix problems that could have been prevented with pre-migration planning. The cost of getting it right from the start is a fraction of the cost of recovering from a migration that went wrong.
We're on a fixed launch date - can you work within that timeline?
Yes. Most migrations operate on fixed timelines driven by commercial deadlines, contract renewals, or rebrand launch dates. We work backwards from your go-live date to build the migration plan, prioritising the highest-risk elements first. What we won’t do is tell you everything is fine if the timeline doesn’t allow for critical SEO requirements – if redirect mapping for 50,000 URLs needs four weeks and the team has scheduled two, that’s a conversation for leadership before launch, not after. Realistic planning upfront prevents expensive post-launch recovery.
How long does it typically take for organic traffic to recover after a migration?
Even a well-executed migration will see a period of volatility as search engines recrawl and reindex the new site. For a straightforward platform change with clean redirect mapping, expect two to six weeks before traffic stabilises. Domain migrations take longer – typically six to twelve weeks for the authority transfer to settle. Large-scale international consolidations can take three to six months across all markets. The critical difference is between planned volatility that recovers on schedule and unplanned losses caused by errors that compound over time. We monitor daily post-launch and flag anything that deviates from the expected recovery curve.
What does your involvement look like alongside our existing agency and dev team?
We act as the SEO authority within the migration project, not as a replacement for your development or agency team. In practice, that means owning the redirect strategy, reviewing technical requirements against the new platform, running pre-launch validation, and providing the migration plan your teams execute against. We sit in the project standups, review staging deployments, and escalate risks to leadership when something needs a decision. Post-launch, we monitor recovery metrics and flag issues in real time. The goal is that your existing teams have clear SEO requirements from day one, not a retrospective audit after something breaks.

See the results

See how strategic SEO and AI Search consultancy turned into measurable growth.

What we did

Long-term client engagement delivering consecutive year-on-year growth and achieving market-leader status. Work included technical SEO, strategic direction, stakeholder communication, reporting, and global stakeholder management. Multi-product focus across mutual funds, 401(k) solutions, and sustainable investing.

What they said

“Working with our company is very demanding, and there are many levels of approval to go through for work to be implemented. Carl has always been very responsive and goes beyond the typical scope of any project, providing us with all angles of technical solutions and detailed recommendations for content optimisations.”

Jennifer Xiques

Global Head of SEO

What we did

Improving B2C & B2B user journeys through query intent and optimising internal page signals.

What they said

As someone who has been doing SEO for about 10 years and having worked on companies of all shapes and sizes myself, I can tell the difference between someone who gets their hands dirty and delves into the deepest regions of your site vs an SEO “expert” who pushes a button and runs a site audit report only to tell you you have “12 duplicate title tags.” Carl is definitely the former, and whenever I need a fresh set of eyes on my site, I call him.

Brendan Baker

Director of Growth Marketing

What we did

Supporting SEO strategy and execution across a number of Apax portfolio brands.

What they said

“His knowledge base expands far beyond SEO having run many successful affiliate sites in his down time. His day-to-day work of planning and implementing SEO strategies for major, FTSE 100 brands was first class. He’ll also know the very latest news on domains, ecommerce and pretty much everything else you’ll wish to mention when it comes to running a successful business online.”

David Burgess

Operating Executive

What we did

A detailed technical SEO audit assessed the platform’s architecture and server logs to uncover crawl issues and indexing gaps. The work focused on strengthening geo-specific targeting and capturing high-intent commercial queries, alongside a review of the existing JavaScript framework.

What they said

“Addressing technical SEO challenges at the global domain level requires deep expertise and strategic thinking.

Carl and his team didn’t just conduct an audit – they uncovered the infrastructure-level opportunities that were holding back our entire global platform. Their comprehensive server log analysis, technical audit, content & UX audit as well as a discovery review gave us the clarity and confidence to secure cross-divisional investment for the project.

What sets Audits.com apart is their ability to translate complex technical findings into actionable business priorities that resonate with stakeholders. Their expertise in the financial services sector, combined with their hands-on approach, turned a complex challenge into a clear roadmap for transformation across our divisions.”

Mel Poole

IG Markets (APAC+ME)

What we did

What they said

“Working with Carl has been a game changer for our SEO. He cuts through the noise, finds what really matters, and turns it into a clear, prioritised roadmap my team can execute. Within a few months we’d fixed long-standing technical issues and unlocked meaningful organic growth. ”

Oliver Garas

Head Of Digital Marketing & Website PO

What we did

Comprehensive organic search review across multiple websites within the Citation Group portfolio. Each site received a tailored analysis with prioritised recommendations, supported by group-level dashboard reporting, LLM/AI search visibility reporting via in-house technology, and content recommendations aligned to user search intent.

What they said

I’ve worked with the team at Audits a number of times over the past 10+ years. They consistently identify the key factors limiting performance and provide clear, data-led recommendations. Their support for internal teams is invaluable, and they’re always responsive, approachable, and communicate in plain English.