Don’t risk losing all your hard SEO work, page 1 rankings and brand visibility online, just because you want to make significant changes to your website. We see this all the time but it’s very easy to avoid, simply by talking to an SEO consultant and putting certain measures in place.
Whether you’re redesigning your site, changing CMS, moving domain or restructuring, SEO must be taken into account from the start of the migration process.
Website redesigns, rebrands and domain changes are exciting – and, in many cases, necessary if you want your site to rank well in both traditional search results and AI citations.
But not factoring in SEO from the outset can mean that any progress you’ve made in search over the years is entirely lost.
The Ad Rank One team works to ensure that all rankings thus far achieved and all technical onsite SEO conducted previously is safeguarded through in-depth planning, expertise and experience.
Our goal is to give you a fresh start, a new perspective and an uptick in performance over time.
Optimising your visibility across
Your website is your calling card. You need customers to be able to see it and you need to ensure that digital visibility isn’t compromised… which can easily happen if you don’t seek SEO migration guidance before making major changes. But we’re here to lend a hand!
Never take your SEO rankings for granted. There are no guarantees when it comes to search results and the landscape is a very fluid one. Enjoying page 1 results and consistent AI citations takes a lot of work to achieve and a lot of work to maintain.
Top results are also very easy to lose if you don’t factor in SEO whenever you make significant changes to the design or structure of your website.
When carried out professionally, site migrations can really deliver in terms of enhanced user experience and overall site performance – which is why businesses go down this route, of course.
But without expert support every step of the way, you risk losing all SEO value thus far achieved.
It’s entirely normal (and expected!) for site migrations to cause an initial drop in traffic, anywhere between five and 30 per cent. But bouncing back from this happens relatively quickly, with previous positions regained – and, in many cases, surpassed.
Search engines need time to crawl and understand the changes that you’ve made to your site. Without appropriate SEO support, you could lose up to 80 per cent of your traffic and this is significantly harder to recover from.
So don’t give up your rankings for the sake of a shiny new website or a new domain name. The two are not mutually exclusive!
All you need is Ad Rank One guiding you throughout the process to build resilience online.
+90%
Organic revenue, 24 months year on year
90% More Organic Revenue for a Prop Trading Firm
Rebrand, Domain Move and a New WordPress Site for a London Yoga and Pilates Studio
Website Redesign and SEO Migration for a Commercial Flooring Specialist
New WordPress Site and SEO Migration for a Preston Aesthetics Clinic
100 2,000
Monthly organic users, 24 months
Wix to WordPress Migration and SEO for a London Wellness Centre
+28%
Organic clicks, 3 months YoY, from near-zero visibility
Near-Zero Visibility to Page 1 for a Private Oncology Centre
+50%
Enquiries through organic search, 6 months vs the previous 6 months
226 to 754 Page 1 Positions for a Private Neuroscience Centre
+49%
Daily organic clicks, since the new site launched on 15 July
Local SEO and a New WordPress Build for a Bespoke Furniture Maker
+37%
Organic clicks, 3 months year on year, post relaunch
Bespoke WordPress Rebuild and SEO for a B2B LED Screen Retailer
+42%
Organic ecommerce revenue, in 90 days
Capturing Page 1 and AI Citations for a Luxury Cigar Brand
+679%
Organic users, 3-month average
Unranked to Page 1 for a Custom Furniture Brand
£0 £700k
Monthly online revenue, in just 18 months
£0 to £700k Monthly Revenue for a Gym E-commerce Brand
Enter your website and our team will take a proper look, then talk you through exactly what we’d do differently.
100% free No obligation Genuine advice
You can’t afford to lose your digital visibility as a smaller local business. A strong online presence is a must for local consumers to view you as trustworthy and genuine. But if your site is down, hard to use or difficult to find, your traffic will take a hit.
Don’t take the risk!
As an ecommerce site, you’ll likely have hundreds of product pages that you need to rank for in order to drive revenue. A poor site migration that doesn’t factor in SEO can see you slide into oblivion and your competitors take centre stage.
Don’t let it happen!
Trust and authenticity are key in the digital sphere, where there’s so much noise that consumers have to cut through in order to find what they’re looking for. Your website needs to be fit for purpose at all times.
Don’t compromise this by sidestepping SEO migration support!
If you’re doing any of the following work on your site, it’s advisable to ensure that you have SEO support in place before implementing any changes:
– Replatforming, where you migrate from one CMS to another. Common issues include URL changes, different SEO plugins and new canonicalisation strategies.
– Site redesigns, where significant changes take place. Common issues include vanishing internal links, header tags, keywords, FAQs and so on.
– New site structure, where URLs, breadcrumbs and internal links are affected.
– Domain changes, where URL structure changes take place and there’s an increased risk of backlink loss and missing 301 redirects.
– Site location changes, where top-level domains migrate to a different country, affecting local ranking achievements.
– Website consolidation, where you want all websites you have brought together in one place. Issues such as URL changes, content duplication and different content strategies may complicate matters.
Changing the domain name of your website is a risk if not done properly. You could see your digital authority disappear overnight. But a seamless transition is certainly possible if you have the proper support in place and work in a way that search engines understand.
A solid migration checklist would include a full audit, server-level configuration, staged testing and ongoing maintenance… but you can leave all this to us.
Both these types of migration are significant events in the world of SEO but they are very different.
A domain migration will see your web address change, with the main SEO risk loss of historical domain authority and backlink equity.
Meanwhile, a CMS (content management system) migration changes the software that powers your site. The main risk here is changes to source code, mobile responsiveness, page speed and internal linking.
The associated migration costs will depend on the level of work involved. If it’s a simple project, such as a hosting migration, it could cost between £100 and £500. A domain migration, meanwhile, could cost up to £1,000.
More complex projects, such as platform migrations, could cost between £1,000 and £7,000.
Site migrations are a gradual process that can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to stabilise.
When Google Search Console’s Change of Address tool is used alongside 301 redirects, this is registered almost immediately and you’ll start to see traffic rerouting straight away.
From there, crawlers begin verifying the stability of your redirects, building trust and moving canonical status from old URLs to new ones. It can take up to six months for the index to clean up fully.
In an ideal world, you’d freeze content changes during a migration. It’s important for search engine crawlers to understand why the site is changing.
And if you see a drop in traffic, you won’t be able to tell what the reason behind the drop is. Isolate the variables so you know what’s happening and why.
But all of this is something we can advise you on, so give the Ad Rank One team a call to discuss your site migrations today.
