SEO should join a migration as early as possible, to align dev and design throughout and to guide strategic decisions about content cleanup.
A migration is the moment to clean up zombie content and to close the content gaps you didn't know you had.
Some traffic loss after a migration is close to inevitable. But traffic alone as a metric isn't enough to measure success.
Content still matters even as sites get more transactional - it's what search engines and LLMs use to establish your expertise.
What this video covers
The technical side of a migration is rarely the hardest part. The bigger risk is timing - bringing SEO into the conversation early enough to actually shape decisions, instead of after they're already made at the leadership level and handed down the pipeline.
That's the throughline below: when to bring SEO in, what to clean up, and what to actually measure once the new site is live.
Bring SEO into the room as early as possible
How early depends on the type of migration. A straightforward design refresh is a different project than one where 90% of your content needs removing.
Either way, someone needs to assess the site and build a roadmap from the beginning. Ideally before decisions made at the C-level are handed down the pipeline. At that point it may already be too late, especially if you're moving to a new platform, where the developer team needs real lead time to build the new backend.
The SEO lead can be the communication hub between developers, designers, and leadership, coordinating the whole effort instead of being looped in after the fact.
Planning strategically ahead is cheaper, faster, and safer than cleaning up afterward.
Build the information architecture before you build anything else
Information architecture comes first:
- What's the core of your business
- What you want to say
- What gives you the best visibility across search engines
That means knowing two things upfront - your message and your audience. From there, a proper content strategy covers more than the words on the page. It shapes how the site is structured, which pages are prominent and why, and it feeds directly into planning for multi-channel communication, which matters more than ever in the age of AI.
Clean up zombie content - and close the gaps you didn't know you had
Most migrations turn into cleanup projects, whether that was the plan or not. On most sites, very few pages are actually driving clicks, impressions, or leads. The rest can drag the whole domain down in search visibility.
An SEO can assess what's relevant to your current audience and offerings, decide what to remove, refresh, or consolidate, and catch pages ranking for keywords that have nothing to do with your brand.
The flip side of cleanup is the gap: search terms your audience is actively using, related directly to what you offer, that your site has never properly covered.
A content gap analysis surfaces those blind spots so they can be filled as part of the migration plan, instead of discovered afterward.
Traffic will dip. Plan for it, and measure past it
Some traffic loss after a migration is close to inevitable, even for a design-only update that keeps the same domain and structure. If the migration is planned and executed well, that dip should be short-lived, and the traffic would recover and eventually exceed its previous levels.
But traffic alone is becoming a vanity metric fast if it isn't converting into real leads and pipeline.
As AI Overviews and zero-click search change how people interact with results, clicks are dropping even as impressions go up - that's the search landscape shifting, not your migration underperforming.
A website migration is an opportune moment to pair traffic with lead quality and pipeline impact, and layer in direct feedback from visitors about the new site's navigation and design.
That feedback does double duty: it tells you what to fix, and it sharpens your understanding of your actual ICP.
Your website is more transactional now, but content still matters
Buyers increasingly choose a vendor before they ever click through to your site, informing themselves elsewhere and treating your website more as a transactional stop than a place to be educated. That shift is real, but it doesn't mean you can cut content aggressively during a migration.
To be visible and trusted in the first place, a site still needs to demonstrate expertise - through guides, case studies, and content that clearly addresses the problems you solve.
That content might not get read by many humans, but it gets read by search engines and LLMs, which infer your expertise from it and route traffic and trust accordingly.
The balance matters: too little content and the site reads like a storefront with no credibility; too much unfocused content and you're back to zombie pages.
And the shift keeps on - agentic search, where a browser can complete a purchase on your behalf without a visit to your site at all, is already changing the interaction model further.
Get SEO, dev, and design in the same room
The technical work on a migration can be flawless and still go wrong if the teams involved aren't talking to each other early and often.
Developers and designers often see different pictures on the same page. A designer focuses on usability and aesthetics, which doesn't always translate directly into what a developer builds, and a developer might work on just a menu without a full view of the page it lives on.
Basic SEO requirements, like whether a page can actually be crawled or whether the information architecture holds up, can fall through exactly that gap.
Treat cross-team alignment as a core item on your migration checklist, not a nice-to-have. Regular check-ins between SEO, dev, and design leads keep decisions coordinated, and prevent solvable misalignments from spinning into months or years of lost visibility.
The bottom line: treat your website migration as a strategic project decision, not just a technical one. Plan for it, invest in the SEO work early, and align your teams from the start - the upfront cost is always cheaper than fixing it after launch.