SEO Migration Recovery Services

Migration Recovery Key Take Aways

• The majority of SEO damage from a website relaunch comes from issues that weren't spotted before go-live.

• Migration SEO damage can take weeks to reflect in your rankings, traffic and revenue.

• Recovery from a website relaunch can take from a few weeks to over a year.

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Our Traffic Dropped After A Website Redesign - What Now?

If you've recently redesigned your website, relaunched to a new CMS platform, or carried out any other kind of website migration, you may have noticed SEO rankings falling as a result of post-migration issues. This often requires the assistance of an experienced SEO consultant to analyse the issues, formulate an SEO strategy and oversee the execution of that strategy. While recovery is seldom as overnight as post-migration problems, it is possible to return or even exceed previous traffic and sales. If your traffic has dropped overnight, it may be the result of a recent migration that search engines are critical of - if that is the case, it's worth having a call with an SEO professional to build and execute a roadmap for recovery of the organic traffic channel.

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Did You Recently Launch A New Website, Change Domain Or Move CMS?

SEO migrations come in different shapes and sizes, and all of them can affect your website's organic performance.

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• CMS migration - moving to a new CMS platform opens you up to a range of problems if not executed to perfection. If your rankings start declining in the weeks following your CMS migration, then an SEO specialist may need to help recover your lost rankings.

• Website redesign - relaunching your website with a new design can create a whole host of technical problems upon go-live. Fortunately a good SEO can identify these quickly, but fixing them can take time.

• Domain migration - sometimes the wider business strategy required moving to a new domain name. It could be a new name for the business, it could be moving from .com to .co.uk (or from .co.uk to .com). Planning and preparation is everything with this type of migration, and if not executed to perfection, issues can show up.

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If you've undergone any of these projects and your rankings are declining, then it could be that your migration had issues - contact North West SEO for a free discovery call to discuss your SEO recovery plan.

 

How Do I Know If My Migration Damaged My SEO?

The effects of problematic SEO migrations are progressive, not immediate following go-live, due to the issue affecting rankings as search engines re-crawl the site following go-live. That means there is a delay between a website relaunch causing SEO problems, and those problems affecting your rankings.

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Unless core pages have '404 error' status on go-live, your site will continue with some momentum and rankings will start being affected as search engines crawl your site over the next days and weeks. It could take a month to realise the full extent of your new website's problems. So how can you diagnose any problems as early as possible?

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Usually we can spot migration related SEO issues from the shape of the Impressions and the Clicks chart on Google Search Console. A sharp drop in traffic from your key pages suggests that the issue is site-wide or template level. While this has the most adverse effects on the business, usually the fix is down to one issue that can be addressed quickly. If the Search Console chart tapers off over time, then there's likely a range of issues affecting different pages, such as improperly actioned redirects. This level of issue is a slower burn on the business, but requires a full audit to find how many issues there are and where they are, before executing a remedy.

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What A Post-Migration Crawl Reveals

Site crawlers used by SEO professionals will flag up technical issues on your site immediately. Following the launch of the new design, new CMS or new domain, a post-launch crawl is standard practice. That being said, a pre-migration site crawl is the only sure-fire way to proactively find migration issues before they are published and affect your website's performance.

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What Google Search Console And Bing Webmaster Tools Show After A Migration

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If you are noticing a decline in clicks, impressions and average positions on both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, then you can confirm that it is not related to an algorithm update that has hurt your site. Alternatively, SEO news outlets will publicise any updates, so you can verify if an update has affected you or not.

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In our experience, an algorithm update is a giant refresh of the rankings, so any latent issues or improvements tend to kick in in bulk during these. Outside of updates, rankings change more or less on a case by case, page by page basis. So, if you're not paying attention to your web performance it could be several months before you realise your recent migration was a hand grenade for your rankings waiting to go off.

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​It's worth noting that Bing and Google crawl websites differently. Bing transfers authority only once it has recrawled a critical mass of your pages, which means Google search and Bing search performance will not recover in step.

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Was It The Migration, Or Was It A Google Update?

Google regularly updates its search algorithm, so there's the chance the ranking drop you're seeing isn't related to the website migration you've conducted, but rather the Google update. To make matters more complicated, Google updates act as re-calibrations of the index, so issues that were not causing rank drops before will start causing issues (the delay we previously mentioned), so in many cases the Google update triggers the SEO problems your migration caused, but isn't the actual cause.​

 

To confirm whether it's the migration or the update, compare Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. If both of these platforms show a decline, then the issue is on your website's end, and likely due to the migration project. If Bing performance holds steady, while Google performance is in decline, then it is likely the Google algorithm changing. Compare with Google Search Status Dashboard to see if there is an update rolling out and contact us for an algorithm update recovery strategy.

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The Four Types Of Migration Damage

When auditing a site following post-live issues, there is a checklist of common issues we crawl for, based on hard-earned experience covering multiple migration projects. Depending on developer resources these can usually be sorted with a bulk change ticket, or else require manual fixing within your CMS. By far, the issues arising from migrations are from incorrect implementation of small details on the site. In some cases, the new platform may have issues that cause search engines to lose trust.

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Not all faults break websites the same way, as this depends on the scale of the issue. For instance, sometimes title tags change in a migration, and depending how much of a revenue driver that page is, then the impact could range from 'hardly felt' to 'bring everything to its knees', same goes for the number of pages impacted.

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Cosmetic Loss: Metadata And On-Page Signals Broke

The mildest tier. Redirects are intact and the content is all there, but the signals describing it came across wrong.

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What you see:

Rankings wobble rather than collapse. Click-through rate drops before positions do, because the listing is describing the page badly. Often the only tier where the business spots it from the SERP rather than from analytics.

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What causes it:

• Incorrect title tags

• Incorrect descriptions

• Structured data dropped in the re-platform

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How we fix it:

Usually a bulk change ticket or a templating fix is required for these issues. We'll find them in a routine crawl of the website. For some websites, bulk changes are not possible and in those situations we will map out every instance, and implement the fix manually in the CMS.

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Recovery window:

One to two crawl cycles once corrected. The fastest of the four by a wide margin.

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Redirect Decay: Chains, Hops And Mass Redirects To The Homepage

The most common serious fault, and an issue that arises due to the problem not being noticed by the content team. Links still look like links, so these errors slip through. A pre-live crawl will flag these, but often deadlines are hard targets that must be met.

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What you see:

Deep pages die first while the homepage holds steady, so the business believes the site is fine for weeks. Category and product pages, or long-tail blog traffic, go before anything visible does.

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What causes it:

• New instances of internal links to redirects

• New instances of internal links to 404-errors

• Redirect chains and hops, where one URL passes through several before landing

• Mass redirects pointing everything at the homepage instead of the closest equivalent page

• http/https and www/non-www duplicates left resolving alongside each other

• Trailing slash inconsistency

• Internal links pointing to the staging URL

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How we fix it:

A working redirect is not the same as a correct redirect, so a full internal link audit is needed. We will bulk export every instance of every internal link, with the status of the destination, then compile a correct destination replacement, which will be executed, hopefully in bulk by your developers. Otherwise this needs to be done manually.

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Recovery window:

Weeks to months, depending on how much of the site is affected and how quickly it can be recrawled. The recovery window also depends on if the replacement destinations are implemented in bulk or manually.

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Content Loss: The URLs Survived But The Content Didn't

This tier of SEO damage from a website re-launch isn't from a technical SEO issue, but from the re-design itself. Content that has been cut for the re-design causes pages to lose rankings. Content loss is difficult to recover from, because it means pages need re-writes, or to be restored to their previous iteration, making this issue difficult for businesses to accept, because nothing is technically broken. Every crawl comes back clean and the rankings still slide.

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What you see:

This tier of damage will show no technical errors at all on a site crawl. In terms of performance, it will reflect as a steady decline rather than falling off a cliff. In Search Console, pages drifting into 'Crawled - currently not indexed', will show as a judgement about the page's worth rather than a technical blocker.

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What causes it:

• Copy cut during the redesign to make the layout breathe

• Content rendered client-side on a new JavaScript front end, so it is not reliably seen

• Internal link equity lost when contextual links were replaced by template navigation

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How we fix it:

Content loss related ranking decline requires a rebuild rather than fixing faults. Google must view the content of the new site as equal to that of the old site before new content can be added. Wayback Machine copies of the old site may be needed as reference to find what copy was lost in the migration.

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Recovery window:

Recovery from declined rankings due to cut content presents the longest recovery time, due to each affected page needing to be strengthened with new content. There is no bulk ticket for the dev team.

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What A Redesign Silently Deletes

A re-design of a website is meant to enhance the web experience for users, and therefore improve commercial performance for the business. Designers will re-work the page layout, adding components for a better visual aesthetic, and in some cases editorial decisions are made that some content must be cut. Migrations of any kind only work when Google perceives no difference in the before and the after, so radical layout changes with editorial content being removed creates a sense of whiplash for the search engine, and the result is it chooses to re-assess your page, and re-ranks it, sometimes lower.

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Re-designing websites need to take this into account - even keeping the content the same, but changing the page design too much can harm your rankings come the next crawl. No pre-live audit will pick up on this, and it is why post-launch monitoring is essential.

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Identity Loss: The Site Moved And Search Engines Didn't Keep Up

This tier of migration issue is the worst case scenario, and will likely only happen during domain migrations. In essence, for some reason, search engines have not understood that the new site and the old site are one and the same.

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What you see:

Near-total collapse on GSC. The old domain sometimes still ranking while the new one is barely indexed. In Search Console, pages sitting in 'Discovered – currently not indexed', meaning the URL is known but has not been judged worth crawling yet, making this a crawl allocation problem rather than a content problem.

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What causes it:

• Canonicalisation

• Unintended no-indexed pages

• The staging noindex or robots.txt disallow shipped to production

• No Change of Address submission on a domain move

• A redirect map that was never built at all

• Hreflang breakage, on international sites

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How we fix it:

We will work to re-establish the relationship between the old site and the new site before anything else is worth doing. That could mean checking canonical URLs are correct, that internal linking is correct, that redirects from the old site to the new site are working, or any other number of actions required. As usual, an audit will highlight the exact root cause, and from there we will address the root.

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Recovery window: 

Due to the severity of this issue, this will take months to execute a fix, and longer for the recovery to reflect in your rankings. It's worth noting that such a serious migration problem likely means rebuilding to a new baseline and recovering all pre-migration rankings can take years.

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These are by no means exhaustive issues, there are often issues that are very specific to the set up of the individual client.

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How We Rebuild Your Pre-Migration URL List

Many clients re-launch their websites and lose a record of what URLs the website used to have. North West SEO is experienced enough to know a pre-launch URL list isn't always available, and we are able to re-build your old URL list to a high degree.

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We had a case with a cybersecurity client that was redirecting an unused non-English domain into its flagship website, but had lost the URL map some years ago and no one had been in the CMS for some years. We rebuilt the URL list by exporting 12-months of data from Google Search Console, to be sure any low traffic pages are found. We can also combine this with GA4 data and the Wayback Machine to find URLs that weren't indexed on GSC.

 

It is not possible to find every page, but the good news is after a certain level of URL retrieval, it stops mattering about a few lost URLs. If we can't find them, they didn't rank well enough to worry about their lost authority.

 

Our SEO Migration Recovery Process

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We have experience helping businesses recover from imperfect SEO migrations, both as part of a full-time SEO project, and also as a one-off SEO project with a client. Regardless of the scope of the project or the scale of the site, we are able to work with you to return your SEO traffic to pre-migration levels.

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• Book your free discovery call and walk us through your recent migration

• We will conduct a Post-Migration Site Audit and Analysis

• We will put together a recovery roadmap and share that with you for sign off

• We will execute the pre-agreed plan with regular progress reports

• We will monitor and amend the work as needed

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It is worth noting that while we will do our best to identify what went wrong with your migration and to rectify the issues, as ever with SEO, complete recovery is not something we can promise. We do provide a support period to ensure the post-migration recovery has had all the work it needs.

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Fixing A Domain Migration: Redirects, Change Of Address And Authority Transfer

Losing organic visibility following a domain migration can be tough to recover from. If redirects were not implemented correctly, or Google's Change of Address tool (and Site Move Tool for Bing) was not used to inform the search engine of a domain change, then search engines will need to recalibrate your site's authority, making recovery of organic traffic an uphill battle.

 

North West SEO has experience helping businesses recover from domain migrations that haven't gone to plan, and we can build a roadmap that is suitable for your budget.

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Fixing A CMS Or Re-platforming Migration

Recovering lost rankings following a switch to a new platform or CMS can be tricky as it requires familiarisation with the new platform, but otherwise it is a standard SEO error-fixing process, so long as all major traffic generating pages were migrated too. It's worth noting that every CMS (and different versions between them) have their own quirks that affect SEO performance. These idiosyncrasies may mean SEO flexibility on one platform is a compromise on the new platform, and as a result some SEO benefits may need workarounds as part of the migration.  

 

North West SEO has years of SEO experience on a multitude of CMSs, from WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Umbraco and many other custom-built CMSs. We are able to hit the ground running and begin the optimisation process on your new platform, whatever it is.

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Why Bing And Copilot Won't Recover At The Same Time As Google

Being different search engines, Bing handles migrations differently to Google - and this will impact anything Bing affects, such as Copilot citations and any other LLMs that use Bing's index. Once your migration is live, use IndexNow to force a re-crawl of your website. If you've moved to a new domain, use the Site Move Tool to let Bing know. Bing will crawl your website in due course, but since its crawlers utilise different crawl budgets from Google's, a migration recovery can look complete on one search engine, while another still pulls from an as-yet un-updated index.

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Should You Roll Back The Migration?

Sometimes the correct call is to roll-back the migration. Only do this if the old site is still intact on staging, and if the issues run deeper than SEO technicalities that are hurting the business, but the damage hasn't fully rolled out yet.

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What An SEO Specialist Needs To Begin Your Organic Recovery

Regardless of who you ask to help you in your post-migration recovery, you will need to provide them with as much data as possible. This includes:

• Google Search Console access

• Bing Webmaster Tools access

• Analytics access (usually GA4, but can be anything)

• Web Dev agency contact details

• Day and time of website re-launch

• Any SEO benchmarking you undertook

  • Pre-launch Screaming Frog crawls​

  • Pre-launch traffic and conversion performance

  • Pre-launch keyword tracking and ranking reports

• URL redirect maps, if available

• Old sitemaps, if available

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These help your SEO consultant to objectively establish how the website performed before the migration, and measure future performance and recovery efforts against this pre-existing data.

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We understand it is not always available - we have helped clients that had no GA4 connectivity before we undertook any SEO work for them, so while these are good to have as they give a clear target for recovery, an experienced SEO knows that recovery may sometimes be a verbal agreement on what performance should look like in a set timeframe.

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How Long Does SEO Migration Recovery Take?

As with any SEO project, there is no clear-cut time scale, and we often suggest a year of ongoing work to know if a strategy has worked. However, depending on the scale of the project, and the issues that need to be addressed, the first signs of recovery should be evident within a few months, or weeks even.

The bespoke roadmap we create for you will provide timescales for work done, but we cannot promise results from that work.

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Generally, for small migration errors, one or two crawl cycles is enough to rectify rankings, meaning recovery is measured in weeks. For a domain migration where search engines didn't realise the domain has changed, recovery can take longer than a year.

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How Much Does SEO Migration Recovery Cost?

The cost for a migration recovery project is dependent on the size of the site that needs recovery and the amount of recovery work that is needed, and our roadmap will make this clear. However, to allow for predictable pricing, and budgeting, North West SEO works in price blocks via a £250 daily rate. An audit of your site will clarify how much work is needed, and the client's appetite will determine how much work we implement every month. Our SEO project pricing structure is designed to scale with the client's need.

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Is It Too Late To Recover My Traffic?

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For a website that was in good health pre-migration, then leaving it a few weeks or months before an organic channel recovery campaign isn't too late. To return organic traffic to pre-migration levels, speed is of the essence however, and working with an SEO specialist like North West SEO is of paramount priority.

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The aim is to send signals to search engines as quickly as possible that your site is exactly the same site as before the migration, and the loss of traffic is often a result that those signals stopped being clear.

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When it IS too late to recover all traffic

If there is no accessible save of the previous site to compare with, such as what pages you had that didn't migrate and are now 404 errors, then recovery requires re-building and re-writing lost content from scratch, in this case the recovery is about damage limitation and you need a longer plan to recover through creating new replacement content. The new content may outperform the old content as it is now up-to-date and fresh, but there will of course be a backlog to create this and rank it. In this case, recovery means achieving a new baseline of performance, and building up from there over the course of a year or more.

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Why SEO Migrations Go Wrong

Migrations have multiple points of failure, making them notorious for undoing your hard-worked SEO efforts. Whether you are migrating to a new domain, or a new CMS, the SEO work is the same: ensure Google sees the changeover seamlessly. Migrations start to go wrong when the preparation stage hasn't been detailed enough.

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Migrations involve taking a live site through to a staging site and then the staging site to the new live site. This means regular and thorough checking at each point, and ideally not progressing to the next phase until the current phase is signed off as okay from the SEO team. Unfortunately for SEOs and therefore SEO performance, deadlines often dictate how thorough a check can be, and sites progress to go-live without all the required checks.

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At that point, it's a matter of time before Google, and other search engines crawl the new site, and notice any errors, thereby impacting your SEO performance.

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Many businesses will only know that a migration has affected their organic traffic performance once they see the negative impacts of rankings dropping or traffic suddenly dropping. For any SEO specialist that comes in to troubleshoot and rectify post-migration issues, overseeing the recovery is very labour-intensive, but recovery can be managed if actioned in time.

 

Our Migration Recovery Experience

​North West SEO has more than 10 years of SEO experience across freelance, in-house and agency-side roles. Through those years migration preparation and post-migration maintenance were a regular project we worked on. As part of acquisition-led in-house SEO teams at Love Energy Savings, Crown Oil Group, and others, we have, on a monthly basis, migrated websites to the in-house CMSs, we have migrated websites to new domains and when things didn't go to plan, we had to plan a recovery process.​

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Migration Case Study: Love Business

Love Business was launched as the mother-brand of the Love Energy Savings portfolio of websites. To give it the strongest start in life, a decision was made to redirect PowerCompare.co.uk into the LoveBusiness.co.uk domain to transfer its authority to the new site. The website started life with core revenue-generating keywords ranking on page one.

 

Read more about this in our SEO case studies.

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Who Is North West SEO?

North West SEO is headed by Pana Markides, an SEO consultant based in Bolton. He has more than 10 years experience in SEO working for B2B and B2C clients in the energy industry and beyond, and has worked on e-commerce clients and lead-generating clients too. All SEO work by North West SEO is handled by Pana, and you can trust that road maps will be implemented in-house by North West SEO.

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SEO Migration Recovery FAQs

How long after a website migration will I see the traffic drop?

The SEO impact of a migration doesn't happen overnight - it happens as search engines crawl your newly re-launched website. You can expect to see the full extent of the migration over the course of a month (although this depends on how often Google visits your website), if your SEO has been hurt you will see decline in Search Console and any other SEO tools. Our advice is to contact an SEO specialist to oversee the migration as an ad-hoc SEO project, however failing that, as soon as you suspect the migration has not gone to plan.

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Can I recover rankings if the old website is gone?

If you've lost a copy of the old website, then recovery is an uphill battle. We will work to reconstruct the old website based on the Wayback Machine's data and Search Console URLs. In some cases if the old content cannot be recovered, then a re-build is required.

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Will my rankings come back on their own?

In some cases, your rankings may very well return naturally. This might happen if you have indexation issues and small technical SEO that Google simply needs some time to understand and recalibrate. However, it's still worth working with an SEO partner to speed up the process and minimise what Google needs to recalibrate.

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My developer says the migration was fine. Who's right?

Your developer can be right that the migration was fine from their end, and you are most certainly right that it has not gone to plan. A post-migration audit will seek to uncover if there's any SEO elements the developers missed (such as internal links pointing to the staging site, something we've seen often!).

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Do I need a full SEO retainer, or can this be a one-off project?

North West SEO offers SEO services as one-off projects and as a retainer. In this regard we consider post-migration recoveries as a defined project. See our prices to understand the cost of a migration recovery project.

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Contact us today for your free discovery call to troubleshoot your post-migration traffic drop.

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