Not all of the website migrations we worked on started with it running.
Sometimes we arrive after that. A business launched a new site, but things didn’t go as planned, and they need someone to diagnose why their organic traffic is declining and help them rebuild. It’s some of the most revealing work we do, because seeing the consequences of poor SEO migration teaches you a lot about what really matters.
This article covers both ends of that experience. First, what we found when we came to fix a migration gone wrong and what the recovery looked like. Next, what does the migration process look like when SEO is included properly from the beginning, before a single line of code is written.
Part 1: The actual cost of a failed migration and how we rebuilt it for Havwoods
Havwoods Accessories has been in the flooring industry for over 40 years. They are the premier supplier of flooring accessories and machinery to the building trade, serving everyone from world-class architects to individual flooring contractors. Its product portfolio includes hardwood floor seals, coatings, oils, undercoats, sanding products, molds, adhesives, and more.
They came to us after a drop in traffic following a website migration that was completed prior to our involvement.
“Decline in traffic after migration” is one of the most telling phrases we hear when a new client comes through the door for help. It almost always means the same thing: the migration was managed as a technical build project rather than an SEO project. The redirects were incomplete or set incorrectly. Pages that had been earning organic traffic for years either disappeared from Google’s index or were redirected to loosely related pages without any real URL traffic. The content was updated during the migration process, adding more variables for Google to re-evaluate at the same time. And no one was monitoring Search Console closely in the days immediately after launch.
By the time a company notices a drop in traffic, they’ve typically been building for two or three weeks, which means the issues have had time to fester.
When we checked out the Havwoods website, we found exactly what we expected. Search engines cannot crawl a number of pages at all. Search trends have evolved and much of the content is outdated. The landing pages needed significant work to reflect existing keyword targeting and to give the site a real chance of ranking for the business terms that were most important to the business.
Reform requires action at all levels simultaneously. Technical SEO to restore crawlability to pages that have become invisible to Google. Deep keyword research, updated from the current search landscape rather than relying on what’s been successful for years. Fresh on-page copy across key landing pages, improving user experience, brand messaging, and SEO capabilities together, because these things are not separate. The new PPC campaign is being created for key product lines including Bona, Portamix and Wirbel, because regaining organic traffic takes time and businesses still need leads while doing organic work.
The results, once the foundations were restored and the work was given time to take effect, were dramatic. Organic transactions increased by 62%. Organic revenue rose 399% year over year. On the PPC side, conversions increased by 55% year-over-year while cost per acquisition decreased by 21%; Better results at a lower cost, which happens when you target the right keywords with the right messages.
399% revenue growth is the number customers tend to focus on, and understandably so. But the most useful figure, for understanding the actual cost of migration, is the baseline against which migration is measured. This baseline has fallen due to the damage done by migration. The recovery process required months of careful, multi-layered work across technical, content and paid channels before the site was performing as it should have been all along.
All this cost could have been avoided.
Part 2: What we do differently: Designlab migration
Designlab is a leading mentor-led provider of UX and UI design training. They provide aspiring designers with the skills, mentorship and experience to build careers in UX and UI; Competing in a crowded market of design schools, coding bootcamps, and professional learning platforms, all targeting the same career-changing audience.
When Designlab came to us, they needed two things: ongoing SEO and content support to grow their organic presence, and specialized SEO support to safely transition to a brand new website domain. These were not separate workflows that could be managed independently. It was deeply connected, because the value of any content we produced for the new site depended entirely on the new domain inheriting the authority built over the old domain.
This is the essence of domain migration SEO, and what most migrations fail at. When you move to a new domain, you’re asking Google to recognize that your new address is the same as your old address, and move the ranking signals associated with the old URLs to the new ones. The mechanism for this is a 301 redirect, and how you create and implement your redirect map determines whether Google gets this message clearly or misses it entirely.
When we run a migration, instead of arriving to fix someone else’s problem, the work starts long before the new site is built.
We audit the current website first. Not just the pages that are obviously generating traffic, but the entire inventory of URLs: deep product pages, old blog posts, and category structures that may have quietly built equity over years without anyone tracking them closely. Every URL with a ranking value should be considered. The redirection map we construct from this audit is comprehensive by design, not by assumption.
We are also involved in content structure decisions before they are made, because decisions about URL structures and information hierarchies have direct SEO consequences that are very difficult to eliminate after the fact. For example, a CMS migration that restructures a URL system creates new redirection mapping work that didn’t need to exist. A redesign of the page hierarchy that buries previously accessible content deeper into the site architecture impacts crawlability. These decisions are good if made with SEO input. They become problems if they are done first and reviewed later.
For Designlab, we also built an extensive content strategy that runs in parallel with the migration work. Long-form blog articles targeting high-intent searches by their potential students, on-page optimizations for business landing pages, and targeted PR outreach to secure article contribution opportunities to influential UX publications including Smashing Magazine and UX Mag. We intentionally timed this work, so that the new domain would not only arrive with its historical authority intact, but was also generating new relevant signals from the moment it was launched.
We’ve been monitoring the Search Console since day one of the new site’s life. Post-launch monitoring is one of the most neglected steps in the migration process. It is not enough to start off right and assume that everything has worked out. Issues that arise in the first week; Indexing gaps, crawl anomalies, and ranking fluctuations on home pages should be detected and addressed immediately, before they have time to escalate into something more harmful.
The migration was smooth. The content we produced ranked competitively for targeted business keywords. In the first review of the strategy, conversions for UX Bootcamp Leads in Designlab increased by 31%. The 31% conversion increase didn’t come from a particularly clever conversion rate trick. This came from the fact that the migration was successful, which meant the SEO foundation was stable, which meant the content could do its job, which meant leads could flow. Each step depends on the one before it.
The true cost of treating immigration SEO as an afterthought
Havwoods and Designlab are the most common migration experiences we encounter. One of them arrived with damage that needed repair. The other was planned properly from the beginning and the damage was completely avoided. The results differ not only in degree, but also in kind. Recovering after a failed migration requires working backwards: diagnosing what is broken, recovering what was lost, and rebuilding what was never supposed to need rebuilding at all. It takes longer, costs more, and involves months of pent-up organic performance that directly impacts the company’s bottom line.
Handling migration correctly does none of that. It produces a new site that launches with its authority intact, its content indexed quickly, and its business pages ready to be built upon immediately.
The difference between the two is not luck or complexity. It’s when the SEO work begins.
If you have an immigration plan; Change domain, switch CMS, rebuild a major site, change branding, the time to talk to us is now, before construction starts. not yet.
Connect with the Koozai team.
