On average at Right Now Marketing Group Digital, our website migrations result in a 15% increase in organic traffic.
Planning to move your website to a new domain or change its URL structure? Although it might seem straightforward, migrating a website involves many SEO considerations. You need to handle URL redirects and updates, revise tags, transfer content, update internal and external links, keep your sitemap current, and notify search engines about the move using tools like Google Search Console.
At Right Now Marketing Group Digital, we have successfully migrated hundreds of websites since 2003. Our SEO specialists assess your website’s current performance and take inventory of your existing content and organic rankings. We then prioritize tasks to ensure the migration goes smoothly, minimizing SEO risks to help you maintain your search rankings and traffic throughout the process. Being Google Analytics Certified, we rely on data to guide your website migration and make sure all key pages and content are properly accounted for. We work with all types of CMS platforms—including Umbraco, Wordpress, Sitecore, Joomla, DotNetNuke, and more—handling every migration internally without outsourcing. All migration tasks are prioritized, organized into a clear roadmap, and shared with you through our project management tools so you always know what’s happening and when.
Not sure where to start?
Use our SEO Migration Checklist to get a better idea of how you can ensure your site's migration goes smoothly, and understand the extent to which your search rankings may be at risk based on what your migration will require.
Get your customized SEO migration check list
Please complete your details and we will send a custom checklist which will outline how you can address each of the areas of your migration based on your answers above.
What are SEO Migration Services? Who Needs Them?
SEO migration services help maintain and enhance a website’s search visibility during important changes like a website migration. They concentrate on transferring and optimizing vital components such as meta tags, URLs, backlink authority, and content structure to reduce any negative effects on organic rankings and traffic. These services are crucial for businesses updating their online presence, ensuring their SEO performance remains steady throughout the transition.
Our SEO Website Migration Services
As we said, we always start with a full comprehensive Google Analytics audit to start. We start from the top down, making sure that your Google Analytics property is installed and setup correctly, and that the data it’s returning to your reports are correct every time. We then compile data from world-class analytics and SEO data sources including Google Analytics, Majestic, SEMRush, and more, to score what content on your website has the more search engine value. This is a proprietary scoring tool we've developed over 17 years called the SEO Migration Scoring Card, and it helps us prioritize content, redirects, and more in a website migration.
Analytics Benchmarking
We start by diving into the data. Our team of Google Analytics Certified SEO specialists will first evaluate how your website is currently performing. This benchmarking process helps us understand:
- How well your existing content is performing
- Which pages are most important and need focused attention during the migration
- Your overall organic visibility before the migration begins
- How the site performs after migration and what actions should follow
Afterward, we ensure Google Analytics is correctly installed on your new site, complete with your historical data, and that all traffic is being tracked accurately. From there, we continue to monitor your post-migration organic performance closely—allowing us to quickly detect and resolve any issues that may arise.
URL Redirect Mapping
When migrating your website, it's highly likely that your URLs will change—and this is a major consideration from an SEO perspective. These existing URLs are often already ranking for valuable keywords and have backlinks contributing to your site's organic visibility. At Right Now Marketing Groups, our SEO experts will crawl your current website, catalog all existing URLs, and match them to their corresponding versions on the new site after migration.
We’ll then create a detailed redirect map and provide it to your web development team for implementation. If you don’t have a development team, no worries—we have one ready to handle the process for you. This step is absolutely critical and needs to be executed with precision, which is why it should be handled by experienced professionals.
Internal Link Updating
It’s not just search engines that need to be aware of your changing URLs—your website’s internal linking structure must be updated too. This includes internal links found in menus, on-page content, and sitemaps. Keeping these links updated is essential, as search engines rely on a consistent internal structure to properly crawl and index your site. Outdated links can lead to unnecessary redirects, which slow down your website and negatively impact your rankings.
Our team will thoroughly audit your internal links, identify their current placements and destinations, and update them to reflect the new URL structure. This process ensures that link equity continues to flow effectively across your site and supports your new URLs in maintaining strong organic visibility.
Tagging Updates
During a website migration, it's common for elements like titles, meta descriptions, Schema markup, and headers to require updates. As we audit and catalog your content, we also map targeted keywords to each page and ensure that all tags and on-page elements are optimized to preserve—and ideally enhance—their existing search rankings.
Our team will collaborate closely with your content team to implement these updates effectively. After the migration, we’ll continue to monitor the organic performance of these pages to make sure the transition supports long-term SEO growth and visibility.
Search Console Configuration
When transitioning your website to a new domain, it’s crucial to notify Google and other major search engines to ensure your rankings remain intact. One of the most effective ways to do this is by using Google Search Console, which offers specific tools to inform them of domain and URL structure changes. Properly utilizing these tools helps prevent SEO traffic loss and supports the preservation of keyword rankings and organic visibility.
Our SEO specialists will develop and supply the necessary assets to notify search engines of your domain migration. Following the move, we’ll closely monitor performance to ensure your new URLs are being indexed properly and are maintaining their keyword positions in search results.
Project Plan & Roadmap
A website migration involves many moving pieces, and we make it a priority to keep you informed throughout the entire process. After conducting an initial assessment of your website, we’ll develop a detailed project plan outlining the full SEO migration strategy. Along with this, we’ll create a visual roadmap that clearly lays out each phase of the project, showing your team the timeline and tasks we’ll be executing at each stage.
All tasks will be entered into our project management system, which you’ll have access to, allowing full visibility into the progress, timelines, and completion status of each action item. This transparent workflow ensures collaboration and clarity every step of the way.
