SEO Migration Services Manchester
Moving domains, redesigning your site, or changing platforms without proper SEO migration planning is one of the fastest ways to lose years of ranking progress. MancSEO ensures your migration preserves your organic traffic and backlink value.
What Goes Wrong in a Website Migration
Site migrations are high-risk SEO events. Done without proper planning, they can cause significant traffic and ranking drops that take months to recover from — sometimes never fully recovering.
Missing or Incorrect Redirects
301 redirects pass link equity from old URLs to new ones. If redirects are missing, incorrect, or chain through multiple hops, Google devalues the transferred authority and your new pages start from scratch. We map and test every redirect before go-live.
Lost Content and Cannibalised Pages
Redesigns often combine, delete, or restructure pages without considering how Google sees them. We audit every page on the current site, flag any that need to be preserved, redirected, or merged — and protect pages with strong rankings.
Crawl and Index Problems
New sites frequently launch with robots.txt blocking crawlers, noindex tags still set from staging, broken sitemaps, or misconfigured canonical tags. We run pre-launch and post-launch crawls to catch all of these before they cause damage.
Technical Regressions
New site designs often introduce technical SEO regressions — slower load times, broken schema, missing structured data, or changed heading hierarchies. We benchmark the old site and compare against the new build before launch.
How We Manage Your SEO Migration
- Pre-migration crawl and content audit of existing site
- URL mapping — every old URL mapped to new equivalent or redirect target
- 301 redirect implementation review and testing
- Backlink profile analysis — protecting high-value inbound links
- Canonical tag strategy for the new site architecture
- robots.txt and sitemap review for new site
- Pre-launch technical SEO checklist and staging review
- Post-launch crawl, index monitoring, and Google Search Console validation
- Traffic and ranking monitoring for 90 days post-migration
- Post-migration SEO audit to identify any remaining issues
What is an SEO migration?
An SEO migration is any significant change to your website that could affect how search engines crawl and index it — including moving to a new domain, redesigning the site, changing CMS platforms, or restructuring the URL architecture.
Why do sites lose rankings after a redesign or migration?
The most common causes are: missing 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones, canonical tag errors, robots.txt blocking crawlers, lost internal links, changed meta titles and descriptions, and removed content. We prevent all of these with proper pre-migration planning.
When should migration SEO work start?
As early as possible — ideally before the new site is built. We create a URL mapping document, audit the current site's backlink profile, and define redirect requirements and canonical strategy before a single line of new code is written.
Can you help recover rankings after a migration has already gone wrong?
Yes. If your site has already lost rankings following a migration, we can diagnose exactly what went wrong and implement the corrective measures — redirect audit, crawl analysis, index coverage review — to recover as much ranking as possible.
What migrations do you handle?
We handle domain migrations, platform migrations (e.g. moving from WordPress to Shopify), HTTPS migrations, URL structure changes, and full site redesigns. Each type requires a different approach, but all require careful pre-planning.
Planning a Website Migration?
Get in touch before you start. The earlier we are involved in the migration process, the better we can protect your rankings.
Protect Your Rankings Through Your Website Migration
Book a free consultation before your migration begins — or get help recovering from a migration that has already gone wrong.