Because a migration changes every web address on the site at once, and unless every old address is pointed at the right new one, every ranking built over years is thrown away in a single night. Migration SEO is the work of making sure that does not happen.
This is the fastest way for a store to lose money in search, and it is almost entirely preventable. The loss is not caused by the new platform being worse. It is caused by nobody mapping the old site to the new one before the switch.
If you are planning a move, the time to bring us in is before the build is finished. If you have already moved and the traffic has gone, the recovery work is harder but most of it can be got back.
What Counts as a Migration?
More things than most people expect. Any change that alters your web addresses, your page structure or your content at scale carries the same risk as a full platform move.
The common factor is scale. Changing one page is routine. Changing ten thousand pages in one night is an event, and events need a plan.
What Do We Do Before the Move?
We record the current site completely, decide where every old address should point, and test the new site before anyone else sees it.
Most of the value of this service is in step two. It is slow, unglamorous work and it is the difference between a quiet launch and a bad quarter.
What Do We Watch in the First Weeks After Launch?
Daily checks for the first two weeks, then weekly for six. A migration problem found on day two is a small fix. The same problem found in the monthly report is a lost quarter.
In the days after launch we watch four things. Whether the old addresses are actually pointing where they should. Whether the new pages are being indexed at the rate expected. Whether rankings are holding, dipping or falling. And whether the product feed is still accepted, because feeds break silently and nobody notices until sales drop.
Some dip is normal. Search engines have to re evaluate thousands of pages and that takes weeks. What is not normal is a fall that keeps going after three weeks, and telling those two apart quickly is the reason this monitoring exists.
We report daily during the first fortnight, in a short note rather than a full report, because during a migration you need to know within hours, not within a month.
What If You Have Already Migrated and Lost Traffic?
Most of it can usually be recovered, and the first week of work is diagnosis rather than fixing. There are only a handful of causes, and they are quick to tell apart.
Recovery timelines depend on what went wrong. Blocking and redirect problems often recover within weeks of being fixed. Structural and content losses take longer, because pages have to earn their position back rather than simply being found again.
How Much Does Migration Work Cost and When Should It Start?
Migration projects start at 6,000 Canadian dollars and should begin at least six weeks before launch. Emergency recovery after a bad launch is quoted separately and starts within days.
Six weeks sounds like a lot until you see the mapping work. On a store with ten thousand pages, deciding where each one should point is not something that can be done in a sprint the week before launch, which is when most agencies are asked to do it.
The cost is driven by the number of pages and by how different the new structure is from the old one. A like for like move is cheaper than a move that also reorganises every collection.
One honest note about value. If your store gets very little search traffic today, there is less to protect and a lighter version of this work is enough. We will tell you if that is your situation rather than selling you a full project you do not need.