Most businesses don’t lose their traffic because SEO “stopped working”.

They lose it because someone redesigned the website and didn’t know what they were doing.

Hi, I’m Nikki Pilkington. My site is https://nikki-pilkington.com/ and in this episode of "SEO F**king What", I’m talking about website migrations, redesigns, domain changes, and how businesses accidentally torch years of SEO in a single launch.

This is the episode your controlling web developer probably doesn’t want you to hear.

In this episode, I cover:

Why website migrations go wrong so often

Why developers are not SEO specialists (and why that matters)

How URL changes wipe out rankings overnight

What 301 redirects are actually for and how people mess them up

Why missing metadata quietly kills performance

How to tell Google you’ve changed domain properly

What to do if you’ve already launched and everything’s gone a bit tits up

If you’re planning a website redesign, changing platforms, moving from .co.uk to .com, or touching your URLs in any way, listen to this before you launch.

If you’ve already launched and your traffic has fallen off a cliff, this will help you work out what’s broken and how to fix it.

Share this with your web developer.

Share it with your marketing manager.

Share it with anyone who’s about to make a very expensive mistake.

Timestamped summary

00:00 "Your Developer Is Not Your SEO Team"

01:49 "Why Website Migrations Go Wrong"

05:00 "A Real SEO Disaster Story"

06:47 "What Happens When You Mess It Up"

08:11 "How to Migrate a Website Properly"

12:10 "Fixing a Broken Migration"

If you want better results from your SEO and you don’t want to be firefighting disasters like this, I offer SEO supervision, training, and support for businesses and teams – https://nikki-pilkington.com/seo-training-and-development-uk/

Want more episodes?

https://seofuckingwhatpodcast.co.uk/

Your web developer is not your fucking SEO team. Website

Migration Edition. Hi, client. Do you need help

migrating your website from.co.ukto.com

I know you've redesigned some bits of it, so there's quite a lot to think

about. No, thanks. We have it all in hand. I mean,

are you sure? There's quite a lot to consider here. I said we're

fine. Stay in your lane. Our web developers are handling it.

A few weeks later, we have no. Traffic, our

signups have ground to a halt and loads of our pages have been

deindexed by Google. What have you done to our

SEO? Well, did you map the 301

redirect? Yes. Did

you tell Google that you'd changed domain? Yes.

Did you move all the metadata and structured data over to the new

design?

Hmm. Your homepage meta title says

Home XYZ company. Do you know what

your issue is? No, Nicky, what's our issue?

You didn't let your SEO help with your fucking migration.

This is SEO. Fucking what? I'm Nikki, and here's the deal.

I've been in SEO for over 30 years before it was even called

SEO. And I help people like you make money from your

website by being found in search. Today, I want to talk

to you about website migrations, because only last week I

watched a business torch years of SEO work

because their web developer said, don't worry, we've got the migration

covered. It's not an SEO job. No. No,

they fucking haven't. And yes, yes, it fucking

is. If you're planning to redesign your website,

change a domain, move platforms, or do anything that involves

URLs, changing this episode might just save

your ass.

Why migrations go wrong. Right,

let's talk about why this keeps happening. Because it does keep

happening. All the fucking time.

Website migration is like moving house. You've got

all your stuff in one place, everything's working, people know where to find

you. And then you decide to move somewhere new. Maybe because

it's a nicer house, maybe it's got better foundations,

maybe you just fancy a change. But when you move

house, this is what you do. You tell people your new

address, you set up mail forwarding. You don't just pack

up in the middle of the night and hope everyone figures out where you've gone.

Unless you're my Uncle Steve, but that's another story. And I hope they never find

him. And I digress. But website migration works the

same way. Except instead of telling the postman, you're just telling

Google. And if you don't do it properly. Google doesn't just lose your

post, it forgets you ever fucking existed. So why does this

go wrong? Well, firstly, because web

developers are not SEO experts in general. And that's

not a dig at web developers. I love a good web developer. They build

brilliant things and they do things that are way beyond my knowledge and skill set.

But building a website and optimizing it for search are two completely different things.

When a web developer says, we'll handle the SEO during the

migration, what they usually mean is we'll set up some

redirects and then we'll install Yoast to make sure your site isn't actively

broken. That's not SEO. That's the bare minimum

to not be completely invisible. Hello. Secondly, Nobody thinks

about URLs until it's too late. Your old site had a

URL structure. Maybe it was messy, maybe it was

beautiful, but Google pretty much knew where everything was.

And your new site probably has a different URL structure.

Maybe the page that used to be a services

SEO consultancy is now at

Whatwedo Search Engine Optimization.

But if you don't tell Google that those two pages are the same thing,

it thinks that the old page has just disappeared and the new page

is brand new content with no authority. All the links or the

rankings that were pointing to your old page are useless. All

that ranking power you'd built up has gone.

Thirdly, people treat redirects as an afterthought. We'll sort the

redirects later, we'll get to the 301s down the line. That's

like saying we'll add the parachute after we've jumped out of the plane.

Redirect after a migration aren't a nice to

have. They're not something you do when you get around to it.

They're the single most important part of any website

migration. And if you launch without them, you are royally

fucked. So what actually happens when you do cock it up?

Let me tell you about a real client disaster.

I've changed the name, but the pain was very fucking real.

This business had been working with me on their SEO for about a year.

They'd got great rankings, brilliant traffic coming in,

leads were generating on a daily basis. And then they

decided that their website needed a refresh, which was fair enough.

But instead of involving their SEO person, hi, that's me.

They huddled in a corner with their web developer and they worked on it

as a dev project, not an SEO project. One

of the first things they did was they changed the site from

WWW to non www

without implementing redirects, which basically

wiped out their entire site. In Google's eyes, they also

didn't transfer any of the blog content. So over 100 blog

posts had just gone. And when I questioned them about 301

redirects, the response was a casual yeah. We'Re getting round to the

301s down the line. But that was 12 months of SEO work

that I'd done they'd paid for. I'd worked with a

copywriter on completely obliterated every

single search engine listing. Now pointing to Pages that

returned 404 errors, every bit of ranking

authority had gone. All that carefully crafted

content that was doing some good, invisible.

But the killer blow was that they didn't even realize they were

bleeding traffic or rankings until the damage was already

done. And they came to me asking what I'd

broken me. I hadn't touched a fucking thing.

I stayed in my lane. But here's what happens when you launch a new website

without proper planning. First of all,

you get immediate traffic loss. Google can't find your content, so

neither can your visitors. Your analytics will show a cliff edge drop.

That's enough to make you dizzy. Then you'll see vanishing

rankings, those page one positions that you worked so hard for.

They'll disappear overnight as Google removes your old URLs

from the index without knowing to connect them to your new ones.

All those lovely links from other sites are now leading to error

pages. So the authority they pass to you, your site, whatever it was,

has gone. And if those website owners have got any sense, they'll be removing

those links because their systems will be telling them that they're linking to

404s and then you've got the user experience disaster.

Because nothing says professional quite like sending customers to a page that

doesn't exist. And those users are going to hit their 404 errors

and just bounce. They're going to go away, they're going back to Google, they're

looking for something else. And come on, you know they're not coming back, right?

And that puts everything into a trust free form. Because Google starts

thinking, if they can't be bothered to maintain their site properly, why should I send

visitors there? Your site's credibility takes a nosedive.

And unlike a lot of SEO mistakes, botched migration

has immediate catastrophic consequences

that are visible within days. So

here's the fix and what you need to do.

Here's the fix and what you actually need to do. Whether

you're planning a migration or you've already launched and things have gone a bit tits

up. Here's what you need to know if you haven't done it yet, before you

even think about launching. Step 1 Create

complete URL map. Document every single URL

on your old site and where it should point to on the new one.

Every single one, including those blog posts from 2015

you'd forgotten about. Use a spreadsheet, old URL in column a,

new URL in column B. What action are you taking in column C?

Is it a redirect? Is it getting deleted? Is it staying the same? Every

single page? Use something like screaming frog to call your site if you've got

access. Don't guess, don't estimate. Know exactly what you've

got. Step 2 Prioritize your high traffic

pages. Use your analytics, whether it's GA4 or

Clicky or whatever, to identify your most important pages.

Because these are your money pages. The ones that bring in traffic, the ones

that convert visitors, the ones with links pointing at them, the ones with

rankings, the ones that make sales, the ones that track events.

These are the pages that get extra attention. Double check the

redirects. Triple check them. Because if you fuck up a page that gets

500 visitors a month, that's 500 visitors now hitting a

404 error and thinking you're just a little bit shit.

Step 3 Set up your redirects properly. A 301

redirect is your forwarding address. It tells Google and users

that this page has permanently moved. Not a 302, which is

temporary, a 301 permanent. And for

the love of all that is holy, don't redirect everything to

your homepage. That's like telling everyone who visits your old house,

just drive around the neighborhood, you'll find us eventually. Every

old page needs to redirect to its equivalent new page.

If there isn't an equivalent, redirect it to the next most

relevant page. Only redirect to the homepage as

an absolute last resort. Step four

Move your metadata. And this is where so many redesigns

fall over. You've got page titles, meta descriptions,

heading structures, alt text on images, schema,

structured data markup, all of that needs to come across to the

the new site. If your old homepage had a carefully crafted title

tag that was ranking beautifully, and your new homepage

says home company name, well, you've just told Google that

this is a completely different page and Google has no idea what

that page is about. Export all your metadata before the

migration. Make sure it gets imported to the new site. Check

it after launch. Don't assume your web developer has

has done this. It's entirely likely they haven't. Step 5

Tell Google what you've done. If you're changing domain,

use Google Search Console's change of Address tool. It's literally a button that

says I've moved my site from here to here. Please update your records.

Submit your new XML sitemap. Let Google know where all your new

pages are. This speeds up the process of getting your new site

indexed properly. Step 6 Test everything before you

launch. Set up your redirects on a staging site. Click through

every single one. Check that they go where they're supposed to go. Check there aren't

redirect chains where one redirect points to another, which points to another,

which points to another. Because every hop in a redirect chain

loses a little bit of authority. You want direct connections, not a

maze. And step seven Monitor this like your fucking

business depends on it. Because it does. After

launch, you get need to be looking at Google Search Console for crawl

errors, your rankings for key terms, your traffic levels, your

conversion rates. If something's broken, you need to know about it

immediately. Not next week, not when you get round to checking

now. Set up alerts. Check at least daily for the first week,

weekly for the first month. This is when problems show up, and the faster you

can catch them, the easier they are to fix. But what if you've

already fucked it?

If you've already launched without proper redirects, I want to say

don't panic, but you probably already are and you really should be.

So panic a little bit, but then act. Get your redirects in place

now. Even late is better than never. Every day those

redirects aren't working is another day you're hemorrhaging

visitors. Check Search Console for crawl errors. See what

Pages are returning. 404s and fix them. Priority goes to the

pages with the most authority and the most traffic. Submit your new

sitemap. Help Google find your new pages faster.

Contact those sites with your most valuable backlinks.

Ask them to update their links to your new URLs.

Yes, this is fucking tedious. Yes, it's worth

it. And if everything's gone completely pear shaped, you might

need to roll back to your old site while you fix things properly. And

this is why you always, always keep a

backup. You did keep a backup, right? So there you

have it. Website migration isn't black magic, but it

does require attention to detail and a solid plan. And more

importantly, it requires actually involving your SEO

person before you launch, not after everything's on fire and

you're looking for someone to blame. And if this helped, don't keep it to yourself.

Share it with your web developer. Share it with your marketing manager. Share it

with anyone who's about to make a very fucking expensive mistake. Make

sure you're following SEO. Fucking what? In whichever app you're listening to right

now so you don't miss the next episode. Until next time.

Get found, make money. And for f sake, let your SEO

help with your migration.