Often, yes, although the outcome depends on what went wrong and how long the problems have existed.

We compare the old and new websites, historic rankings and traffic, URL changes, redirects, indexation and technical signals to identify where visibility was lost. That can reveal issues such as missing redirects, removed content, changed architecture, canonical errors or pages becoming inaccessible to search engines.

The priority is then to recover the highest-value losses rather than blindly reversing every change.

Common technical migration issues include missing or incorrect redirects, changed URLs without mapping, accidental noindex directives, restrictive robots.txt rules, incorrect canonicals, broken internal links, lost content or metadata, redirect chains, unexpected 404s and failing to submit updated sitemaps.

Another common mistake is simply involving SEO too late, when the site's structure and development decisions are already fixed.

Some ranking and traffic volatility can occur while search engines recrawl and process a substantially changed website, but a significant or sustained loss of organic visibility should not simply be accepted as inevitable.

The purpose of migration planning is to preserve the signals search engines already understand while improving the new website. Pre-launch benchmarking also gives us a clear reference point for identifying whether post-launch changes are normal volatility or evidence of a migration problem.

Launch isn't the end of an SEO migration.

We crawl and manually review the live website to confirm the new URL structure, redirects, internal links and status codes are behaving as expected. We also check robots.txt and indexability, submit new XML sitemaps to Google Search Console, validate analytics and search tracking and compare site performance against the pre-launch benchmark.

Organic rankings and traffic are then monitored for unexpected changes.

Yes. We support migrations involving platforms including Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, WordPress, Statamic and custom CMS platforms.

For ecommerce migrations, particular attention is paid to product and category URLs, internal linking, canonicals, faceted navigation, metadata and redirects because structural changes can affect large numbers of commercially valuable URLs simultaneously.

Redirects tell search engines and users where content has moved. When valuable URLs are removed or changed without appropriate redirects, they can return 404 errors and lose rankings, traffic and authority accumulated by the old pages.

We export and review existing URLs, redirects and important backlink destinations before launch, then create and QA the redirect mapping. After launch, we crawl the new site again to check for broken redirects, redirect loops and unnecessary internal links pointing through 301s.

Before launch, we establish technical benchmarks for rankings and site performance, review important backlinks, map redirects and assess the staging website.

Our staging QA then covers areas including metadata, content, robots.txt, internal linking, redirects, 404 errors, crawl depth, canonicals, URL behaviour and indexability.

The objective is to identify problems before Google encounters the new website, when they're usually much cheaper and easier to fix.

Ideally, SEO should be involved before development is complete, not immediately before launch.

Early involvement means URL structures, information architecture, content requirements, redirects and technical requirements can be considered while the new site is still being built. This is significantly easier than discovering migration risks after decisions have already been implemented.

Our migration process therefore covers pre-launch planning, staging QA and post-launch monitoring, rather than treating migration SEO as a final checklist.

A successful SEO migration starts before the new website launches. We benchmark existing rankings, traffic, backlinks and site performance, then map existing URLs to their new destinations and review the new site in staging.

Before and after launch, we check redirects, internal links, canonicals, robots.txt, sitemaps, status codes, crawlability and indexability. Rankings and organic traffic are then monitored after launch so unexpected changes can be identified quickly.