SEO check for a website relaunch or migration

The new version of your site looks good, but a few weeks later organic traffic falls. The usual cause is not the design but a technical mistake: old URLs lead nowhere, a noindex tag was left over from development, robots.txt blocks the entire site, or canonical URLs point to the old domain. These errors can be found and fixed if someone looks for them systematically.

This is a checking job. We do not write content or do long-term SEO. We make sure the relaunch did not destroy what you already had.

What the work includes

• Baseline of the old site. Before anything changes, we record the old URLs, titles, meta descriptions and the pages that bring the most traffic. This lets us compare afterwards what was lost.
• Pre-launch crawl. We crawl the new site with a Screaming Frog-type crawler and look for 404 errors, redirect chains, duplicate or missing titles and broken links.
• Old-to-new URL map and 301 redirects. We compare the old addresses with the new ones and set up 301 redirects so each old URL points to the right new page, not just the home page.
• Meta data and canonicals. Titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, Open Graph and hreflang (on multilingual sites) are in place and have not been wiped by accident.
• robots.txt and noindex. We check that the development-time noindex and any robots.txt block have been removed. This is the most common post-migration mistake.
• XML sitemap and Google Search Console. We check that the sitemap lists the right URLs and submit it in Search Console, verifying domain property and permissions if needed.
• Post-launch monitoring. For 2 to 4 weeks we watch the Search Console indexing report, unexpected 404s and traffic against the previous period.
• Fixing 404s. If monitoring shows URLs that were missed or redirected wrongly, we add the redirects needed.

Typical problems we find

• The development-time “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” setting is still ticked in WordPress.
• All old URLs redirect to the home page, which Google treats as a soft 404.
• A new theme creates duplicate pages (tag and archive pages, for example) that did not exist before.
• Both HTTP and HTTPS, or www and non-www versions, are reachable.

What we need from you

• Access to the site and, where available, to Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
• A list of the old site’s URLs, or access to the old site if it has not been switched off yet.
• The planned go-live date, so we can schedule checks before and after.

What is not included

• Long-term SEO, keyword research, copywriting and link building; see our SEO page.
• The migration itself: moving a website to WordPress or migrating from other platforms.
• Speed optimisation, which is a separate job.

Who this suits

It suits anyone with search traffic who is changing a theme, platform or domain, or moving a shop (see shop migration). If the site is not indexed yet or has little traffic, the check is still useful but worth less. We will tell you honestly during the review.