SEO Migration Services
Andy Wang consulted on the Pokémon redesign: 1MM+ URLs, 32 countries, no significant traffic loss.
Andy Wang · founder, does the work on every accountB.S. Pharmacology, UC Santa Barbara · Pokémon, Disney, Mastercard, Mailchimp · About Andy →
SEO migration services keep a website’s rankings, organic traffic and link equity in place when its domain, platform, URL structure or design changes. SERP Masters is an SEO agency that plans, tests and monitors migrations for replatforming, rebranding and redesign projects. Each project gets a URL inventory, a 301 redirect map, a staging audit and a launch-day crawl of the live site. The work is measured in Search Console: whether the pages that earned clicks and backlinks still earn them after launch. Projects are scoped up front, and follow-on work runs month to month.
Pokémon1M+URLs migrated32countries,
11 languages
Figures come from Google Search Console, Keyword.com and Ahrefs, named per figure on the case pages. Ranking outcomes cannot be projected with certainty.
Your launch date is set. The developers own the build, the templates and the hosting. Search risk usually has no owner. Google treats a changed URL as a new page, and only a 301 redirect tells it where the old one went. Every ranking and backlink rides on that redirect.
SERP Masters gives that risk an owner before launch. Andy Wang builds your redirect map from Search Console clicks, Ahrefs backlink targets and the pages that convert. He audits it on staging and crawls it against the live site on launch day. The person who builds the map tests it.
The same approach ran on the Pokémon redesign: over 1 million URLs in 32 countries and 11 languages, with no redirect chain past two hops. The method has five steps, starting with what your current site already earns.
What are SEO migration services?
SEO migration services cover four jobs: 301 redirect mapping, a staging site audit, Google Search Console and GA4 continuity, and monitoring against the pre-launch baseline. The staging audit checks the XML sitemap, robots.txt, canonical tags, noindex directives and structured data. Monitoring tracks index coverage, crawl errors and clicks. SEO migration sits in the full list of SERP Masters services as its own discipline.
Which website migrations need SEO support?
Website migrations come in six common types, and SEO risk rises with each type bundled into the same launch.
SERP Masters stages bundled changes when the launch plan allows, because changes shipped together hide which one caused a drop.
What can go wrong in a website migration?
Website migration failures trace to six recurring patterns:
Who needs SEO migration services?
SEO migration services fit teams with a launch scheduled and organic traffic worth protecting:
SERP Masters is a poor fit for a brochure site moving hosts with no URL, template or domain change; a developer can handle that alone.
What SERP Masters SEO migration services include
SERP Masters SEO migration services include eight named deliverables, each built by Andy Wang:
SERP Masters specifies and verifies the work, and your developers implement it, so the checking stays independent of the build. The limit: results depend on your team shipping fixes and on access to Search Console, GA4 and staging.
How SERP Masters runs a website migration
SERP Masters runs every migration through a five-step method: Diagnose, Architect, Execute, Corroborate, Measure.
What the launch-day checklist covers
The SERP Masters launch-day checklist runs in this order:
How migration results are measured in Google Search Console
SERP Masters measures a migration against the Diagnose baseline, with Google Search Console as the source for clicks and impressions. Reports track five numbers:
SERP Masters does not forecast when rankings settle after launch, because recrawl speed depends on site size, crawl budget and how many changes shipped together. Weekly reports flag any priority URL that stays broken.
AI search gets its own check: SERP Masters confirms AI crawler access and repeats a fixed-panel citation check across the launch, and brands that want a full AI baseline first can start with an AI Visibility Audit.
Platform, ecommerce and international migrations
SERP Masters handles CMS migration across WordPress, Shopify, Magento and Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Webflow, HubSpot CMS, Drupal and headless front ends, writing each redirect map to that platform’s URL rules.
Ecommerce replatforming changes URLs at volume. Shopify forces product URLs under /products/ and collections under /collections/, so almost every product and category URL changes in a move to Shopify. Faceted navigation, variants, discontinued products and product schema need rules before launch, and the wider store work sits under ecommerce SEO.
International migrations add hreflang, locale redirects and country targeting. Moving ccTLDs into subfolders needs an hreflang map that agrees with the canonical tags on every template. SERP Masters covers the language side in its multilingual SEO work, and sites with millions of URLs and several approval layers fall under enterprise SEO governance.
Migration proof: the Pokémon redesign
The largest migration Andy Wang has consulted on is the Pokémon redesign.
Andy Wang also consulted on the Mailchimp and US Soccer redesigns, which are the live sites today. More client outcomes are on the SERP Masters case studies page.
How to recover traffic after a failed migration
SERP Masters also repairs migrations that already lost traffic, starting from evidence of what broke:
“A botched site migration wiped out our organic traffic and I’ll admit I panicked. SERP Masters worked the problem methodically, redirects, crawl errors, indexation, and walked me through each fix in plain English. Traffic came back, then climbed past where it started.”
What do SEO migration services cost?
One-time audits and project work are quoted after the free audit. Engagements are quoted after the free audit, on month-to-month terms.
Five factors set the cost of an SEO migration:
A failed migration has its own cost: lost organic traffic gets bought back with paid media or repaired after launch.
How to choose an SEO migration agency
An SEO migration agency should answer these questions before you sign:
Two objections come up often. “You are one person”: the map, staging audit and launch check stay with one person, and scope is set by URL count up front. “Rankings will drop anyway”: some movement is normal, and the work targets lasting losses from missing redirects and blocked crawling. Treat any promise of zero traffic loss or a fixed recovery date as a red flag, since Google recrawls on its own schedule.
Work directly with Andy Wang
SERP Masters assigns one operator to every migration: founder Andy Wang, B.S. Pharmacology, UC Santa Barbara, who has run SEO work for Pokémon, Disney, Mastercard, Mailchimp, US Soccer, Clorox, Wynn Las Vegas and BigCommerce. Migration work builds on the technical SEO services he runs for SERP Masters clients, and his background is on the About SERP Masters page.
The same service from every SERP Masters office.
Fifteen offices, each with its own Google Business Profile and page. Pick the one nearest you; Andy Wang runs the account from wherever you are.
Answered the way an engine would extract it.
Each answer opens with the answer. The FAQPage schema is generated from these fields and nothing else.
01What is SEO migration?
SEO migration is the process of moving a website to a new domain, platform, URL structure or design while keeping its rankings, organic traffic and backlinks. The core work is a 301 redirect map, a staging audit, tracking continuity in Search Console and GA4, and monitoring until priority pages are back at baseline.
02Will a website migration lose rankings?
A website migration causes some ranking movement while Google recrawls the new URLs, even when every redirect is correct. Lasting losses come from missing redirects, removed content, blocked crawling or broken canonicals. SERP Masters reduces that risk with a tested redirect map and a staging audit, and never promises zero loss, because recrawl timing is outside any agency’s control.
03Does a website redesign count as an SEO migration?
A website redesign counts as an SEO migration whenever it changes URLs, templates, navigation or content that search engines have indexed. A redesign that only changes colors and fonts carries little risk. Most redesigns also rewrite headings, remove pages and change internal links, so SERP Masters audits the staging site against the old one before launch.
04Can a developer or CMS plugin handle the SEO side of a migration?
A developer or CMS plugin can implement redirects. Neither decides which URLs matter or checks the result against search data, and a plugin maps only the URLs it can see, with no view of which pages carry backlinks or clicks. SERP Masters writes the redirect specification from Search Console and Ahrefs data, and your developer implements it.
05Does a site migration affect AI Overviews and ChatGPT citations?
A site migration affects AI citations because AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity cite specific URLs, and those URLs change. Until AI crawlers fetch the new site, answers may cite old URLs that now redirect. A new robots.txt can also block AI crawlers by accident. SERP Masters checks crawler access and repeats citation checks once the new URLs are crawled.
06What does SERP Masters need to start a migration project?
SERP Masters needs access to Google Search Console and GA4, the staging URL and its credentials, the planned launch date, and a list of what is changing: domain, platform, URL structure or design. Existing redirect rules help too, because they speed up the URL inventory and reveal old chains.
Andy Wang, founder of SERP Masters.
Andy Wang holds a B.S. in Pharmacology from UC Santa Barbara and has run SEO work for Pokémon, Disney, Mastercard, Mailchimp, US Soccer, Clorox, Wynn Las Vegas and BigCommerce. He runs every engagement himself, from the first crawl to the monthly report, as implementation or as consulting to an in-house team.
Request a free SEO migration review
SERP Masters runs every migration on one rule: the person who builds the redirect map tests it on launch day. One-time audits and project work are quoted after the free audit. Send your URL count, what is changing and the launch date, and the review starts from those three facts.
Request the free SEO audit