How much does website migration cost once the SEO is part of it, and is that SEO work even in the redesign quote you were handed?
We find most companies don’t have any idea how their website is presently ranking, or what it’s generating, before they hand it over for a redesign. You should be able to hold your own quote up next to this and see which parts of the SEO work are in it.
We understand that Authority SEO offers Internet Marketing Services, and that includes migrations. Through more than a decade selling online, we know that the best clients are the most informed. The information we provide stands for any company that you would look to hire.
How much does website migration SEO cost?
There isn’t one honest number we can give you without seeing the site. Our fee is basically the size of the website, and then any specific complexity the site needs to preserve. From a pure migration standpoint, size is most of it.
The store we just moved had thousands of different products, plus collection pages, blog posts, all sorts of different content, and every page on it that had any SEO value needed a home on the new site.
The designer’s quote is for building the new site. That’s a different bill than the SEO side of the move.
What SEO work is usually missing from a redesign quote?
From a redesign, the biggest thing is there’s not going to be any type of keyword and optimization work. Even if they do put in some titles and meta descriptions, there’s just no thought process to what they are, how they relate to the company’s buyers and the company’s search intent, or what the top performing things are that we need each page to do.
And almost always we find pages cannibalizing themselves. You’ll have a lot of pages with the exact same content on them, and if the new site just copies them over, now the new site has the same problem.
What can go right, or wrong, in a migration you’ve actually lived through?
We recently moved an e-commerce site on Shopify to a new domain name. It had thousands of products, plus collection pages, blog posts and all sorts of other content. The overall result was basically zero loss of SEO value, and in the very first month the new site actually got more organic traffic than the old one did.
Bryan Ashbaugh on what made the difference:
“The real key to it is a twofold. One, we were already working on the, the new site and all sorts of new pages, great content, all sorts of different, uh, technical SEO aspects that had been fixed going into the new website. And then the real key was every single page that was on the old website that had even one ounce of SEO value was, uh, directly redirected to the existing page on the new website. And even if we weren’t going to really utilize that page anymore, we still created the new page to redirect it to so that any, um, SEO value, anyone that would ever find us clicking on anything online would still be automatically redirected into the new website, and we instantly saw that Google was able to pick up, um, the new website right away. Even some of our best links that came from the old website were instantly transferred to the, the new website to create, um, SEO ranking and power.”
After launch, what’s the first thing you should check?
Click through a handful of the old URLs that got the most traffic and make sure each one lands on its matching page on the new site, not a 404 or the homepage.
Is the SEO work actually in the quote you’re about to approve?
Most of the time it isn’t. The migration side is priced mostly on the size of the website, and the keyword and optimization work usually has to be added on top of what the designer quoted.
Any page on the old site with even one ounce of SEO value, and the best links pointing at it, is lost if it never gets redirected to the new website. We have to start somewhere, and for a migration that’s knowing where every one of those pages is going to redirect before the new site launches.
Authority SEO does this kind of migration work.
Before you approve a redesign quote, you need a baseline of how your website is presently ranking and what it’s generating. Our audit goes through the technical side, keyword research, buyer intent, and how AI is answering the big questions in your space. Check out our AEO and GEO audit.
