Yes. An experienced SEO company can support a website migration, and for any migration that involves a domain change, redesign, replatforming, HTTP to HTTPS move, or a change to your URL structure, having SEO involved is important. A migration is one of the higher-risk events for organic search. It is the moment a site is most likely to lose rankings and traffic, and the loss is often avoidable. The role of an SEO company in a migration is less about adding new content and more about risk management: protecting the search visibility you already have while the site changes underneath it.
What an SEO company does during a migration
The core technical task is URL mapping. Before launch, the SEO team crawls the existing site to capture every indexed URL, then maps each one to the equivalent page on the new site. Where a destination page exists, the old URL is redirected to it with a permanent (301) redirect, which passes most of the accumulated link value to the new address. Where no equivalent page exists, the team decides whether to redirect to a close alternative or to let the old URL return a “gone” (410) response rather than redirecting it to an unrelated page. A clean, complete redirect map is the single most important deliverable in a migration, because broken or missing redirects are the most common cause of traffic loss.
Beyond redirects, an SEO company checks for signal parity between the old and new site. That means confirming that page titles, headings, meta descriptions, structured data, image alt text, and internal links carry over so search engines see the new pages as continuous with the old ones. The team also reviews the new site’s crawl settings, such as the robots file, canonical tags, and the XML sitemap, to make sure search engines can access and index the new pages.
Pre-launch and post-launch checks
Most of the protective work happens before launch. The SEO team records baseline data, including current rankings, organic traffic, and indexed page counts, so there is a clear point of comparison afterward. They review the new site on a staging environment, run a crawl of staging to catch redirect chains, dead ends, or pages accidentally blocked from indexing, and confirm that staging itself is not visible to search engines.
After launch, the work shifts to monitoring. The team verifies that redirects are firing correctly on the live site, watches for crawl errors and indexing changes in search engine tools, and tracks rankings and traffic against the baseline. For a domain change, the team also submits a change of address notification to the search engine. Some short-term fluctuation is normal while search engines recrawl and reindex the site, so an SEO company will distinguish expected movement from a real problem that needs a fix. Larger migrations, especially domain changes, can take several months to fully settle.
What to confirm before hiring for this
A migration involves your developers, your platform or hosting provider, and the SEO company at the same time, so coordination matters as much as technical skill. When you bring in an SEO company for a migration, confirm that they will be involved before launch, not only after. SEO input added after the new site is already live is far less effective, because the redirect map and crawl settings are hardest to fix once the old site is gone.
It also helps to ask how they prefer to sequence changes. A common recommendation is to avoid stacking multiple changes at once. If you are replatforming, for example, keeping the domain, design, and content stable through that move makes it much easier to isolate and diagnose any issue that appears. An SEO company that raises this kind of planning point early is treating the migration as the risk it is, rather than as routine work.
In short, an SEO company can handle the search side of a website migration, and on any migration that touches URLs, domains, or platforms, involving one is a sensible safeguard for the traffic and rankings your site already earns.