How Long Should An SEO Migration Take? [Study Updated] – Search Engine Journal

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A recent study reveals the average time it takes for third-party tools to reflect organic traffic for a new domain.
Website migrations, specifically domain migrations, are often seen as one of the more complex parts of SEO.
They are becoming increasingly more common as businesses are consolidating websites and assets to reduce costs and consolidate efforts as more channels and platforms come into play.
As SEO professionals, we are tasked with mitigating as many risks and variables as possible so that the business doesn’t see organic performance issues – either at all or for a longer than necessary period of time.
When we ran this study in 2023, we looked at 171 migrations and found that it took 229 days (on average) for third-party tools to reflect organic traffic for the new domain to return to the same pre-migration levels of the original domain; 42% didn’t return at all.
The reason we’ve repeated this study is that we think it’s important that businesses (and SEO marketers) have data to work off to make informed decisions when planning domain migrations.
Over the years, I’ve been in a number of pitch meetings where the other agencies pitching have promised no traffic loss at all during migration, and more often than not, adequate preparation work, monitoring, or expectation setting has been done.
This study aims to research and provide a data-led answer to “How long should an SEO migration take,” to help both in-house SEOs and consultants provide better estimations and communications with non-SEO stakeholders of their migration projects.
This is building off of last year’s study in which we looked at 171 domain migrations. This year, we’ve expanded the dataset to 892, thanks to fellow SEO professionals responding to information requests on various Slack channels and X (Twitter).
Using third-party tools, we then measured the number of days it took Domain B (the new domain) to achieve the same estimated organic traffic volume as Domain A (the old domain).
Data was collated on October 22nd, 2024.
Bias in a quantitative study refers to systematic errors that can significantly skew the results, leading to incorrect conclusions.
These biases can arise at any stage of the research process, such as in the design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation stages.
Bias undermines the validity and reliability of the study’s results and can lead to misleading conclusions.
Where possible, we have taken steps to mitigate any bias from impacting the study.
The data set contained domains of varying usage, from lead generation in SaaS, legal, and finance to blogs, local retail, and ecommerce.
The key takeaways from the domain study are:
From the original data set, a number of domains dropped and are now redirected to domain squatters/private domain sellers.
As these aren’t “genuine” domain migrations, and the new domain was never intended to maintain the same keywords and traffic, these have been discounted and not included in the data.
No two websites are the same, and there are several variables in a website migration we can control – and several we can’t.
The discourse around migrations in the SEO industry has really not changed for a number of years, with basic best practices being established and then layering the basics with situation-dependent needs to mitigate risks.
Google rebuilds its index on a page-by-page basis, so opening up new crawl paths and URLs ahead of time could speed up the initial Discover and Crawl phases.
From experience, launching the new domain and URL structure 24-48 hours ahead of performing the migration, i.e. implementing redirects, can help speed up the process as Google has already began to crawl and start processing the new URL paths in the majority of cases. This coupled with the change of address tool in Google Search Console can smooth a lot of early migration lag.
While crowd-sourcing domains for this study, I also asked the community why there are “time lags” in migrations.
Natalia Witczyk proposed the idea that it’s related to backlink profiles and how long it takes Google to process profile transference:
From my experience, for the rankings and traffic to be back to normal levels, the backlink profile has to be recrawled and the redirects have to be reflected.
That takes close to no time if the backlink profile is non-existent, so the return to normal traffic levels happens fast. If the backlink profile is extensive, there’s more to recrawl and that would take Google more time.
This prompted me to look at the total number of referring domains each domain had, and there is some correlation to this being the case, but with a large number of outliers – likely due to how the migration was carried out.
For more information and best practices on website migrations, I’d recommend reading the below articles:
More Resources:
Featured Image: ParinPix/Shutterstock
I’m Head of Technical SEO at SALT.agency, a bespoke technical SEO consultancy with offices in the UK and the United …
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