A website redesign is one of the riskiest moments for your search visibility. Changed URLs, removed pages, missing redirects and broken structured data can undo years of SEO work within days. For a recruitment business, that can mean fewer candidate applications and fewer client enquiries just when you expected the new site to bring more.
The good news is that almost every migration problem is preventable.
Before you launch
Benchmark everything
Record current rankings for your most important keywords, organic traffic by page, and the number of indexed pages and job listings in Google Search Console. You need a baseline to measure against.
Crawl the current site
Use a crawler to list every URL, including job pages, sector and location landing pages, consultant profiles, insights and PDFs. Identify the pages that receive organic traffic or have links from other websites. These are the pages you must protect.
Map old URLs to new
Every important old URL should have a clear new equivalent. Where a page is being removed, redirect it to the most relevant alternative, not simply the homepage.
Protect your content
Pages that rank well usually rank for a reason. Keep their titles, headings and core content consistent where possible, especially sector and location pages.
Check the new site before it goes live
- Page speed and Core Web Vitals.
- Mobile usability.
- Structured data, including JobPosting, organisation and FAQ schema.
- Internal links and navigation.
- That the staging site is blocked from indexing, and that the block is removed at launch.
On launch day
- Put permanent 301 redirects in place for every mapped URL.
- Remove any indexing blocks from the live site.
- Submit the new XML sitemap, including the jobs sitemap.
- Check analytics, tag manager and conversion tracking.
- Test key journeys: job search, apply, contact forms.
After launch
Monitor Search Console closely for at least six to eight weeks. Watch for crawl errors, drops in indexed pages, job posting errors and unexpected 404s. Compare rankings and traffic against your baseline, and fix broken redirects quickly.
Some short-term fluctuation is normal. A sustained drop usually points to a specific problem that can be found and fixed.
Done properly, a redesign should help
A well-planned migration does more than protect your rankings. A faster site, better structure, stronger content and complete structured data should improve them. The key is treating SEO as part of the project from day one, not a task for launch week.