Survey Says Most SEOs Expect Some Traffic Loss After Site Migration

A Twitter poll by Natalie Mott showed that almost 80% of SEOs do expect to see some traffic lost when managing a site migration. There were over 1,300 votes on this poll, which is a lot for an SEO Twitter poll, and 78.3% said they do expect a traffic drop, whereas 21.7% said they do not.

Here is the poll embedded:

Good morning SEO Twitter. When you are managing a website migration, do you automatically assume there will be some traffic loss? Why / why not?

— Natalie Mott (@njmott) March 15, 2022

I am actually surprised 20% actually said they do not expect to see any traffic loss. I mean, even with the most perfect migrations, you should expect a short term (weeks) traffic losses, then probably gains, and then leveling off. But I guess it depends on what is actually changing – but a migration does mean, moving a substantial amount of the site to a new domain or platform.

Most SEOs who have experience with site migrations can do an excellent job managing the migration so the losses are minimal and temporary. But more importantly, these SEOs can manage expectations for the client.

If you click through to the tweet, you can see more detailed responses outside of just the survey results.

Forum discussion at Twitter.