Website Relaunch SEO

A relaunch without SEO support is the single biggest risk to your visibility. If URLs change without correct redirects, Google effectively forgets your site and you start from nothing. That costs real revenue, often 40 to 60 per cent of organic visibility, with a recovery that runs over months. I have seen exactly this worst case several times during the Otto Austria migrations, and I know how it is avoided.

As early as you can. The concept phase is ideal, before the information architecture and the URL structure are fixed. If I come in late, shortly before go-live, redirect mapping is all that is left as damage control, and the strategic calls on site structure, indexability and content migration have usually been made. My advice: once the relaunch is decided, SEO belongs at the table.

Yes. Even a clean relaunch brings short-term movement. Google has to crawl the new site again, reassess it and work out the redirects. In the first two to eight weeks individual rankings can wobble. What counts is overall visibility. With a well-supported relaunch, organic visibility should be back at its pre-relaunch level after four to twelve weeks, and ideally above it, thanks to the technical work.

A redirect map is a complete list of every old URL on the existing site with its new destination. Each old URL needs a 301 redirect to a new URL that actually fits, not to the homepage but to the closest match in subject. Without that map you lose rankings and, worse, the backlinks pointing at the old URLs. For a mid-sized site with 500 to 2,000 URLs it is one to two days of work that pays for itself many times over.

Yes, and platform migrations are exactly where SEO support earns its keep. At Otto Austria Group I supported migrations between shop platforms for several brands (Universal, Quelle, Ottoversand). The usual traps: the new system rewrites URL structures on its own, filter and pagination logic behaves differently, and performance metrics can drop. A structured approach heads off most of it.