How to Audit Your Current Site Before Migrating
You cannot protect what you have not measured. Here is what a pre-migration audit covers, how to set SEO benchmarks so you can measure the migration afterwards, and why this step protects your rankings.
You audit before migrating so you know exactly what you have, which pages matter, how they perform and what technical issues exist, giving you a complete picture to protect and a baseline to measure against. The audit covers a full crawl, traffic and rankings, top pages and keywords, backlinks, technical health and indexing. SEO benchmarks are a snapshot of your key metrics before the move, recorded so you can compare afterwards. After launch you compare live performance against the benchmarks to see whether things are holding, recovering normally, or need fixing.
Why to audit first, and what the audit covers
You audit your site before migrating so you know exactly what you have, which pages matter, how they perform and what technical issues exist, giving you a complete picture to protect and a baseline to measure against. Without an audit you cannot be sure what needs preserving or whether the migration helped or hurt; because you cannot protect what you have not measured, the pre-migration audit is the foundation of a safe move. A pre-migration audit covers a full crawl of every URL, a review of traffic and rankings, your top pages and keywords, backlinks, technical health, indexing status and existing issues, so nothing important is unknown before the move. This gives a complete inventory of what the site is and how it performs, which feeds directly into the URL map; because a migration touches everything, a thorough audit makes sure every valuable page and signal is accounted for.
Full inventory
Every URL, page and issue.
Benchmarks
A snapshot to compare against.
Evidence-based
Measure the move objectively.
Setting SEO benchmarks, using them afterwards, and how it all fits
SEO benchmarks are a snapshot of your key metrics before the migration, such as organic traffic, rankings for important keywords, indexed pages, top landing pages and conversions, recorded so you can compare afterwards. They give you the before picture to measure the migration against; because you need a baseline to judge the outcome, recording benchmarks is what lets you tell whether performance held, dipped temporarily or needs attention. Benchmarks help after the migration because you compare live performance against them to see whether traffic and rankings are holding, recovering normally or dropping in a way that needs fixing, so you can react based on evidence rather than guesswork. The baseline turns vague worry into clear measurement, which is exactly what you draw on when monitoring rankings after the migration; because they let you monitor objectively, benchmarks are essential to spotting and resolving any issues quickly after launch. The audit fits the wider migration as the first practical step, feeding the URL map, the redirect plan and the benchmarks that everything else is measured against, so it underpins planning, execution and monitoring. It provides the inventory and baseline the whole project relies on. So within the wider migration, the pre-migration audit is where safe planning begins and the standard against which success is later judged.
Measure first.
Protect what matters.
A migration is far safer when you know exactly what you are protecting. We audit your whole site, inventory every URL and technical issue, and record clear SEO benchmarks, so you have a complete picture going in and a baseline to measure against once you are live.
Everything included in your plan:
One clear retainer. No setup fee.