A website relaunch has a visible budget: design, development, content. The SEO migration usually isn’t in it. It gets an afternoon at the end, and the bill shows up later, as traffic that quietly doesn’t come back.
Here’s what a careful relaunch costs, what a careless one costs, and how to tell which one you’re about to get.
What a careful SEO migration costs
With us, relaunch and SEO migration projects typically start at $1,500 for smaller sites, up to about 200 indexable URLs. Larger sites, multilingual setups and platform changes are quoted after a short review. Price and scope are fixed in writing.
That money buys a specific list of work:
- A pre-launch crawl and baseline: every indexable URL, with its rankings, traffic and backlinks, captured before anything changes.
- A one-to-one redirect map from every old URL that matters to its best new equivalent.
- An on-page parity check: titles, meta descriptions, headings, canonicals, hreflang and schema, old vs. new.
- Staging QA: robots, noindex, sitemaps, internal links and Core Web Vitals.
- Launch-day checks, sitemap submission and tracking verification.
- 30 days of monitoring, with fixes included.
Most of the cost is the redirect map and the checking. Neither is complicated. Both take time, because they have to be done for every URL, not most of them.
What a careless relaunch costs
The damage rarely shows on launch day. It shows weeks later, and by then it’s harder to trace. The usual causes:
- Old URLs return 404s. Every indexed page has history: links, impressions, a known position. When its URL changes without a redirect, that history doesn’t transfer. It’s gone.
- Metadata gets dropped. New templates ship with generic titles and no descriptions, and pages that ranked for specific searches stop matching them.
- The wrong things get indexed. The staging site gets indexed, or the live site launches with noindex still on.
- Redirect chains and catch-alls. Old links bounce through two or three redirects, or everything points to the homepage, which Google treats like a missing page.
- Tracking breaks. Analytics or conversion tracking stops working at launch, so nobody sees the drop until someone asks why leads slowed down.
Rebuilding lost rankings takes months of content and link work, if they come back at all. Compared with that, the migration is the cheap part.
What we found on our own relaunch
We moved our own site to a new design, theme and domain in one go: 53 URLs, a few seconds of downtime, rankings kept. The checklist still caught two problems that would have cost us:
- After launch, our SEO plugin pointed the canonical of our Serbian homepage at the English one. Left alone, that would have quietly dropped the Serbian homepage out of Google. It was a five-line fix, and we’d never have noticed without checking.
- The old site had been running a Universal Analytics tag that had collected nothing since 2023. Nobody noticed for three years.
Neither was exotic. Both were default behavior of popular software. That’s the point: a relaunch fails in ordinary ways, and only a complete check catches them. The full checklist is in how to relaunch a website without losing SEO.
When to bring someone in
Ideally 4 to 8 weeks before launch, while URLs and templates can still change. That’s when a redirect map is cheapest to build and parity issues are cheapest to fix.
If the site has already launched and traffic dropped, it’s still worth doing. Start by comparing the old URL list against the live site, then fix what’s missing. A free audit is a good first step.
Questions to ask whoever handles your relaunch
- Will every old URL that has traffic or links get a one-to-one redirect?
- Who checks titles, meta and schema on the new templates before launch?
- How do you make sure staging isn’t indexed and the live site isn’t noindexed?
- Who watches Search Console for the first 30 days?
- Do we keep the redirect map and the reports?
If the answers are vague, the migration probably isn’t in the budget yet.
The takeaway
A careful SEO migration is a small line in a relaunch budget. A careless one can cost more than the redesign. Plan it, map every URL, check before and after launch, and watch the first month.
Relaunch coming up? See our website relaunch and SEO migration service, or check typical prices for the rest of the project.