Jardine Studio
SERVICE / SEO MIGRATION + REDESIGN SEO

Rebuild the site. Keep the rankings.

Jardine Studio plans, ships, and monitors the SEO side of a website rebuild: audit, redirect map, schema preservation, launch QA, and Search Console watch. The SEO work shapes the new site before launch instead of cleaning it up after.

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WHERE IT BREAKS

Most rebuilds lose the rankings the same handful of ways.

One of these patterns shows up on almost every rebuild that drops in rankings. None of them is dramatic on its own. Together they explain why a credible site, on launch day, can suddenly be invisible to the searches it used to win. They decide what an SEO migration engagement actually has to cover.

  • The redirect map gets handed to a dev team that did not write it.

    The SEO firm builds a one-to-one mapping in a spreadsheet, walks through it on a call, and ships it to a dev team that has its own rebuild deadline. Half the rows get implemented as 302 instead of 301. A dozen high-traffic URLs get pointed at the homepage. Nobody runs the post-launch crawl that would have caught it. By the time the impressions drop on the dashboard, the loss is already weeks old.

  • The metadata never gets diffed against the old site.

    Titles, meta descriptions, H1s, image alt text, and internal anchor text all migrate "automatically" with the rebuild. Some of it survives. A lot of it does not. The new templates rewrite a few hundred titles in a slightly worse pattern. The H1 on the top-ranking page gets simplified. The product page alt text disappears. The rebuild was the moment to keep them.

  • Schema gets dropped on the rebuild and nobody notices.

    The old site had service schema, page-level schema, breadcrumbs, and an appropriate local entity graph quietly wired in. The new site has none of it. The dev team treated schema as decorative because nobody told them otherwise. Search understanding gets thinner. AI engines lose structured signals they were using. The rebuild looks great and the search graph looks worse.

  • AI search citations follow a competitor.

    ChatGPT and Perplexity had been citing the site under a specific entity name and a stable URL pattern. The rebuild moves the entity around. The URLs change. The schema goes generic. Within a quarter the citations migrate to a competitor whose entity has stayed put. None of this shows up in Search Console. The site just stops being mentioned.

  • The Google Business Profile keeps pointing at the old URL.

    The rebuild ships, the redirects go in, and nobody updates the GBP entry. The map pack click goes to a 301 chain. The phone keeps ringing for a week. Then Google quietly downgrades the listing for sending users through a redirect, and the calls drop.

  • The staging robots file makes it to production.

    The staging site had a blanket disallow to keep it out of search. Nobody changed it back. The new site goes live and quietly tells Google not to crawl anything. A week later, impressions hit zero. The team thinks it is a ranking drop. It is an indexation block. It happens more than it should.

WHAT IT COSTS

The cost is already on the clock. Most teams just cannot see it yet.

A rebuild without an SEO plan does not usually fail on launch day. It fails over the following quarter, while the team is celebrating the new look. By the time the dashboard catches up, the cost is paid and the work to fix it is bigger than the work that would have prevented it.

  • Organic traffic loss in the 30 to 90 percent range, based on published industry post-mortems.

    That range is the documented worst case from migration write-ups across SEO publications and tool blogs. The real number on any individual rebuild depends on how many URLs change, whether redirects are correct, and how much metadata survives. No serious team promises zero loss; the studio promises the work that materially shifts the odds.

  • Paid spend that has to grow to cover the gap.

    The inquiries the site was earning from organic now come from a Google Ad or a paid campaign. CAC creeps up while the team waits for organic to recover. Most teams do not name this cost until the quarterly review, at which point a quarter of paid spend has already been redirected.

  • AI search visibility that migrates to a competitor.

    Citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews follow stable entities and structured content. When the rebuild moves both, citations move too. The site that loses citations does not usually win them back; the AI graph has a stickiness traditional SEO does not.

  • A quarter of guess-and-fix consulting after launch.

    The rebuild is live, the rankings are down, and nobody on the project owns the diagnosis. A second SEO firm gets hired to reverse-engineer what went wrong. The recovery bills more than the migration would have. The site eventually stabilizes, three to six months behind plan.

THE ROOT CAUSE

Migrations fail when two teams own halves of one problem.

The pattern under every failure mode above is the same. The rebuild team owns the new site. The SEO firm owns the recommendations. The handoff between them is where the rankings die. The redirect map is correct in the spreadsheet and wrong in production because the people writing it and the people writing the code never sat in the same room.

A rebuild is a rebuild. An SEO migration is an SEO migration. Most agencies will tell you they handle both, but in practice they handle one and hand the other a document. The SEO firm sends a 60-page audit to a dev team that did not ask for it. The dev team ships the new site. The redirects ship as a punch-down. Schema is decorative. Metadata is whatever the new CMS templates produce. Nobody checks Search Console for a month because nobody owns the post-launch number.

Jardine Studio runs both inside one engagement. The same hands writing the new pages are writing the redirect rules. The same person watching Lighthouse is watching Search Console. There is no handoff because there is no second team. More on the model at /about.

THE WORK

Six pillars cover most engagements, scoped to the size of the rebuild.

Every migration pulls from these six pillars. Small migrations might run only two or three. Larger rebuilds use all six and add depth to each. The mix gets shaped after the audit, around what the site has at stake and what the rebuild is changing.

  • Pre-launch audit and inventory

    Every indexable URL gets pulled from Search Console, GA4, the CMS, and a crawler. Each one is scored on organic traffic, conversions, backlinks, and AI citations. The pages that earned the rankings get sorted from the pages that did not, then routed to keep, move, merge, or drop before the rebuild touches anything.

  • Redirect map

    One-to-one URL mapping in a format the dev team can implement and the studio can verify. No funnel-everything-to-home anti-patterns. No 302s where 301s belong. Tested with Screaming Frog or an equivalent crawler before launch, then again after, with every chain resolved to a single hop.

  • Content and metadata preservation

    Titles, meta descriptions, H1s, alt text, internal anchor text, and on-page links migrated and diffed against the old site. The pages Google was rewarding stay structurally the same where they need to stay the same. Improvements happen on purpose, not by accident in a template rewrite.

  • Technical migration

    Canonicals, sitemaps, robots, structured data, hreflang where applicable, Core Web Vitals, fonts, images. The technical layer ships ready for indexing on day one. The studio runs Next.js sites with self-hosted fonts, next/image, schema graphs, and edge-cached headers as a default.

  • Launch-day QA

    Day-of checklist: crawl the new site, validate the redirect chain, validate schema, validate sitemap submission, run Search Console change-of-address if applicable, confirm GBP and directory entries point at the new URLs. The studio does the QA, not a third party.

  • Post-launch monitoring

    Search Console daily for the first month, weekly for the next two. Ranking checks on the top URLs. 404 monitoring. AI citation tracking. Soft fixes ship the same week they are caught. A retainer is available for the months after launch; it is not required.

PLATFORMS WE WORK ACROSS

The platform is the second decision, not the first.

The studio has run migrations on and off Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, Webflow, Framer, Shopify, and Ecwid, and onto custom Next.js builds. The right destination depends on what the business needs to do on the site over the next two years, not which platform is in the news. The migration plan adjusts to the platform, not the other way around.

The Bodie Foundation case is the kind of platform migration most agencies will not touch because it is small. Ecwid to Shopify, a new shop subdomain at shop.bodiefoundation.org, DNS through GoDaddy, SSL provisioned globally before the CNAME flip, zero merchant downtime, four hours billed. The migration ran cleanly because every step was sequenced before the cutover, not improvised on the way out. Platform rebuilds without an SEO migration angle live on /services/web-design. The two engagements often run together.

  • Squarespace
  • Wix
  • WordPress
  • Webflow
  • Framer
  • Shopify
  • Ecwid
  • Custom Next.js
  • Custom React
  • Headless CMS (Sanity, Contentful, Notion-backed)
SHIPPED WORK

A migration that shipped with the build, not after it.

The Bodie Foundation migration is the launch reference for this work. Ecwid to Shopify, a new shop subdomain, zero merchant downtime, four hours billed. Click through for the full case write-up. More on the case studies index.

QUESTIONS

Things worth knowing before the call.

The questions below come up on almost every migration call. The answers are short, direct, and not the polished agency version. If something is not here, send a brief and we will answer it personally. Migration is one piece of the studio's wider services, alongside design, development, and ongoing SEO work. When the migration ships as part of a full website redesign, the design system and the redirect map ship together.

Can you help with SEO during a website rebuild?
Yes. A rebuild is one of the most important times to involve SEO. Without SEO planning, a new site can lose valuable rankings, traffic, links, and search equity very quickly. We map existing pages, identify what is already performing, plan redirects, preserve useful content, improve weak pages, and launch the new site with a cleaner structure than the one it replaces.
Can you do the rebuild and the SEO migration in one engagement, or only one of them?
Both, and the integrated version is usually the point. The same studio that writes the new pages writes the redirect rules that protect the old ones. Some clients hire only the SEO migration alongside an existing rebuild team; that works too, but the work is stronger when design, development, and SEO live in the same engagement.
What if my site has thousands of URLs?
The audit handles it. Every URL gets pulled from Search Console, GA4, the CMS, and a crawler, then scored on organic traffic, conversions, backlinks, and AI citations. The top 10 to 20 percent get the protection. The long tail gets grouped into patterns and handled at the template level. Every URL gets a deliberate decision, not every URL gets moved by hand.
What if the team that built the old site is gone?
Common, and not a blocker. The studio works from what is currently in production plus whatever access the team can hand over. Search Console, GA4, the CMS admin, the hosting account, and the DNS provider are what matter. The original dev team is not required.
My rebuild is already live and the rankings dropped. Can you help?
Yes. That is a recovery engagement. The first move is a post-mortem on the new site to find what changed. Usually it is a mix of bad redirects, missing metadata, dropped schema, and a robots or canonical issue. The studio fixes what can be fixed and rebuilds what cannot.
How long does an SEO migration take?
Three to twelve weeks, depending on the size of the rebuild and how much overlap there is with the design and development work. A small platform move can run in days. A multi-page rebuild with hundreds of indexable URLs runs alongside the rebuild for two to three months.
Do you guarantee no traffic loss?
No serious migration team does. Some loss is normal during a rebuild and the size depends on what the rebuild changes. The studio's work shifts the odds materially and shortens the recovery. Anyone promising zero loss is overpromising.
Do you send the redirect map to my dev team, or implement it yourselves?
Both are possible. When the studio is also doing the rebuild, the redirects ship with the build. When the studio is running the SEO migration alongside an existing rebuild team, the map gets written in the format that team needs and the studio QAs the implementation before launch.
Will my Google Business Profile, AI search citations, and directory listings update automatically?
No. Each one needs a touch. GBP gets the new service page URLs pointed in. The AI search graph gets monitored for citation drift, with content updates as needed. Major directories get reviewed and corrected. The studio handles this as part of the post-launch work.
What does an SEO migration engagement cost?
Project-scoped, not packaged. A small platform move on a hosted CMS can run in the low thousands. A multi-page rebuild with a full SEO migration runs into a larger project budget. The studio publishes ranges before the call on the pricing page. The actual number gets quoted after a brief and a 30-minute call.
Do you keep working on the site after launch?
By the month, by choice, not by contract. The first month after launch is included: Search Console checks, 404 monitoring, ranking checks, AI citation watch, and fixes for anything that surfaces. A retainer is available for the months that follow, scoped to what the site needs.
Can you handle a domain migration, not just a redesign on the same domain?
Yes. Domain migrations are higher risk because the change-of-address signal to Google has to be handled explicitly. The shape of the work is the same (audit, redirects, content, technical, launch, monitoring) with the addition of GSC change-of-address, DNS coordination, SSL on the new domain, email and brand reference updates, and a more aggressive post-launch crawl cycle.
ACROSS THE STUDIO

The other ways the studio works on a site.

Design, development, and SEO live in the same studio. Many engagements pull from two of the three at once because the constraints overlap. Each one ships standalone or alongside the others, scoped to the actual constraint on the site.

Rebuild planned. Rankings at risk. Same studio for both.

A focused review identifies what the rebuild puts at risk and what the migration would take to ship. Tell us what is moving and what is stuck. We reply within one business day.

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