SEO website migration gone wrong - noticed too late?

[McTaggart]

I have just been contacted by a company whose website has lost nearly all of its traffic.

The web developers appeared to know nothing about the SEO aspects, when it came to migrating the website (this website change took place first week of August) - the traffic has gone from 7,000 sessions to 200 sessions a month.

I can work through the usual SEO migration steps to help recover performance, yet normally I get employed on this kind of project as soon as the traffic loss is noticed... this time the traffic loss kicked in nearly 2 months ago - what are the implications of such a time lag re: SEO recovery?

[MickEdwards]

In my experience fixing all technical issues, making sure all redirects are properly in place and doing some link building then the site should recover well, even 2-3 months later. I rinse through and through on the technical side.

The issues start coming to the fore when content is killed, keywords are changed, directory structure is changed.  You know how it goes.

[mememax]

Agree, it totally depends on what's up with the website. It may be more or less work, but unless they caused a google penalization for changing their website (ex. unwanted cloaking) it should be a matter of fixing the broken stuff.

Most likely google lost the track of their backlinks and without proper 301 redirection (which may have been sent all to the homepage is not helpgin them recover).

I would recommend try get access to their GWT first so you can assess how doable is the work for you. You can make a preventive analysis at no cost which will  help you understand the timeline and weight every single action you'll need to take, and how much are your clients able to support you.

[becole]

Luke, generally speaking, the others are right--you'll want to get going as quickly as possible to recover the lost traffic. Most likely they didn't set up 301 Permanent Redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, and that's what I would concentrate on first. I'd recommend looking at Google Search Console's crawl errors.

If you can get ahold of the site's log files and analyze the site's 404 errors for traffic, then you'll want to set up 301 redirects for pages that have traffic coming to them first.

You'll also want to crawl the site and look for site issues, as most likely someone who didn't know to migrate a site properly may have missed major SEO-related issues when they built the site.

Finally, looking at the site's links and which pages those links are pointing to will be helpful, as that may "save" some link juice. If you can, get some of those links changed or updated so they point directly to the new page and not to a page that redirects.

[McTaggart]

Thanks for your helpful answers - much appreciated