The decision that determines everything comes before the migration starts.

Not the platform choice. Not the redirect strategy. Not which agency you hire.

The decision that determines whether your migration protects revenue is whether anyone has sat down — before a single page is moved — and answered two questions: which pages are actually driving pipeline right now, and which keywords cannot afford to lose their rankings?

Most migrations skip this entirely. Not because teams are careless. Because it requires commercial judgment, not technical execution — and most of the people running migrations are technical. They're excellent at moving things. They're not paid to decide what matters.

So they treat everything equally. Every URL gets a redirect. Every page gets checked. Every keyword cluster gets documented. It looks thorough. It isn't. Because thoroughness without prioritization means the three URLs quietly generating 60% of your MQLs get the same attention as blog posts from 2021 that nobody reads.

That's where revenue gets lost. Not in the redirect map. Not in the canonical tags. In the decision that was never made about what to protect in the first place.

What the triage looks like in practice.

Every migration engagement I run starts with the same document: a migration assessment. Not a technical audit. Not a redirect map. A commercial assessment that answers, before any build work begins, what this site's organic presence is actually worth — and which parts of it cannot be disrupted.

It covers 3 things, in this order.

First: define what success means in commercial terms.

Most migration briefs define success as 'no traffic drop.' That's the wrong metric — because not all traffic is equal, and a 10% drop in total sessions that doesn't touch your pricing or solutions pages is a completely different outcome from a 10% drop concentrated there.

Before any technical work starts, I define the KPIs that will determine whether the migration succeeded: organic sessions to priority pages, conversions from organic (absolute, not just rate), average position of the focus keyword set, and indexed page count as a technical integrity check. These are agreed with the client before launch — so there's a shared definition of what we're protecting, and what a post-launch drop actually means.

This matters because it changes how the team responds to data. A short-term dip in total organic traffic post-launch is normal and expected. A drop in conversions from organic to the pricing page is not. Without pre-agreed KPIs, teams either panic at the wrong signals or miss the right ones.

Second: name the pages that cannot fail.

This is the output most migration projects skip entirely — and it's the one that prevents the most damage.

I build an explicit priority page list before the migration planning starts. Not 'all pages,' not 'high-traffic pages.' A short, named list of URLs that are tied to pipeline: commercial pages, pricing, solution pages, the specific blog posts that are generating trial signups or demo requests from organic traffic.

In practice, this list is shorter than most teams expect. On a typical B2B SaaS site with 200+ pages, the priority list is usually 5 to 15 URLs. That's the set that drives the migration strategy. Every redirect decision, every internal linking review, every post-launch monitoring alert is built around those pages first.

The rest of the site gets migrated correctly — but it doesn't drive the decisions. That distinction is what makes the engagement commercially focused rather than technically thorough-but-directionless.

Third: build the keyword set around commercial intent, not coverage.

Alongside the priority page list, I define a monitored keyword set — typically 15 to 50 keywords depending on the site, all tied to commercial intent or strategic visibility goals. These are the terms we'll track through and after the migration.

The set is deliberately split: keywords already ranking that need to be protected, and keywords with no current visibility that we want to track post-migration as a growth signal. The migration strategy for each is different. Protecting a position-8 ranking on a pricing-intent keyword is an active task — it requires verifying that the page, its internal links, and its structured data survive the transition intact. Tracking a position-100 keyword is a monitoring task. Conflating the two wastes effort on the wrong things.

What this produces is a monitoring dashboard that's commercially meaningful from Day 1 post-launch — not a ranking report that shows 200 keywords moving up and down with no indication of which ones matter.

The assessment about a day. It's the most commercially valuable work in the entire engagement — because once it's done, every technical decision that follows has a clear answer to the question: does this protect what matters?
— Baba, on every migration engagement

What happens when nobody does this first.

Here's a pattern that shows up consistently across migration projects where the commercial assessment was skipped.

The site has significant organic traffic — often 6 figures of sessions per year. But when you look at where that traffic actually lands, 60–70% is hitting the homepage or regional equivalents. The commercial pages — pricing, solutions, specific use case pages — are getting a fraction of a percent each. They look like they barely matter in the traffic report.

But when you cross-reference against conversion data, those same commercial pages are driving the majority of organic signups and demo requests; not surprising. The homepage traffic bounces. The pricing page traffic converts. The traffic report and the commercial reality are pointing in completely opposite directions.

A migration that treats all pages equally — based on traffic share — will spend the most effort protecting the homepage and the blog. It will treat the pricing page as one of 200 URLs to redirect correctly. Nobody flags it as a priority. Nobody verifies that its internal linking survived. Nobody checks whether the platform's canonical handling affected its ranking signals.

4 weeks post-launch, total traffic looks fine. Conversions from organic are down 40%. The diagnostic work takes 6 weeks. The recovery takes 6 months.

This is not a hypothetical. It's the failure mode that a pre-migration commercial assessment is specifically designed to prevent — by making the gap between traffic share and commercial value visible before any build decisions are made, not after.

Your dev agency will migrate your site correctly. They will not tell you which pages you cannot afford to deprioritise — because they don't have access to your conversion data and they don't know your close rates. That gap is where revenue disappears.

What a migration costs — and what drives the difference.

The fee for a migration engagement with Baba SEO runs €8,000–€15,000 for a 3–4 month project. Here's what you're actually paying for — and what the alternative looks like.

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The €8,000–€15,000 range depends on site complexity, URL count, and platform. The Website Migration Assessment call (30 minutes, no cost) is where I assess the specifics and give you a fixed price.

Who this engagement is built for.

I work with B2B SaaS companies at Seed to Series C that are planning a platform migration and have organic traction they cannot afford to lose. Specifically:

• You're moving to Webflow, HubSpot, or a headless CMS 
• Organic is already generating MQLs — not just traffic — and you know roughly what those leads are worth 
• Your dev agency is handling the build, but nobody owns commercial SEO continuity through the transition 
• You've raised a round, you have budget for the move, and losing 3 months of pipeline to a recoverable SEO error is not acceptable 

I don't work with companies that want the cheapest path through a migration. I work with companies that have done the maths on what a traffic drop costs them — and decided that paying for it to not happen is the obvious move.