The challenge
Change every URL — without surrendering years of search equity
This is the challenge every established business faces at redesign time. The existing site carried years of accumulated search equity across roughly 1,800 page addresses Google already knew. A full redesign — a new structure, more pages, a Spanish-language section, and a blog — meant every one of those addresses would change. Done without a plan, that is exactly how a site's hard-won rankings vanish overnight.
The mandate was clear: modernize and scale the site, and protect every position it already held in search. Search-safety could not be bolted on at the end — it had to be engineered into the build from day one.
The site also needed real scale to compete locally: a dedicated page for each of 50+ towns, service-specific pages per town, county-level landing pages, and a blog — each with real, unique local content.
What we did
Search-safe from day one
- Inventoried every legacy address before writing a line of new code. We catalogued all 1,786 addresses Google had on file for the old site — the full picture of what existed and what needed to carry over.
- Built the new site at full scale on day one. 1,022 pages launched together — a dedicated page per town, service pages, county pages, a Spanish-language section, and a blog, every page with real, unique local content. Nothing was consolidated or pruned to make the migration easier.
- Created a one-to-one bridge for every legacy address. Each of the 1,786 old addresses was mapped to its exact new home — not a lazy blanket redirect to the homepage that throws away years of accumulated search equity.
- Aligned every technical signal at the moment of launch. Canonical references, sitemap, and crawler instructions all told Google the same story on day one — a single, consistent account of the change to process cleanly.
- Monitored Google's own data through the full stabilization window. We read Search Console weekly through the post-launch period — separating normal migration churn from anything that needed action, so no false alarm triggered an unnecessary change.
The outcome
Visibility went up, not down
The result that defines this engagement: Google showed the new site to searchers 2.5× more often in the 30 days after launch than in the 30 days before. Impressions climbed during the migration window — exactly the period where a poorly executed redesign costs the most.
All 1,022 new pages were live, submitted, and moving through Google's processing pipeline on schedule. The Spanish-language section and blog added surface area for the long-tail local searches most competitors do not cover at all.
| Metric | Before launch | After launch (30 days) |
|---|---|---|
| Daily search impressions (avg) | 165 / day | 420 / day (+2.5×) |
| Peak impression days | — | 500–645 / day |
| Pages built & live | legacy structure | 1,022 |
| Legacy addresses carried over | — | 1,786 of 1,786 (100%) |
Source: Google Search Console coverage export, verified 2026-06-12. Pre-launch average measured across the 30 days before launch; post-launch average across the 30 days after. Peak days from the daily impressions chart. Results describe this engagement; they are not a promise of identical outcomes for any other project.
Where this applies
Who this kind of work is for
Planning a redesign? Let's protect what you've already built.
We map your existing search equity before we touch a single page — the build protects the foundation first.