Guest post by Evgenii Tilipman.
A Search Engine Journal study of 892 domain migrations found that the new domain took 523 days on average to match the old one’s organic traffic, and 17% had not caught up after 1,000 days. Rebranding SEO looks like a developer’s job, since redirects live in code. But the choices that decide where a company lands in that study are mostly made by marketing.
Picture the leadership meeting two weeks after launch. Someone shares the analytics dashboard, organic traffic is down by half, and the room turns to the marketing lead. Whether that conversation lasts two minutes or two months depends on decisions made before launch: what the traffic was doing beforehand, which pages were cut, who signed off on the information architecture and URL map, and whether anyone checked that leads still reach the CRM.