The most expensive thing that happens to a powersports dealership’s search visibility is a careless platform migration. Rankings built over years vanish in a fortnight, and it is usually a month before anyone connects the traffic drop to the new site.
It is preventable. Here is what to require, and when.
Six questions to ask before signing
- 1What happens to every existing URL? The only acceptable answer is a 301 redirect for each one to its closest equivalent. "Most of them" means no.
- 2How are unit page URLs matched? Stock number is the right answer — it is the only identifier that reliably survives a platform change.
- 3Do our highest-traffic pages keep their existing titles and copy? A page already earning clicks should not be replaced with generated text on launch day.
- 4Who exports our Search Console data, and when? It should happen before anything is built, because it determines which pages get protected.
- 5Who owns the domain if we leave? Ask every vendor. The answer is revealing.
- 6How do you handle our OEM program requirements? Each manufacturer has its own, they differ, and they change on the manufacturer’s schedule. A vendor working from a generic checklist rather than your actual program documents will get this wrong.
Launch week checklist
- 1Verify the new site in Search Console on every hostname variant — www and non-www.
- 2Submit the new sitemap on launch day.
- 3Hand-check redirects for your top 20 pages by clicks. Confirm a 301, not a 302, and not a redirect to the homepage.
- 4Confirm the staging site is noindexed or gone so it cannot compete with the live one.
- 5Confirm canonicals point at the hostname the site actually serves. If the site redirects to www and canonicals say non-www, every canonical points at a redirect.
The first 90 days
Expect two to four weeks of softness while Google re-crawls. The mistake is panicking in week two and changing things, which extends the recovery. Watch for a return to baseline around week six and chase anything not re-crawled by week eight.
Total clicks in Search Console, 28 days after launch against 28 days before, is the number that tells you whether the migration held. Individual keyword positions are too noisy to read in that window.
Conner Rusch is Director of Operations at Wheeler Advertising, where he leads the team behind the Scout dealer website platform. He started the project after hearing the same thing from dealers in every vertical the agency buys media for — the traffic was there, the leads were not. ScoutX is the powersports version of that platform.