Case Study: How Open Sesame Locksmith Recovered Page-One Rankings After a Site Migration
Site migrations are one of the highest-risk moments in SEO. Move your content to new URLs without a complete map of every old URL to its new destination, and you're not just breaking a few links — you're telling Google that pages it had ranked no longer exist.
That's what happened to Open Sesame Locksmith, an Atlanta Locksmith. After a site migration, their rankings for the keywords their business depends on took a serious hit.
The problem: a migration nobody could see the damage from
A migration touches dozens or hundreds of URLs at once. Some get redirected correctly. Others don't — and there's no dashboard that shows you, at a glance, every URL that used to work and now silently returns a 404. You find out the hard way: rankings drop, and you're left guessing which pages did it.
That's exactly what happened here. As Jason, CEO of Open Sesame Locksmith, put it:
> "We did a site migration and our rankings really got hit hard. We installed RedirectIQ and started to see how many missing redirects we had from our migration that were all 404ing."
The keywords on the line weren't abstract — they were the ones driving real business, centered on Atlanta Car Locksmith search terms.
What RedirectIQ found
After connecting their domain, broken-link detection and Suggestions started surfacing the gap between what the migration should have redirected and what it actually did. Instead of guessing which pages had gone dark, Open Sesame Locksmith had a concrete list: every URL from the old site that was now 404ing, cross-referenced against real traffic and search data.
> "The suggestions and analytics provided helped us create the right redirects to the right pages to keep our SEO intact."
That's the core of it — not just knowing something broke, but knowing exactly which old URL should point to which new one, based on real signal rather than guesswork.
The result
> "RedirectIQ has helped us get our site back to page one for Atlanta Car Locksmith keywords we were trying to rank for."
Rankings that had been knocked down by an incomplete migration recovered — because the redirects were finally pointing where they needed to.
The takeaway
A migration is exactly the moment when manual redirect auditing breaks down — there are too many URLs, too little time, and no way to know what you missed until rankings already show it. Detection that runs continuously off real traffic (not a one-time crawl before launch) is what catches the gaps a migration checklist won't.
If you're planning a migration, or you're a few months past one and rankings still haven't recovered, connect your domain and enable Edge Proxy — the same detection that helped Open Sesame Locksmith find every broken redirect from their migration.