The single most expensive thing that happens to an RV dealership’s search visibility is a platform migration done carelessly. Rankings built over a decade disappear in a fortnight, and by the time anyone notices, the traffic has been gone for a month.
It is avoidable. Here is what to require, in the order it should happen.
Before you sign
- 1Ask what happens to every existing URL. The correct answer is that each one gets a 301 redirect to its closest equivalent, with no exceptions. "Most of them" is not an answer.
- 2Ask how unit detail page URLs are matched. Stock number is the right answer — it is the only identifier that survives a platform change reliably.
- 3Ask whether your highest-traffic pages keep their existing titles and copy. A page earning real clicks should not be replaced with generated text on launch day.
- 4Ask who exports your Search Console data and when. It should happen before anything is built, because it is what tells you which pages matter.
- 5Ask what happens to your domain if you leave later. The answer tells you a great deal about the vendor.
- 6Ask for a staging URL you can review before launch, and confirm it is not indexable.
Launch week
- 1Verify the new site in Search Console before launch, on every hostname variant — www and non-www, http and https.
- 2Submit the new sitemap the day you go live.
- 3Spot-check redirects by hand. Take your top 20 pages by clicks and confirm each lands somewhere sensible with a 301, not a 302 and not a homepage.
- 4Confirm the staging site is now noindexed or gone, so it does not compete with the live one.
- 5Check that canonicals point at the hostname you actually serve. If the site redirects to www and the canonicals say non-www, you have pointed every canonical at a redirect.
The first 90 days
Expect a dip. A migration almost always produces two to four weeks of softness while Google re-crawls, and a dealer who panics in week two and starts changing things makes it worse. What you are watching for is recovery to baseline by roughly week six, and pages that have not been re-crawled by week eight.
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 RV dealers over and over — the traffic was there, the leads were not. Scout now runs across roughly 40 RV dealerships, and RV News interviewed him about it in May 2026.