New site or fix the old one
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I have a delima. Basically the main business product I used to offer is not going to be offered anymore. The types of sales events we conducted for auto dealerships are not able to be insured any longer forcing the change. So I am pivoting to just offering direct mail and I plan on going into digital probably social, landing pages, content marketing and not sure what else.
I was able to register http:www.roiautos.com and www.roidirectmail.com both variations of www.roiautosolutions.com withc was the original site. Also that is the closest to the actual name of the business.
My question is whether to build a site focusing on direct mail using the direct mail dot com, or just to redo the current site. The current site doesn't have much rank if any because the old product was not something that was searched for. As a mater of fact 99% of my business came from referrals and word or mouth so I just never really bothered.
My thoughts are that ROI Direct Mail will work better for search and I am even going to use that as a DBA and TM. But I am unsure of what to do for search. One thing that has to happen is that all references to offering staffed sales events have to be removed from any site per my insurance company.
Any advice?
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Thanks for the help guys, I was trying to move away from that long URL. Plus I want to start offering to more industries. I think even with your advice I am going to leave that site up, archive and rewrite the stuff about staffed sales events and 301 all the stuff about direct mail to the new site.
I also decided to start a new company for the other URL for due to insurance E&O coverage requirements. So that put me in a box.
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In your situation I would recommend to redesign the same website and go with it... Automotive related industries are quite competitive and difficult to rank and I believe your previous website have advantage of the age of domain and may be some natural links that points to your old URL... in case of choosing the new domain you have to start from the scratch!
I believe something is better than nothing so you should go and redesign your current website. As far as the keyword in the domain name is concern, in my opinion Google does count that but % of it is very miner that you can easily ignore that!
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Thank you very much, I think what you say makes the most sense. I guess I need to figure out whether to use roiautos.com or roidirectmail.com i also have roisocialmedia.net or something. I went on a domain buying spree one night when I figured out I could by them for less than a $1.00 each.
Thank you very much,
Mark
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If you believe your old site does not have much SEO value and a rebranding of your company would help, I believe it would be a good idea to go ahead. However, you mentioned that you plan on going into social media and content marketing. In that case, roidirectmail.com may not be a good representation of the services you are offering? roisolutions.com or the original site name sounds like a better representation to me.
Even if your old site does not have much search traffic, you should consider doing a 301 redirect of your old site to the new site. You would want any possible visitors to your old site to be redirected to your new site, and not be lost in a sea of 404 pages.
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