New site or fix the old one
-
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?
-
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.
-
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!
-
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
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site Migration due to Corporate Acquisition
Hey everyone, Wanted to check-in on something that I've been thinking way too much about lately. I'll do my best to provide background, but due to some poor planning, it is rather confusing to wrap your head around. There are currently three companies involved, Holding Corp (H Corp) and two operating companies, both in the same vertical but one B2B and the other is B2C. B2C corp has been pushed down the line and we're focusing primarily on H Corp and B2B brand. Due to an acquisition of H Corp and all of it's holdings, things are getting shuffled and Ive been brought in to ensure things are done correctly. What's bizarre is H Corp and it's web property are the dominant authority in SERPs for the B2B brand. As in B2B brand loses on brand searches to H Corp, let alone any product/service related terms. As such, they want to effectively migrate all related content from H Corp site to B2B brand site and handover authority as effectively as possible. Summary: Domain Migration from H Corp site to B2B Brand site. Ive done a few migrations in my past and been brought in to recover a few post-launch so I have decent experience and a trusted process. One of my primary objectives initially is change as little as possible with content, url structure (outside the root) etc so 301s are easy but also so it doesn't look like we're trying to play any games. Here's the thing, the URL structure for H Corp is downright bad from both a UX perspective and a general organizational perspective. So Im feeling conflicted and wanted to get a few other opinions. Here are my two paths as I see and Id love opinions on both: stick with a similar URL structure to H Corp through the migration (my normal process) but deviate from pretty much every best practice for structuring URLs with keywords, common sense and logic. Pro: follow my process (which has always worked in the past) Con: don't implement SEO/On-page best practices at this stage and wait for the site redesign to implement best practices (more work) Implement new URL structure now and deviate from my trusted process. Do you see a third option? Am I overthinking it? Other important details: B2B brand is under-going a site redesign, mostly aesthetic but their a big corporation and will likely take 6-9 months to get up. Any input greatly appreciated. Cheers, Brent
Web Design | | pastcatch1 -
Recovering organic traffic and Google rankings post-site-crash
Hi everyone, we had a client's Wordpress website go down about 2 weeks ago and since then organic traffic has basically plummeted. We haven't identified exactly what caused the crash, but it happened twice in one week. We spent a lot of time optimizing the site for organic SEO, improving load times, improving user experience, improving the website content, improving CTR, etc. Then one morning we get a notification from our uptime monitoring service that the site was down, and upon further inspection we believe it may have been compromised. The child theme that the website was using, all of the files were deleted and/or blank. We reverted the website to a previous backup, which fixed the problem. Then, a few days later, the same exact thing happened, only this time the child theme files were missing after the backup was restored. We've since re-installed and reconfigured the child theme, changed all passwords (Wordpress, FTP, hosting, etc.), and we're looking into changing hosting providers in the very near future. The site uses the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, which has recently been reported as having some security flaws. Maybe that was the cause of the problem. Regardless, the primary focus right now is to recover the organic traffic and Google rankings that we've worked so hard to improve over the past few months up until this disaster occurred. The client is in a very competitive niche and market, so I'm pretty frustrated that this has happened after we were making such great progress, Since the website went down, organic search traffic has decreased by 50%. The site and all internal pages are loading properly again (and have been since the second time the website went down), but Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting a number of pages as "not found" witht he crawl dates as early as this past weekend. We've marked all errors as "fixed", and also re-submitted the Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools. The website passes the "mobile-friendly" tests, received A and B grades in GTMMetrix (for whatever that's worth), and still has the same original Google Maps rankings as before. The organic traffic, however, and organic rankings on Google have seen a pretty dramatic decrease. Does anyone have any recommendations when it comes to recovering a website's authority and organic traffic after it's experienced some downtime?
Web Design | | georgetsn0 -
Too Many Links on One Page - What to Do?!
Hello Geniuses, Prodigies, and Experts of the Field, My website pages for www.1099pro.com have too many links on one page, something like 150-175, and I understand that each page should ideally be under 100. Most of these links, approx 105, come from dropdown navigation options in the header toolbar or the footer links. It is my take that these links make our site easier to navigate but I'm sure that they are hurting my pagerank / SERPs. Is there a best way to handle a situation like this? I'd really prefer not to alter the header/footer layout of the entire site by removing 50-75 navigational links. The only other idea I have is below but I have no idea if it would work. For any link that I do not care to pass pagerank, institute a "nofollow" parameter. This would be my favorite option if it is viable.
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
Site Rebuild -Larger to smaller
Hi All, We are rebuilding an existing site which has around 230 Pages (lots of content not required) down to around 20. Whats the best way to 301 redirect the pages that are going to be removed- (we wont be able to use .htaccess because we are moving to Adobe Business Catalyst) Thoughts? We are trying to preserve as much SEO value as possible.....
Web Design | | OnlineAssetPartners0 -
How important is w3c validation for mobile sites???
So mobile sites are all the rave, but how many are doing it correctly and with all the different options which is correct or the best? For example I have a guy telling me that the mobile site must validate here http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ or here http://ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN However I have run many so called mobile sites like nike (m.nike.com) and those built by dudamobiles and all dramatically fail the above tests! Responsive is another key element of web design and the guys at twitter came up with bootstrap, so I ran these sites through the above validators and all have failed. I take this site as an example from ilovebootstrap.com, please note this is not my site but was top of thelist on here. Mobi Ready 2 / 5 - result poor mobile experience Results from google pagespeed Mobile 62 / 100 Desktop 83 / 100 So while it looks good on mobile devices it does not score well If you look at the google site: http://www.howtogomo.com/en-gb/d/why-get-mo/ The case studies listed all fail the validation tests, so my question is is it worth getting our mobile sites validated and will this affect rankings?
Web Design | | iprosoftware0 -
Site Review Please
A few weeks back I posted a question regarding a client's website and the very high Bounce Rate. We were looking at about 70 to 80% BR. The site was rough, and so I asked for some feedback that can be seen here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/high-bounce-rate-on-this-specific-page Since that time we've changed the WP Theme and the client would like specific feedback from the SEO experts. The BR has dropped by roughly 53% over the past month since we changed things, as traffic has risen by roughly 20%. We have lost some rankings for our targeted keywords, even as nothing has greatly changed on the site other than the theme. But even as we've lost some rankings for targeted keywords, we've gained for others and increased traffic dramatically. So, what do you think of the new site? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! http://EraseDisease.com
Web Design | | Linwright0 -
What is value in site aggregation?
If one was to own 5 sites that were in a similar vertical and at some point decide that managing 5 sites was more of a pain than managing 1,2, or 3, is it possible to combine sites via 301 redirects and increase the overall DA, and for urls that are similar, PA? So, we have site Hairbrush.com, comb.info, trimmer.com, hairmud.org, and barber.net: Assuming that they have a DA of Hairbrush.com = 32 Comb.info = 36 Trimmer.com = 27 Hairmud.org = 21 Barber.net = 44 Is there any testing that has shown combining the first 4 would increase the Comb.info from DA of 36 to DA of 51, etc? Is there any testing regarding the same, but with Page Authority? Thanks PS Assume other variables are equal. I also realize this could look as if they were all ECommerce, but what if they were service or bricks and mortar?
Web Design | | RobertFisher0 -
Will opening in a New Window pass all link juice?
Hey guys, We're in the middle of designing our core navigation for our new site, which will feature a blog. I want to make sure the blog is linked to from the main navigation to pass all of the link juice to it, but since it isn't the core feature of the site we want people to view, I don't want it to take attention away from other things. Due to this I am thinking about giving it a main navigation link that opens in a new window. It would still be reachable from every page on the site, but it would allow users to view the blog in a new window rather than leaving the main site. The blog will still be on the same domain in a domain.com/blog subfolder. My question is... is this good practice? Will this pass the necessary link juice from our root domain to our blog, or will opening it in a new window detract from the value of the link? Any other comments / issues with designing the navigation like this that I'm not thinking of would be appreciated! Thanks
Web Design | | CodyWheeler0