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
-
Migrating Magento site to Shopify Plus without dropping in SERPS
We have been looking at moving our ecommerce store www.pretavoir.co.uk from Magento to Shopify Plus. However, as we rank quite well at present we are interested in hearing experience others may have had making this change and also any advice that you may have... Also, any general comments on Shopify appreciated..
Web Design | | seanmccauley0 -
Does having too many wordpress portfolio pages with little content hurt a site's SEO?
I have a site that is for a service company, not image based like a photographer or artist. We utilize the Portfolio feature to create a gallery of floor coating finishes (images of all the flooring finish options available) but this solution has created /portfolio/file-name pages for each image. These pages have no other content besides the image. I've run SEMrush audits on this site which shows a high percentage of pages with low text/code ratio and duplicate content (a lot of the finishes have very similar names). This site has been extremely slow to improve any visibility online (more than 9 months) and I'm wondering if this is a factor by possibly having a negative effect on our site. We initially chose the portfolio option because it was the best-looking solution for our users but we can certainly change it to another format if that is better. Thanks!
Web Design | | WillGMG0 -
Wordpress Blog Providing SEO to Main Site
Hi, I recently started a very much "learn on the job" SEO position, transitioning from a copywriting background. We currently have a wordpress blog up and running (and producing some decent quality content too I hope!) at example.com/blog/ and a sign up page located at example.com (sorry, can't put the address right now) for a site that is being custom built as it's got some nifty software linking to back end systems. My question is whether the content on the blog will bring SEO benefits to the main domain or whether it'll just be for the blog itself? If the latter, should we navigate the blog onto the a separate page of the main site? Thanks so much! I'm learning as much as I can as quickly as I can, but somethings still get me in a little bit of a tizzy.
Web Design | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Bar Codes for Event Sites
A client is requesting bar codes for simple tracking of event attendees. Their need is to be able to verify at the door someone has registered and then have that data link to the registrant to show who did/did not attend, etc. We looked at QR code solutions (seems bar code makes more sense at this point) and now are at a point where we need input from any who have experience with either system and could potentially make a recommendation. A person would sign up for this once a year event (no charge, informational) on the site and be able to print off their registration ticket to bring to the event. If it could also be downloaded to iPhone/Android that would be a plus as well. When they come through the door the code is scanned and registrant is in. Simple. They currently keep a database of past attendees and only use it for general area the attendees are from and how many show over time, etc. Since we do not want to reinvent the wheel, we were hoping a mozzer might have insight. thanks, Robert
Web Design | | RobertFisher0 -
Do you think it will be a good idea to delete old blog pages off the server
I paid somebody to build my website using Dreamweaver, and at one point I didn't know how to use the template which automatically updates every page in the menu section so I stupidly broke the template on every new page when I made the websites blog and put the pages into a subfolder. I realised this was a silly thing to do and now and I now know how to use the template correctly I've copied every single page over from the subfolder and put it into the main template. Now I can update the template menu and every page changes automatically. The only problem is I've now got two versions of every page of my blog on the website. For some reason when I do a sitemap it comes up with a links to the old blog pages I, don't know why when I've removed the links from the blog page? and also the new copies also. I have basically got a copys of all blog pages. Do you think it will be a good idea to delete old indexed blog pages off the server so that when Google spiders the site it will pick up only the new links to the copy pages?
Web Design | | whitbycottages0 -
What site do you admire/like for its SEO - technical, content, whatever - and why?
I am gathering examples of great SEO'd sites and would appreciate your examples. The rationale can be anything - great SEO structure, great linking, solid content - you think stands out. Thank you!
Web Design | | josh-riley0 -
Effect of Off-Site Images
I'm getting to start work with a new client, and I've run across something I've never had to deal with before, off-site images. The site I'll be working on is for an appliance retailer, both online and physical. The way they've had their site built (not something I was part of) a third party company maintains the product inventory side of things. They're sourcing from about 35 different manufacturers, and this third party has direct access to the product information streams. They push the weekly updated information to my clients site. What this means, though, is that the product images don't live on the client's site. They're hotlinked from the third party's inventory doohickey. I've never seen something quite like this before. Has anyone else? Any ideas as to what problems I may face when it comes to on-site SEO?
Web Design | | MRCSearch0 -
Will my site structure provide decent SEO?
We have an ASP.NET MVC website with a view that can dynamically display each product we offer. The product name is hyphenated in the URL, and this is what we’re using to pull the product from the database. So an example URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida/Sample-Product-Name We have another view that dynamically lists the products offered for each state. This page would contain links to the URL for each product offered in that state. The URL for Florida would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida We want to make sure that when we enter a new product into the database, the product is indexed by Google the next time our site is crawled. I know that Google will crawl through the links in our website, so the new product should get indexed as long as we have a link to it. In this case, the link will be on the view that lists the products for the corresponding state. I have 2 questions: 1) Is my understanding correct that Google will index the product page as long as it can find a link to it somewhere in my site? 3) To get Google to index each URL for content that is generated dynamically from a database, is having links in my site for each URL the only way to do it? Is there something we can do with the site map? Thanks in advance everyone! -Alex
Web Design | | dbuckles0