SEO before Replatforming - Good Idea?
-
Hello,
We are in the midst of a major replatforming of our current website, the process will take roughly six to nine more months to complete.
We are completing revamping our site - the new site will be on the same domain, but almost everything is changing - from the category structure, hierarchy, architecture, different regions on separate URLs will not be on the same with a currency converter, URLs - you name it, we're changing it.
There has been internal discussions for some time on whether we should hire an outside firm to help us with our SEO. I have a lot of experience in SEO but my role has changed recently and we have had trouble filling my previous role. We are not looking for help with the replatforming project, we have a great plan in place to preserve link equity, tags, etc. We are looking for general SEO help as if replatforming wasn't on the table.
My question is, is this smart to do before replatforming? In my opinion, it's not. Our new site will have completely different URLs and will be so dramatically different.
We could have someone do some keyword research, but we have already done the bulk of it. We have thought about and researched keywords for every new page we are creating. But from a technical SEO perspective, I don't see the point in getting someone.
In addition, we just had a major SEO audit done last year and we completed the tasks from that audit on the current site; however, most of the changes were technical, not content based.
Thoughts?
-
Agree with both reponces.
What is the imperative to have SEO done now? If you are in a seasonal retail business makes sence, but if you are not, what is the reason for this need now?
Bruce
-
KelG,
I'd say the answer to that depends on your specific immediate goals. There must be a reason you are discussing having SEO done before the replatforming--what is that reason. You may very well have a relatively short term issue that SEO can solve for you within a budget that makes sense. But then again, you may not. In order to answer, I think that objective would need to be made clear.
-
I agree with you KelG. I don't think it would be wise to do since "everything" will be changing. You may end up wasting a lot of time and creating more work once the site launches. You may need to redo a LOT. We like to work SMART, not HARD!
We are working on a similar project here and have been compiling all the data, strategies, ideas, etc. so that once the overhaul is complete we can then begin to implement. This way we are not just going through the motions.
However, as I'm sure you already know, there are other aspects you can focus on during this time like social media and whatnot. But that may get tricky too if you are linking to the site since the URL's may ultimately change.
Good luck tackling this mongoose!!
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
-
Entities and SEO
How do you find the correct words (entities) to explain an entity ? The words (entities) that go together within a sentence seem to be based on the specific corpus (the keyword you want to rank ) and when they are million of results it seems impossible to find what word / entity is going to explain the entity / concept I want to explain. It seems that I got a better chance at the lottery 🙂 a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Do you have any advice or software that could parse and find the words that co-occure the most often out of millions of results !! Thank you,0 -
Best SEO Strategy
Hi fellow Mozers: I have a question about strategy. I have a client who is a major real estate developer in our region. They build and sell condominiums and also built and manage several major rental apartments. All rental properties have their own websites and there is also a corporate website, which has been around for many years and has decent domain authority (+/- 40). The original intent of the corporate website was to communicate central brand positioning points, attract investors and offer individual profiles of all major properties. My client is interested in developing an organic search strategy which will reach consumers looking to rent apartments. Typical search strings would include the family whose core string would be 'apartments in Baltimore.' (Currently, the client runs PPC for each one of their properties. This is expensive and highly competitive.) In doing research, we've found that there are two local competitors who are able to break on to Page 1 and appear beside the National 'apartment search guides' who dominate the Page 1 SERPS (like apartments.com). The two local competitors have websites of either the same or lower authority than our client's; one has a better link profile, the other is comparable. Here's our problem: our local competitors only build and manage apartments. So, then, the home pages and all the content of their sites ONLY talk about apartment rental related information. Our client's apartment business is actually larger in scope than either local competitor but is only one of their major real estate verticals. So my question is this: if we want to build out a bunch of content which will rank competitively with our local competition, are we better off creating a new area of the corporate site, creating targeted content and resources appropriate for apartment seekers OR would we be better off creating an entirely new site, just devoted to the same? I'm wondering if a new section will ever rank well against competitors whose root domains actually feature content which is only rental related? Likewise, I'm wondering whether we'd be giving up too much, in terms of authority, by creating an entirely new site? I've also only found examples in the industry where an entirely new site was created, so it makes me question the strategy of building out a rental-specific section of a site which also contains information about their condo business. For instance, the Related Companies are a huge builder in the East; they have a corporate site and a site called https//relatedrentals.com . Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Seo black hat tricks
I have a competitor in the local area. He registered a new domain name. www.orangecountypatentlawfirm.com. It was created back in 11/10 and updated a few months ago on 11/13. My domain is ocpatentlawyer.com. I put my domain and his domain in the open site explorer. The peculiar thing is that my competitors website mirrors identically to my domain. (see attached image) my competitors website rose through the SERP very fast. I never saw it coming. Anyways, I wanted to know if he was using some type of black hat seo trick to hi jack my domain authority to get his own website to rank higher? Plus, if so, does it hurt my ranking? compare.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjd710 -
Multinational SEO
Hi all The situation: We have a .com website that is the core of our business over the last 3 years we have built this into a very sucessful brand. Customers are able to purchase products from our website and have it delivered anywhere in the world. As part of the development of our business we want to obviously rank high within serps regardless of what country our potential customer is from. We understand that we will need to translate much of our website to achieve this and that is something that we have in the pipeline. My question is more aimed at the English speaking countries and how we should optimise our website for these. For example: websitename.com.au and websitename.co.uk were initialy setup as 301 redirects to websitename.com, however, we have now set them up as their own domains which display the exact same content as the .com website. So to clarify the content on websitename.com/product1.html is also on websitename.com.au/product1.html and websitename.co.uk/product1.html What would the best way to ensure that our .com.au and .co.uk gain traction within the appropriate country? Is duplicate content still an issue? All our prices are displayed in USD will this go againts? We use US English (with a sprinkle of chinglish) as our websites copy languange should we change spelling for AU and UK? Does anyone have any case studies and or other reports I can read that may help me find the right solution for us. Thanks Danny
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyCarter0 -
SEO friendly blog.
i've read somewhere that if you list too many links/articles on one page, google doesn't crawl all of them. In fact, Google will only crawl up to 100 links/articles or so. Is that true? If so, how do I go about creating a page or blog that will be SEO friendly and capable of being completely crawled by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenfoxone0 -
SEO for an exponentially growing site?
Hey Mozers! I was having a quick chat with a friend the other day on doing SEO for a site that grows in page size at an exponential rate and was just wondering how you would go about optimizing it? The example that we used would be a site that allowed users to upload videos and then have people vote on two videos against each other. So, if there are 100 uploaded videos and each of them are pared up with the other 99 to create a unique voting/battle page which has it's own unique URL, the site can get very large, VERY quickly. Meaning if just one more video is uploaded there would be How exactly would you go about optimizing the site? My biggest area of confusion would be generating sitemaps. I'm aware of best practices with large sitemaps (i.e. having a sitemap of sitemaps, not going over 50k in entries per sitemap etc..) But, how would you go about creating the sitemaps for this website if it's growing at an exponential rate, if at all? If you have any other questions feel free to ask and I'll clarify it. Thanks! 😃 **TL;DR How would you optimize a site that grows at an exponential rate? **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanChoo0 -
Domain name match and SEO
I was asked a question today and would like a second opinion on it : Knowing that Alex wants to rank for personnal training the question is, from a SEO standpoint, which domain name would you recommend me using and why : personnaltraining.com ( IS not available) Personnaltrainingalex.com alexpersonnaltraining.com alextraining.com trainingalex.com I have my idea on this, but I'd like to have your so we can share and discuss on that. Thanks !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Catalyste0 -
Sounds too good to be true?
Hi all, Speaking to an SEO company at the moment about doing some link building for me but I just can't shake this suspicion that they are a bunch of cowboys. My budget is £1000/month and they are promising 500-1000 high quality links/month. Common sense dictates that surely that would trigger an unnatural link building pattern and at £1-2 /link doesn't sound like they are going to be quality. Is there any scenario where these figures might stack up. Personally I think it's bullshit but thought I'd check it out before telling him to piss off. Thanx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0