How stupid is it to launch a new URL structure when our traffic is climbing?
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We decided to redesign our site to make it responsive as Google is ranking sites based on mobile friendliness. Along with this we have changed our URL structure, meta tags, page content, site navigation, internal interlinking.
How stupid is it to launch this site right in the middle of record traffic? Our traffic is climbing 10,000 more visitors every day with the current site. Visitors have increased 34% over the last 30 days compared to the previous 30 days.
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I would tend to agree with Lynn Patchett. Could you tier out your changes and plan to methodically release it in small increments while monitoring the effects? This way you could begin with smaller changes, even a few url's with an update and gauge its effectiveness (or non)...
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I think I speak for everyone with that type of traffic increase you should not gamble mixing it out.
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Is all that new traffic organic? Is your sale/conversion rate increasing at the same rate?
If the answer to either of those questions is yes then you should be moving cautiously. If the main aim is to make the site mobile friendly then do that first and monitor traffic/rankings for a couple of weeks. After that depending on what you see try implementing the other changes you have planned in order and give a week or two in between each change to monitor how things are going.
Changing urls, titles, metas, internal linking and content all at the same time on a site with that much traffic (and I am assuming at least some profit).... is crazy. If rankings/traffic plummet, which change caused it? Where do you even start diagnosing with that many changes at once? Nightmare!
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Hire someone to make sure all of your redirects are setup correctly.
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First off, getting your site mobile optimized is smart.
Next, you need to have a clear understanding of where all this traffic is coming from. If it's organic, dig into Google Webmaster Tools & even Semrush to determine how much of it is from branded queries. If a large percentage of your traffic is from non-branded organic searches, I would be very cautious of changing URLs & title tags - unless your organization is completely okay with the possible ranking & traffic loss that will most likely come with all the necessary 301 redirects. The current URLs are already far, far cleaner than a lot of sites (especially ecommerce sites that have crazy dynamic URLs).
With all that said, I have worked with a few brands in similar situations where we decided to move forward with a site overhaul (which is what you're describing) because (a) most of their traffic was either direct or branded organic and (b) they worked with an SEO agency years ago that implemented a number of spammy tactics that we needed to clean up. Ultimately, we decided that the benefits of sort of "getting straight with Google" was worth the possible ranking & traffic loss.
I hope this helps!
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Have you looked at your analytics to see which mobile devices are driving the greatest amount of traffic then tested your site on those devices? This would be a key step in my opinion. It might be that your site already works great and doesn't need the redesign. If the redesign does go forward however, make sure that it looks stellar on these devices as well. It's highly likely that you can cover 80 - 90% of your mobile visits by checking the look and feel on 10 - 20 devices.
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Traffic is 7.7 million in the last 30 days. Domain is 16 years old. The URLs are not bad - instead of /used-perfume-for-sale/chanel-number5 it would now be /perfume/chanel-number-5/
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It depends on if the traffic is extremely low and how old the domain? How bad the URLs are there's a lot of different questions that need to be answered with the actual .if you're only doing 100 people a month and he went up by 30 people yeah it's safe to say you should be okay to changing them there are good reasons to change URL structures however there are also awesome reason keep them. If you cansend me a URL I would be happy to tell you if I agree with your choice or not.
tom
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