The client wants to close the current e-commerce website and open a new one.

[meliegree]

The client wants to close the current e-commerce website and open a new one on a completely different engine without losing income. I have no idea how to approach this topic.

Old site has over 100 000 pages, and in terms of SEO is quite great - we hit almost every important keyword in our niche but thanks to heavy modifications of source code site become unmaintainable. Content on new shop will be almost 1:1 with old page but:

• domain will be different (I can't explain to the client that this will damage our core brand). Beacuse of that I'm forcing idea of going with brandname.com/shop domain instead of newshop.com beacuse our main brand is well known to our customers, not as much as old shop but still better than new shop brand.

• engine and design will be different

• we will lost almost 30 000 backlinks.

• budget: only IT. No content and seo tools budget.

• BONUS: client hired before me some "SEO magician" - now SEO audit score with tools like ahrefs etc. is around 6 - 12% for 100 000 pages on new shop. Great.

Does anyone have idea how to approach such task with minimal losses?

[meliegree]

Ok, so situation with branding etc look like this:

There is company, let's call it X with own website X.com and they have shop oldshop.com. After years shop is well known in their niche, which is competitive like hell (you change something on your page and next day ALL competitors are doing the same).

Company X want to make their offer bigger, more mature so they want to open new shop, based on new technology, with new name (beacuse they don't like old one) on domain newshop.com and kill oldshop.com domain.

domain X.com and oldshop.com are quite well known, almost always in top 3 results are either oldshop.com or x.com, newshop.com thanks to many factors can't rank at this state. Last SEO destroyed engine, link, canonicals to the point that on test pages nothing index. I just finished making repairs but either way we can't compete with other brands on the market with this new site and 60-70% of revenue is from either shop or from calls that shop generates.

Killing it now would cut off this revenue. Since positioning this new shop is matter of months I want to save what I can and instead of newshop.com do something like x.com/newshop so x domain would carry on newshop and this would in theory minimalize revenue drop.

If not - separate domain newshop.com and then we'll wait for it to get revenue but with no budget at all it's near impossible to win with our competition.

Sadly I don't know owners very well but I have feeling that they don't have idea what they're planing to do and yet they don't want to listen. Personally, as marketer, I would leave oldshop.com alone and do redesign to make it more modern.

[meliegree]

Speed is not an issue, more security. But I managed to prepare new shop, it works great with good audit scores, indexing works fine. But main problem here is that client doesn't want to lose revenue/traffic and they want to kill old page any time now. Competing with original would do nothing, years of linkbuilding and well known name vs. 5 - 6 links may be a factor.

I could pull it off but not with $0 budget and not in this timeframe.

[EGOL]

Sometimes owners and managers and other people want stuff for good reason, but there can be equally good reason nix the idea.... but they still want it even though a magician is needed to pull of the trick.

So, the people to whom the job falls must decide... (A) spend major sweat into understanding and planning,  then, (B) toss the risk, financial cost, employee cost, etc. cards on the table in front of the bosses and let them back off or rush forth,  (C) if they rush forth, and you are not the magician that they need to do the job, then it is best to confess.. "I am not the right person to do this"... and offer to help find someone who will do this project, while you continue on in your normal duties.  Or decide that you are willing to make your life Hell and your reputation Crap when things go bad.  Or, decide that you are moving on to a new job or moving on with other clients.

Lots of people leave a couple of jobs because the are 400 pound mules being asked to carry their normal 600 plus an additional ton.  Leaving opens new doors.