Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

We Have A Great Domain With High Ranking But....

Posted by Anonymous on 6/27/2009 at 10:55 AM ET 245 Points
We own the name baseballcamp.com which puts us on the first page of google and yahoo. We are going to change our business to a national based company from a local one and want to redesign an entirely new website. We are afraid of losing our rankings and are looking for advice on how to proceed. If we keep some content the same but add moe locations etc and a new website will thy effect our ranking?

Any advice or if anyone can point us in the right direction that would be great.

Thanks in advance.

Jim

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RESPONSES

  • Posted by mattbertuzzi on 6/27/2009 at 2:33 PM Accepted
    Some good resources in this "kit" from HubSpot:

    https://www.hubspot.com/website-redesign-kit/

    Good luck.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 6/27/2009 at 7:46 PM Accepted
    Also:
    https://searchengineland.com/best-seo-practices-during-a-website-redesign-1...
    https://www.yourseoplan.com/website-redesign-seo.html
    https://www.localseoguide.com/how-to-redesign-website-and-not-screw-up-your...
  • Posted by SEM and Interactive on 6/27/2009 at 7:47 PM Accepted
    You can give me a call or email me and I would be willing to give you 15-20 of free advice. There are many things to consider and discuss on "how to proceed" for me to put here. It all depends on your goals.

    When you say ranking - you have to specify which keywords. SEO/SEM is a keyword specific discipline and ranking #1 for one keyword, does not neccessarily mean that good ranking for other related keywords. In addition, the keywords you want to rank for need to be evaluated (keyword analysis). In my opinion, that is the most important and ciritical aspect of SEM and the one that is often missed the most by SEM professionals.

    When one does a keyword analysis you should focus on 3 main areas:

    - Search Volume
    - Competion
    - Search Intent/Conversion

    The third one is very often missed. Imagine being number one and getting tons of traffic BUT not converting anyone? (Whatever conversion means in your case).

    So to answer your question.

    Q: If we keep some content the same but add moe locations etc and a new website will thy effect our ranking?

    Not neccessarily, however keep in mind that in my experience whenever there is a design or content change there is typically a short period of "shuffling" that ocurrs. SEM is not math - is somewhat of an art.

    However that should not concern you too much. If you site has good SEO and "Link Juice" any small change or design update will not have an impact on your rankings.

    The Link Juice comes from link building and it does not matter how good your internal SEO is - if you dont do link building, its a matter of time before your competion or some related site crushed your ranking.

    I hope this helps!

    Robert
  • Posted on 6/27/2009 at 10:08 PM Author
    Hi Guys

    Thanks for the responses. Keywords "baseball camp" and " baseball camps" are the keywords that give us such a high rank on yahoo and google. I would love to take you up on you offer to speak on the phone Robert. That would be great.

    Been too afraid to make a change to the site.

    Thanks

    Jim
  • Posted by excellira on 6/27/2009 at 11:25 PM Accepted
    During a redesign/redevelopment it is critical that the existing content be preserved. This would include URLs (including file names, directory structures, and file extentions), page copy as well as title tags. Changing any of these elements can result in a loss of rankings and traffic.

    Rather than change file extensions (say from .html to .php or .asp to .php, etc) we frequently we frequently recommend removing file extensions on web pages, per W3C recommendation, if possible. This simplifies changes in the future. If you change URLs you can implement wildcard and/or manual permanent (301) redirects.

    Here are some additional tips:

    *If you do not have strong analytics in place, it is good practice to implement a system and observe the keywords and traffic patterns prior to making the change. Observe the data in your Webmaster accounts.

    *Don't use flash to replace HTML text

    *Don’t use JS or Flash for navigation

    *Out of necessity some redirects may be required to be done manually but many may be achieved with wildcards (removing file extensions or changing directories for example)

    *Do keyword research to optimize new sections and content and to uncover opportunities. Relevance, "buy" signals, search volume, and competition are the most important selection critera.

    *Be careful when revising navigation and internal linkage-it can affect rankings.

    *Plan out your content and redirects prior to changes.

    *There will be fluctuations in rankings during transitions but if the transition is well planned, it can boost rankings rather than disrupt them. We just transitioned a client and their rankings improved rapidly across a number of prime keyphrases. The new positions are holding.

    *Work quickly during the transition. Google is crawling and indexing pages rapidly these days. When the crawlers come you don’t want them to find a broken site and 404 pages. One of our clients recently had a server outage for nearly 5 days and they refused to change hosts. Googlebot came, discovered the outage and the client’s #1 position out of 300 million competing pages vanished.

    Rather than panicking and making changes, we advised the client to get the server back up and be patient. It took 3 weeks to go from oblivion to #1 again. They were ranked #1 for a reason and when the server came back up they were put back in the place they deserved. The moral of the story? Work fast and avoid presenting conditions which are detrimental to your success.

    *Review robots.txt file and add or remove disallows to keep robots indexing the correct pages.Plan this before the transition.

    *Before going live, check your xml sitemap(s) to ensure that all pages are included and that any pages that shouldn't be there are removed. Test it again after the launch.

    There is a lot more to this but I hope this helps.


  • Posted on 6/28/2009 at 9:00 AM Author
    This is a lot to digest! Can anyone give me a ballpark figure as to what this will cost? We have used websites from lucky marble -they offer nice looking easy to use templates. I was going to use one that I have used a few times in the past.

    If I was to set up the whole site with content etc and then let a professional tweak the site and review it foe necessary changes befor going live does anyone know tv approximate cost? I assume it will be a 10 page site give or take a page or two and as we add more camps from around the country the site will get larger. By hay time Im hoping the ranking will stay relatively the same and will improve as we add more content.

    I will admit to dumb luck when I bought the name baseballcamp.com. I think the ranking I have is based more on the URL name than anything I have dome to optimize the site because I honestly haven't done anything at all I'm that area Om purpose. I just put up a very basic have hardly any referring links at all but I do update it quite often as we announce new camps and clinic each month.

    Definitely not a pro here so if anyone here is an expert am would like to offer a bid I'd love to hear from you.

    The advice so far has been great and very appreciated I'm learning how much hat I don't know!

    Thansk

    Jim
  • Posted by excellira on 6/28/2009 at 10:02 AM Member
    It sounds like a lot but with the right consultant it can be a breeze. Feel free to give a ring at 978-287-0010. We'll be in the office on Monday and all of next week and there is no obligation. The key is to see if there is a good fit.

    Best,

    Greg
  • Posted by SEM and Interactive on 6/28/2009 at 10:04 PM Member
    Hello Jim,

    I agree with most statements above from my colleges, however keep in mind that in SEO/SEM and any marketing for that matter is all about ROI.

    There are 1 million (not that many -but you get the point) different factors and things that you can do to improve your rankings and traffic, but at the end of the day, you have to justify your investment and get the most bang for your buck.

    Here is what you need to do:

    - Identify your goals.
    - Define your budget.
    - Set Realistic Expectations.

    Once you have those 3 things squared away - then you have to make sure that you get the most out of your investment. SEO/SEM can be pretty staightforward or very complicated.

    Your goal is to generate as much target traffic and CONVERSIONS as possible,with your budget - whatever that is. Again who cares if you are #1 for 10 keywords and get 1000 visitors a day - if NONE of them convert!

    I have websites that do not have 50% of the "standard" SEO but I still get tons of targeted and sustainable traffic and registrations and beat most of my competitors that have all the bells and wistles - Why don't I implement the remaining 50%? becuase the additional return would not justify my additional costs- Again its all about marketing ROI.

    In low competitive niches - I've gotten away with optimizing the site pages minimally and link building - can you do more - of course SEO/SEM is typicallly an on-going process, but why spend additional funds that are not generating any additional return?

    My email is on my profile and my phone number is 407-208-9022. You can email or call me if you have any questions or need guidance - even if I need to point you in the right direction.

    Independently of what you do or who you work with - please make sure that you have realistics expectations. In this industry there are no Silver Bullets and I frequently find many people trying to find the "magic formula" to dominate Google top 10 results by using a magic wand.

    Good Luck,

    Robert
  • Posted on 7/2/2009 at 9:00 AM Accepted
    Jim,

    I have not had time to read everyone's comments so I will give you mine.

    Your domain name baseball camp is great but it's also very generic.

    I live in Houston and if I wanted to find a baseball camp for my nephew I would go to Google and type in Baseball Camps Houston.

    It's like the old saying about Tennis Shoes. Type in Tennis Shoes and you will get hundreds of millions of possible sites. Type is Running Shoes for Marathon Runners. More keywords and the person searching is further down the buying cycle and is looking for specific information.

    If your going national with your brand, how are you going to help me in Houston and John is Seattle and Mary in Baltimore? Are you wanting to be a directory of baseball camps and make your money off affiliate links and merchandise?

    You really need a good strategy for taking your business and your website to the next level. I would recommend doing some good keyword research and find out what cities or states are most popular for Baseball Camp searches and start with those states/cities first. Then you can add keep adding to the site.

    I bet there are a number of searches done for Baseball Camps run by specific players or ex-players. You might look at promoting these types of camps as well. Again, do your keyword research first and see what people are searching for. There are some great tools at https://www.wordtracker.com

    I specialize in website redesigns, so if I can be of more help, please contact me.

    Brian Bearden
    Houston, TX
  • Posted by excellira on 7/8/2009 at 10:40 PM Member
    "I live in Houston and if I wanted to find a baseball camp for my nephew I would go to Google and type in Baseball Camps Houston."

    This can be resolved by creating a page for each geographical target:
    www.baseballcamps.com/houston
    www.baseballcamps.com/boston
    www.baseballcamps.com/san-diego

    Now you stand a chance of ranking for the broad and narrow terms.
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