Disadvantages of Migrating Website to New URL
-
Hi There,
I am currently struggling with the ranking of my website. No matter how many initiatives I try (backlinking, blog commenting, social posting, etc.) I can't seem to make any progression in Google Search. I've done competitive metrics through Open Site Explorer and can't seem to really find the reason why my site is not ranking as well as my competitors. The only one possible glaring element I've thought about is my website URL. This company is in the heating and cooling industry and majority of my competitors have either "heating" or "cooling" or both in their website URL's but mine does not.
Does anyone have any thoughts or recommendations on if changing my URL and then redirecting my current URL would be a step in the right direction help me to climb the rankings in Google Search?
Thanks!
-
Thank you so much for the reply!
I've been working on tracking, analyzing and optimizing this particular website for about a year now. I've optimized my homepage for the best and most specific keyword I can and I've got a 94% optimization score on the page (I can't put the keyword in the URL as it's the homepage). I've added in my competitors into OSE and reviewed their backlinks and besides some local advertising backlinks they have received, my Moz stats are much better than the competition. There is one competitor in particular that is mult-national company and I know that as a small business I don't stand a change in ranking higher than them, however, the other top competitor I have in my local market - does not optimize and still ranks higher than my site. One of the largest frustrations I have with this particular competitor is that the page that results higher than mine has little to no content on it and in other searches (because we are in the same industry) - their homepage will rank higher than my optimized interior pages. We use facebook and link back to our service pages which contain our keywords as often as possible and my crawl from Moz shows 1 missing meta description tag (on a category) and that's it.
I did read up on the Moz Blog today and it seems like everything is on-track but there's no progress. I should also mention that the website is built on Wordpress and as far as I know from the stats I am pulling from Moz - I've covered my bases.
I'm not sure what other specifics I can offer that might assist me with this challenge.
I guess at this point - maybe a second set of eyes on an audit (outside of Moz - because I look at that all the time) is what I need????
If you have any recommendations on a comprehensive site audit, I'd be very interested.
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to this.
-
Thank you so much for the reply!
I've been working on tracking, analyzing and optimizing this particular website for about a year now. I've optimized my homepage for the best and most specific keyword I can and I've got a 94% optimization score on the page (I can't put the keyword in the URL as it's the homepage). I've added in my competitors into OSE and reviewed their backlinks and besides some local advertising backlinks they have received, my Moz stats are much better than the competition. There is one competitor in particular that is mult-national company and I know that as a small business I don't stand a change in ranking higher than them, however, the other top competitor I have in my local market - does not optimize and still ranks higher than my site. One of the largest frustrations I have with this particular competitor is that the page that results higher than mine has little to no content on it and in other searches (because we are in the same industry) - their homepage will rank higher than my optimized interior pages. We use facebook and link back to our service pages which contain our keywords as often as possible and my crawl from Moz shows 1 missing meta description tag (on a category) and that's it.
I did read up on the Moz Blog today and it seems like everything is on-track but there's no progress. I should also mention that the website is built on Wordpress and as far as I know from the stats I am pulling from Moz - I've covered my bases.
I'm not sure what other specifics I can offer that might assist me with this challenge.
I guess at this point - maybe a second set of eyes on an audit (outside of Moz - because I look at that all the time) is what I need????
If you have any recommendations on a comprehensive site audit, I'd be very interested.
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to this.
-
Hi Matt - As Bernadette said, there are many, many reasons why your site could not be gaining on your competitors in the SERPs. And without specifics, it's tough to say why... but unlikely to be the URL. It's actually probably due to not just one, but several reasons. As you are at the point where you are considering something as drastic as moving your site to a new domain, it sounds like now would be a good time to invest in a comprehensive site audit.
Oh, and did you happen to read today's post on The Moz Blog? I've Optimized My Site, But I'm Still Not Ranking—Help!
-
Matt, there are really a lot of reasons why a site won't seem to gain any ground when it comes to ranking in Google. It could be links, it could be content, it could be lack of social media, it could be a lack of local links and citations, or it could be something else. It could be just that you're in a competitive market and that the competition is doing more (or has been around longer).
Regardless, it's most likely NOT the URL. Every domain name has an equal chance of ranking in the search results. So whether or not your keyword is in the URL really doesn't make any difference. It could still be a URL issue or domain name issue, such as if you have other domain names redirecting to your site or if you have used another domain name in the past that has the same content on it.
Without specifics, it's tough to pinpoint a specific reason why the site's not ranking well.
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
-
Complete redesign of website and 301 redirects
I did a complete redesign and content change for my website. I have my new webpages indexed but they still haven't replaced the old ones after 1 month. In search results I see both the old ones and the news ones. How long of a delay should I expect (approximately) for the old pages to be replaced by the new ones knowing the entire website was changed. Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | seoanalytics0 -
Home page keyword in url
I have been looking into SEO for a few weeks now trying to perfect a homepage. Going through various sources on MOZ, and other examples out there on the internet, I keep seeing that you should have your keyword in the URL of the page. The homepage is the page most people want to rank the highest in google searches, however, you cannot put the keyword in the URL as most home page URLs are simply /. Should I actually make the home like this: www.example.com/key-word-example? I would imagine this would not be the normal for many users and would seem like it's not the home page.
On-Page Optimization | | Matthew_smart0 -
With 301 Redirects Does Changing URLs Matter?
We are redesigning our website in order to give it a more modern visual look. For the most part all the content will remain the same. Our old site is hosted on .asp so all of our current URLs look something like this: www.example.com/products/food.asp We plan on using 301 redirects in order to update every URL and remove the .asp. Since we are going to be doing 301 redirects for every existing URL anyways, does it matter from an SEO and ranking standpoint, if we also change the content and structure of the URL? For example, would we see a ranking impact if we were to change the above example URL to www.example.com/food? Obviously we want to try to retain as much link juice and ranking factors as possible during this redesign. Another issue we are seeing is with the image file names of our existing website images. We are moving to a new CMS platform (WordPress) that automatically saves images using a folder path similar to this: wp-uploads/2015-08/food. Will that change affect our SEO or ranking at all? When Google crawls an image does it care about the full path? Any insight would be much appreciated! 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | BlueLinkERP0 -
XML Sitemaps for Property Website
Hi all, I was hoping that someone might have a link to a good example of an XML Sitemap for a large property (real estate) website? Thanks in advance to anyone who does! 🙂 Gavin
On-Page Optimization | | IcanAgency0 -
Paginated URLs are getting Indexed
Hi, For ex: - My site is www.abc.com and Its paginated URLs for www.abc.com/jobs-in-delhi are in the format of : www.abc.com/jobs-in-delhi-1, www.abc.com/jobs-in-delhi-2 and vice versa also i have used pagination tags rel=next and rel=prev. My concern is all the paginated URLs are getting indexed so is their any disadvantage if these URLs are getting indexed as somewhere i have read that link juice may get distributed in case of pagination. isn't it good to use Noindex, Follow so that we can make the Google to understand that paginated page are not so much important and that should not be ranked.
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
New Articles and Posts - what key word to focus on?
I have a few pages on my site focused on key words...such as office design Birmingham. The contact page and a tag page. http:www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-design-birmingham/ Now I recently published an article about a big new office design in birmingham for a company....and I tagged it as office design birmingham naturally...put it in the category for Birmingham office news....and then also put office design Birmingham at key strategic seo points.... the result being this article now seems to rank higher than my office design Birmingham pages?! My question is this....how should I optimise posts? Lets say I put 3 or 4 posts on my webiste/blog about an "office design Birmingham"....I dont want to rank for "HSBC office design birmingham"....I want the article to lend weight to my office design Birmingham credentials ...so I focus on office design birmingham? I dont really want my posts to rank very high though...I want them to help my key pages "float". I'm very confused how to optimise my posts. If I do it too well, they out rank the "old" pages that I actually want people to visit?! Mmm, thanks for pointers!
On-Page Optimization | | bizint0 -
Panda Update and Website Content
According to the Panda Update information, website content that is or was written to help with SEO is now not the best idea, but content that is very informative and interesting is the way to go. But if you have an Ecommerce Website how can you write informative bookmarking content, if each product you sell is very similar, and the information for the product is just details about the product. Its hard to write good content for an eCommerce website. We have 300+ products that are all similar, but if we would write content about each product, it would be similar and not interesting to read. People just want to purchase the product, not read a bunch of content. How do websites that sell many products and not content driven websites rank well in search?
On-Page Optimization | | hfranz0 -
Is it worth changing urls with underscores?
A few pages on one of my sites have underscores linking keywords rather than hyphens (keywords_and_keyword rather than keyword-and-keyword). Possibly from a time before I knew hyphens were preferred... One of the pages ranks well, and drives a good amount of traffic. The others do not do so well, but are still within the top 10 landing pages for the site. Is it worth me changing the underscores to hyphens (setting up 301 redirects first of course) or doesn't it make that much difference?
On-Page Optimization | | Jingo010