Changing URLs for SEO

[mikekeeper]

Hi,

Currently we have a page, /business, but we have shifted our strategy to optimize for this page for the keyword "enterprise" instead of "business".  The page authority of this page is 18 and our domain authority is 35.

I've already updated content and title tags to more of an enterprise focus. Would it be wise to move the page to /enterprise and create a 301 redirect from /business to /enterprise?  Or is this too risky from an SEO standpoint?

Thanks!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Mike,

I think I understand what you are saying and there is no problem with doing this, and it is in fact a recommended practice.

If the page has changed, there is no harm in changing the URL, site focus, Title, Description etc, and have it as a new page. A 301 from /business to /enterprise would be the best way to handle this.

-Andy

[O2C]

We did this recently with a client of ours, we saw almost instant effects, they dropped of the radar completely for all old keywords (good, right!?) but then we only saw a slight increase in the new targeted keywords, so their overall search engine presence had dropped massively!

We will hopefully start to see a rise in the new focused keyword but its just something to keep in mind. Maybe if we were to slowly incorporate the new keyword into the page rather than change it all at once it would have had less of a dramatic change.

[mikekeeper]

So I made this change 2 days ago... I created a 301 from /business to /enterprise.  Here's what I am seeing so far:

• Both pages are indexed... why?
• The /business page is still ranking in the same place for the same terms
• The /enterprise page isn't ranking well
• For some reason our homepage ranking for the target keyword fell off the map completely... this is probably unrelated but not sure