Specific Domain Migration Question

[BMac54]

My company will be taking over an ecommerce site that is built to get local city/state traffic where the competition is slim to none for the given keyword. This site gets 2500+ visits per day, and we're looking to maintain and eventually grow that traffic.

We would like to move that site onto our ecommerce platform which will force URL change and of every 'keyword' city/state page on the site.

We're undecided whether to keep it on an unfamiliar platform that already gets traffic or to move it and possibly face the 404's or weeks of redirecting a single keyword-city/state page to another.

Any advice or insight would be great!

[NakulGoyal]

You are asking this question, which means you already know and I am presuming retaining the same URLs is not a possibility. Even if it's a slim possibly, I'd suggest looking into it further. If not, then as long as you can 301 each and every URL to the new target URL, you should be fine. I have seen a +/- 10% Dip in traffic and rankings (if any) and it all varies on the authority and strength of your website. If you say, you are ranking well with some traffic, it definitely has some strength and I would not worry about moving it as long as you are prepared for it, in terms of redirects and maintaining similar or better On-page SEO and Internal Link Juice. Typically, when CMS's change, so does the internal link juice etc and that can have an affect even if you do the redirects fine. So you need to do an Audit of what's before and after, how optimized is the after compared to the before and what does your competition look like (if any).

I hope this helps.

[BMac54]

Thanks for the quick reply! You're correct, zero chance of maintaining URL structure.

I appreciate the advice.

[MoosaHemani]

If you have a choice to stick up to the current version and carry on with the things then it is fine but if this is not a choice then move towards redirecting 301 to all the pages to new URL structure is something you should be doing.

Obviously this affect your traffic and SERP rankings for certain keywords but along with the migration if you also working on the quick marketing campaign (as you are taking over some other website) which may includes Press Release, Blog posts about it, mailer to all your subscribers and social media.... this will help people coming and visiting your website from multiple places and this will help you retain your SERP rankings and traffic quicker than normal.