Our site was built so that our main product description pages are in fact CMS entries. As the design is very limited I have been working on actual pages to replace these. The resulting pages will be better in all senses, text, graphic, layout, etc.
However, the existing CMS entries don’t actually perform badly on google search, in as much as they appear well ranked for certain search terms (i.e. consultant salary survey).
So I am worried that if I replace the CMS pages with my newly created pages I may lose some sort of advantage that may have built up over time. To be clear I don’t really know, just want to be sure I am not doing something risky before I do. The new pages, should in terms of content , be better SEO-wise than the old ones, and I don’t mind if the search results are temporarily impacted but then return. But as said if there is anything to do or keep in mind to minimise negative impact or optimise the process, please let me know.
Many thanks.
The current product pages, or one of them is here:
Easy fix. Set up some 301 (Permanent) Redirects from the https://venconresearch.com/[CMS OBJECT SLUG]/[CMS ENTRY SLUG]/ to https://venconreseaerch.com/[NEW PAGE SLUG] in your site settings. All backlinks to those pages and all traffic going to those pages will be automatically redirected to the new page and the browsers will all save that redirect permanently. You might lose a teeny tiny bit of your “link juice” but Google will learn pretty quickly that the new location is the same as the old location. Just make sure you don’t change any of the content. At all. Unless you’re improving it SEO-wise.
I agree with @vinberdon - 301 redirects are the best transition here.
If you are skeptical about too many changes at once, focus first on the redirection and then implement the on-page optimization.
Good luck!
Yeah, @Sofian_Bettayeb is right. While many on-page changes are pretty low-impact, it’s always possible something you do has a huge impact (good or bad) so I would take some of your lower-ranking pages and optimize them after the migration and leave the rest the same. Wait a few weeks and see how things go.
