Merging B2B site with B2C site
-
Hi,
A mobile phone accessory client of ours has a retail site (B2C) and a trade site (B2B). The retail site does pretty well and ranks highly for a number of terms. The trade site doesn't really rank for anything as they don't optimise it.
They would like to merge the two sites and allow trade customers to log-in and purchase goods in bulk for their business.
If they were to merge the trade site into the already successful consumer site, what would be the best way of doing this and what, if any, implications would it have on the organic visibility of the B2C site?
Would it be possible to target retail and trade customers on one website?
Cheers,
Lewis
-
Hi Lewis! Did Matthew answer your question? If so, mind marking one or both of his replies as a "Good Answer?" It'll get him a couple bonus MozPoints, and it helps us keep track of things.
-
Yeah, that would probably make the most sense. For sites where I've done something like this before, it is usually a single page (or maybe a few pages, depending) that talks about the trade program, answered common questions, allowed login, and encouraged signup. You could then promote that page(s), optimize it for appropriate terms, get links going to it, etc.
-
Hi Matthew,
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
I think everything on the B2B side would be hidden and not accessible to bots. If this is the case, how would we target B2B customers? Just set up a single page with content regarding the trade products and process?
Cheers,
Lewis
-
Hey Lewis,
I would imagine it is possible to merge the two sites with limited implications. From a pure SEO standpoint the biggest consideration factor is if there is any negative "baggage" associated with the B2B site--especially spammy backlinks or any wonky technology that would impact the B2C site (speed, redirect issues, etc.). Given that, I'd do a careful review of the B2B site first to evaluate backlinks to that site and any errors reported about that site (using something like Moz's crawl tool and/or in Google Search Console).
The other potential risk is if there is any duplicate content that would be created as a result of the merger of the two sites. For instance, if you have a page on the B2B and B2C sites about Product X, after the merger you'd potentially end up with two pages about Product X. From what you said, it seems like the B2B's site content would be hidden behind a login and wouldn't be accessibile to bots. If that is the case, then maybe this isn't much of an issue. But where this is an issue, I'd also work to figure out the sitemap of the merged site and map out any link changes or redirects that are required to implement that new sitemap.
Along with SEO considerations, there are of course non-SEO factors to consider that could have indirect implications on SEO. Would there be any harm in the customers of the B2C side knowing the B2B trade side exists? If so, that could potentially harm the visitor experience and the brand which could negatively impact clicks, social shares, link building, etc. in the future. Likely not a risk, but I've seen a handful of companies who've merged their two sites only to find that they should have kept their audiences more segmented.
Hope that helps!
any duplicate content that would be created as a result of the merger
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Site map creator
I have a large website with about 1300 pages. I can't find a good sitemap creator that will crawl the whole site and spit out the xml file. Any ideas or suggestions for good services? Also, a site this large, should I consider mutiple site maps?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dwebb0070 -
How to avoid adult traffic to site?
A client of ours is increasingly getting a lot of adult traffic to their site, where they show up only for adult searches and not at all for relevant searches. How can we stop Google associating their site with adult content? Here's a blog example, giving advice to parents on girls and body image issues: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/girls-and-body-image keywords driving traffic to this page are all around images for 'young nude girls' etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MediaCause0 -
301s from previous site
Hi! Got quite a tricky problem regarding a client, http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/ and their previous site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/ Here's the background: We have approx 1500 'listing' pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/listing/view/1925/the-barre-des-ecrins-or-the-dome-des-ecrins-mountaineering-trip They bring in min 2k hits/month, and also add to the overall site authority I suspect. They will eventually all have a home on main domain. When they do, they will also each have been rewritten to be unique, so the value of them will increase (many are currently not). We also have landing pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/view/559/volunteering-holidays- which despite being hideous are ranked fairly well (page 1 for key terms). We cannot currently fulfil all these on main domain, but do not want to shut them down and lose positioning. Choices as I see it: Make a landing page e.g. muchbetteradventures.com/volunteering and a) redirect from old landing page, b) redirect all related 'listings' to this page. May help preserve rankings of main landing page (the most important), but not of any listings? Import all listings to have a home on main domain, (probably as children of a landing page, but not rewritten to be unique just yet). Make them not accessible from homepage, and change functionality of them so that new visitors from google are told we cannot currently help them with this trip. This is more work to complete so will take longer to do and is a distraction from our core focus so needs good justification! Stay running largely as we are, slowly redirecting 1 page at a time as we carry over more and more options to main domain. This will take over 12 months min.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
New site - when will it rank?
We changed our domain 6 weeks ago as we had a penalty we couldn't shake off... My question is: How long will it take to rank for our keywords. I appreciate this is a difficult questions as there are a lot of factors that will effect our ranking. Do Google wait a period of time before allowing a new site to rank well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Development site crawled
We just found out our password protected development site has been crawled. We are worried about duplicate content - what are the best steps to take to correct this beyond adding to robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
How can i redirect my site to other domain ?
I have been running an eCommerce site since 2008 and have a PR3 with mostly have an authority link from reputed sites, how can I transfer my existing eCommerce site to the new domain so in the new domain i get SEO value from the old domain. Please advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chandubaba0 -
Site speed tests
In webmaster tools my site is showing that it is taking longer and longer to load, and it has now doubled. Is there a way to check which pages are the problem? The site is quite large so I can't check them one at a time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Is there a FastTrack to re-index? a site?
Hello... i just started with a new client this week, before working with us his last domain-hosting-webdev provider cancel their account and took off the entire site and left them with a nice "under construction page" (NOT) and added the noindex, nofollow tags. 4 weeks after that, we come into the scene and of course our client it's expecting us to reinsert at least for branded terms the site, and he wants it done on a matter of hours... I tried my best to explain that it's not possible and we are doing everything we can't.... now i ask you guys.. I already created de GWT account, Created a well structured Sitemap and submitted it to google and bing, did the onpage optimizitation at least the basics... there is a way to speed up the process? kind of like "hey you! google bot, forget about the noindex nonsense a come crawl again?" Any help would be great Daniel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0