YP Migration WordPress or Wix

YP Migration WordPress or Wix

Below is a plan I helped create with a SEO consulting client that was unsure how to navigate a migration away from YP.com for website hosting and SEM or Pay-Per Click (PPC) Management.  If you are currently stuck in a one-year contract with YP.com now is the time to start creating your migration plan to another CMS like WordPress, SquareSpace.com or Wix.com.

Craig,

We currently use YP for our SEM services. We pop-up at the top for all of our keywords (Utility Locating, Vacuum Excavation, Utility Mapping etc.) We would like to run our SEM and SEO simultaneously and lower our SEM budget significantly once ranking improves.  We are going cut down on SEM budget to allocate some of the funds to SEO and we are concerned about our visibility to potential customers during the transition.  As you probably know YP is expensive and requires a min. 1 year contract. Would it be better if we purchased our ads directly from Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. rather than using a broker?  Can you offer any advise on this matter? Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,

Those are great questions.

You are correct to be concerned with your visibility during the transition from SEM to allocate SEO. It’s also a good idea to not make all the changes at once including the website transfer to Wix.

As I see it your website has 4 major hurdles to a more profitable online presence.

  • Transition Away from YP
  • Increase in SEO Visibility
  • Decrease SEM spend
  • Wix Migration

Although there are 4 hurdles each one on its own is not really an area of concern. However, changing them all in a close periods of time could completely flat line your lead pipeline for up to several months.

If you are unsure… here is the biggest thing that needs to occur to keep your current WordPress SEO authority when transitioning to WIX.

That is URL structure: Your current URL structure looks like this:

  • http://www.yourwebsite.com/sue
  • http://www.yourwebsite.com/pipeline-video-inspections

With Wix it will change and will require 1-2 months before Google likes the new URLs.

 Example:

  • http://www.yourwebsite.com/#sue
  • http://www.yourwebsite.com/#pipeline-video-inspections

All though they look the same Google considers them completely different and rankings will start from scratch. Then with SEO redirects you can reclaim your positions after a few months.

If I were you or a stake holder in SafeSites LLC and needed to get off the YP platform in totality all at once, I would do the following:

  1. Migrate to a WordPress Blog
    1. Benefit: Your URL structure will stay the same and SEO will only increase
    2. Costs: It will cost a re-design and CMS migration of 1-3k depending on the web developer.
    3. Solution: We offer WordPress Migration for $1900 and theme Designs at $2600
      1. Otherwise, You can set up WordPress for $18 a year here:
        1. https://wordpress.com/
        2. Then install a free theme like this one:
          1. https://wordpress.org/themes/advent/
      2. Massage in your content to look like your existing site
  1. You now have a very affordable WordPress site that will be scalable for the life of the business and any agency or consultant can optimize and design better than Wix or your existing site.
  1. Start Your own Adwords/Bing/Yahoo Account or hire a Pay-Per Click Management Firm
    1. The information to be gleamed from owning the SEM account (versus YP) is priceless and worth any growing pains.
    2. Our agency can manage your spend and create the new account if you would like. Our fees for expert PPC Management Services are 20% on ad spend.
    3. With an outside firm you usually get about a 25-30% reduction in spend out the gate with good optimization so it should be an immediate benefit for your organization.
  1. Hire and SEO agency or consultant like myself to optimize and drive authority and rankings.

Otherwise I would approach each change one at a time. Allowing the site to reclaim its traffic volume and leads for each channel (SEM and SEO) before moving forward with any other changes.

I regret to provide a doom and gloom overview but navigating that many changes at once will most assuredly effect your bottom line in the immediate future negatively. It will also place a number of hidden challenges across your path as anytime major changes occur with digital marketing there are unforeseen problems that arise.

Let me know if this raises more questions than answers and if I can assist.

There is also an even cheaper path that can be taken. You can hire myself or someone else to harvest your existing site and re-host it as is off of the YP site.

This way nothing really changes to Google and you now have complete control to migrate both CMSs (WordPress, Wix) and SEM at your leisure without opening yourself up to all the potential issues you can experience jumping to Wix out the gate.