E-commerce site to information site

rocky raccoon

The small company that I work for currently has an e-commerce site with Volusion. We are looking are looking at the possibility of removing the e-commerce facility on our website as we are not using it.

Volusion have offered us the option of an informational website at $15/month. The concern that I have is that if we do change to the informational site with Volusion, we do not receive the same level of search engine ranking that our e-commerce site currently gets with Volusion.

Can anyone advise me on the best informational website builder in terms of seo?

As this is a business site we require it to have as much impact as possible with the search engines.

the sword

The website platform would have no bearing on the organic ranking of the site.  My main concern would be proper indexing of the site and ensuring any pages that you are migrating would be properly redirected. 
You will most likely see a drop in search engine ranking if you lose the ecommerce side of the website, simply because the site will be less engaging and you wont rank for your product search terms over time if the pages don't exist anymore.  But you could create a blog and drive visitors that way?
Google uses a number of factors (forever changing) for determining organic rankings for a website, if you follow some of the most basic and fundamental you should be grand with whatever platform you decide to go for. 
Check out the link below:

http://searchengineland.com/seotable/

rocky raccoon

the sword wrote: »

The website platform would have no bearing on the organic ranking of the site.  My main concern would be proper indexing of the site and ensuring any pages that you are migrating would be properly redirected. 
You will most likely see a drop in search engine ranking if you lose the ecommerce side of the website, simply because the site will be less engaging and you wont rank for your product search terms over time if the pages don't exist anymore.  But you could create a blog and drive visitors that way?
Google uses a number of factors (forever changing) for determining organic rankings for a website, if you follow some of the most basic and fundamental you should be grand with whatever platform you decide to go for. 
Check out the link below:

http://searchengineland.com/seotable/

When I view the website stats on the Volusion the page views numbers of the home page is in the 1000's each day (I know the no. of visits is more reflective of customer traffic through the site). I assume that the large number of visits is part of Volusion promoting the site. They have stated that if we remove the ecommerce facility we will "have the same exact tools as you currently have now regarding search engine promotion".

So are you saying that there is no additional seo benefit of setting up an informational website with a company like WIX for example as opposed to staying with Volusion (an e-commerce company facilitating an informational website)?

I will take your advise on the indexing.

the sword

I am unfamiliar with Voulsion but have had a quick look through their website.  They appear to be an eCommerce platform that centralises most web applications you would use independently, eg their own email marketing platform as opposed mail chimp.  I take it you had built this yourself as opposed using a web dev agency?
What additional tools do they offer you to promote the site out of curiosity? From looking through their website features they say they offer an SEO Friendly eCommerce site, but these appear to be standard on page seo techniques they employ (image alt tags etc) do they offer more as they were not mentioned?

A websites success depends on how much effort is put into it and how engaging the end user finds it basically.  In your case, sticking with Voulsion may be a seamless easy migration, as all they may have to do is remove ecommerce functionality, going with a new platform may mean having more technical work to do, such as implementing the correct redirects.

rocky raccoon

"I take it you had built this yourself as opposed using a web dev agency?" Yes, before I started in the company.

"What additional tools do they offer you to promote the site out of curiosity?" When I view the stats for the website the Pages View numbers are in the 1000's where as the Visits are in their 100's. I understand that there are not 1000's of people looking at our website each day but I assumes that Volusion might have been helping it in the rankings. A few times a week I do do small changes (changing stock nos. and date) on around half the pages, in order to increase its ranking. It ranks quiet well but could always be better.

The site is currently not mobile responsive and Google rates it in the 60's with its browser Mobile-Friendly checker.

The two additional sites I am considering building will be much smaller sites (around 10-20 pages each) but will contain links back to the main site, and visa versa. Less wording on the site but more keywoods.

I am aware if the level of work that it will take to create one new properly indexed site let alone three so I want to get the right before before I start, with the aim of hopefully increasing traffic through our site and through our doors.