Migrating online store to subdomain using shopify and effects on seo and energy down the road for seo

[MAGNUMCreative]

I'm looking for some clarity...

Looking at using Shopify for an existing online store that we have to migrate. Setting up the store with shopify means we will be using a subdomain such as shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com/shop.

The following are points to consider when responding

1. The client currently has an online store, however it's a proprietary shopping store and CMS that has since gone defunct and they need to migrate to an alternative in order to survive online against new CMS systems that allow the site and its content to be better optimized.
2. There is a lot of existing SEO done on the current site that we don't want to loose PR on.
3. There is roughly 2000 products
4. Client has a fixed budget, dealing with checkout issues, custom work and various other "bugs" seems to be easier controlled with Shopify...thus budget can be used more on content/strategy and migration
5. We want to run the main site in Wordpress and are wanting to use Shopify since it supports a gateway, has great features and seems like it would allow us to get more bang for the buck and can focus more on the main site and content strategy and drive traffic to the subdomain store if needed

Or main concern is the effort of migrating 2000+ products to shopify and the traffic and PR it gives the current site will have a negative effect on the main domain itself.

Should we really be considering this path?

The domain is diveidc.com

One main benefit to the subdomain is the ability to clearly segment products from the service portion of the site in the analytics and focus 2 clear strategies and track it in a very defined manner.

We're really on the fence with this...any thoughts are welcome.

[MAGNUMCreative]

Yes, all good insight.

We are the developers/agency for the client...and we are only considering this option purely on budget reasons. There is a lot of work to address the move to a new CMS, we require stronger content with the move and on top of it all we have to integrate all content to the new CMS....this equates to a treamedeous amount of work...not the best argument but again, posting this in seomoz allows us to have a nice sounding board.

The current CMS is so poorly geared for today's seo strategies that migration to another CMS is 100% required. Moving hosts isn't the problem. The CMS is.

To illustrate how pour the current CMS is, we can't even touch the root .htaccess file to redirect WWW. Doing so breaks the entire CMS system, insane. Thus we have www.mysite.com and mysite.com directly competing against each other, duplicate content etc. That's just 1 issue of many.

Moving to a new CMS is required, but with this move we have budget constraints wrapped in a very big site, wrapped around seo migration issues, wrapped in making things painless for the client, wrapped in making this all work.

We're looking for any insights knowing very well best practices...but having to deal with the reality of budgets. This could end up being "save a penny today, costs big bucks later".

We understand this is our unique  issue and we may have to bite the bullet a bit, go with something like Cart66 and work through the bugs knowing the light at the end of the tunnel will be a brilliant seo/business solution for the client...but may take some painful hours getting there...hours we may have to suck up to keep a happy client and a relationship we've nurtured for some years.

[EGOL]

What isn't so clear is that 2 years down the road this may be a really bad decision that was made just on budget.

I agree.

You never know how google is going to treat a subdomain.... but I have very few doubts about how they are going to treat a folder on my site.

So, if I was in the situation that you are in... I would move hosts,  or change developers,  or find something besides Shopify... to run a website that has the highest present and long-term probability to be as highly competitive as possible.

I work really really hard to compete for rankings.. I am not going to let a host, a shopping cart or a developer screw it up.

It's pretty easy to find new hosts, new developers and new shopping carts when you compare that to the huge job of getting 500 new unique domains to link to a store.  We are comparing issues of convenience to those that are jugular.

Just me sayin' how I look at this.

[MAGNUMCreative]

Yes, we're definitively very aware of this...I'm hoping this post just gives us more brain power to the conversation we're already having internally as an agency knowing we will be loosing a treamedous amount of PR due to products currently being housed within the main domain but knowing that we have to migrate the site out of the existing CMS and go to Wordpress and most likely be using Shopify due to various reasons, mainly around Wordpress and Ecom not playing so hot together and a 3rd party provider (Shopify) cuts a lot of the de-bug work out of the picture allowing us to focus the budget on a content strategy more than build/de-bug time.

To give a bit more of a insight to the type of items the clients website currently caters to. There are 2 sales funnels, one being products and another being services. The products are all scuba dive equipment and the services are all local scuba courses. Currently the site ranks well in a local market for both, however services only ranks well locally while products tend to do much better regionally.

Ranking locally for services is fine, since you can't be in New York and take a scuba course being offered in Vancouver. But, people do query "scuba dive courses" globally and if we get the content strategy right the clients rank will go up regardless of the services being local or not which will benefit products or anything else on the site and vice versa.

Now, going ecom with Wordpress isn't fun. There's no real bullet proof solution that doesn't require some serious elbow grease to get the kinks worked out. Drupal isn't an option for budget reasons. Knowing this we are leaning towards Shopify, a rented solution that offsets some of the headache allowing us to focus on content strategy more than the build and bettering the seo of the overal site and shop...it feels like s safe bet.

I also read that search engines are a bit more aware of what you are doing with subdomains especially when the content you segmenet in to the subdomain is 1 type of content. movies.mysite.com for instance tells search engines it's 1 type of content...so shop.mysite.com essentially says "it's all products 24/7" and we start to focus 2 strategies, metrics and marketing. 1) for the products subdomain and 2) for the services. Sucks we can't cross-share the love, but lead-gen pages may be able to compensate for this as well as other content strategies we would put in place.

What isn't so clear is that 2 years down the road this may be a really bad decision that was made just on budget.

Just a train of thought...

[EGOL]

I have one concern.

There is a big difference in ranking potential between store.domain.com and domain.com/store/

With domain.com/store/ the pages in the store benefit from the authority and linkpower accumulated by the main website.  However, with store.domain.com the benefit is much less.

That alone would have me reject a solution that requires moving the store to a subdomain.