I have a SEO strategy question that I hope someone can help me with.
My website is was built 2 years ago as a B2B lead gen site not an e-Commerce site, thus it was not created on an E-Commerce platform. A lot of the things I sell are custom or can not be quoted online due to competitive advantage reasons (B2B large bids to government, etc). We have around 500 unique SKUs with more added all the time. Some items (20-30%) can be sold online and might be a good source of revenue. At a minimum, I can take some pressure off of my CSRs who responds to leads. I have some different options on how to do this:
1. Recreate the entire website through Drupal or some other CMS. (time consuming and expensive, and does not solve the custom products/privacy issues). Creating a product fulfillment backend, recreating the frontend, exactly porting over all the URLs would be an insane amount of work.
2. On 20-30% of products, create a link to a corresponding page on an E-Commerce portal like shop.mysite.com (network solutions sells a standard Cart/Website package). So when a customer sees a product that she likes on www.mysite.com, she can click on a "Configure now" link to go to shop.mysite.com where she can configure the product, checkout, and my CSR can do fulfillment, etc. There might be tons of duplicate content though as the corresponding page on shop.mysite.com would contain the same information as the page on www.mysite.com
3. If duplicate content is an issue, I can make a concerted effort to not duplicate content. Again, reward vs time spent will be an issue.
Questions:
A. Will having this setup detrimentally impact customer experience and searchability?
B. Do pages on both subdomains contribute to the total weight of the website?
C. If I have google checkout/shopper feeds/BBB logo on the shop.mysite.com, will Google also increase the SEO-ability of www.mysite.com?
D. Anything else I am missing?
Thanks everyone for their input in advance.
Michael
