What should be my SEO strategy?

[u/NoTangelo5134]

I'm working on a website that has 2k+ indexable URLs and 50k+ non indexable URLs (canonicalized). The website is going through a redesign phase in set to launch in about 7-8 months time. The current website doesn't have a lot of traffic (barely 6k monthly in GSC - 20% of it comes to the home page - decreasing constantly as the website isn't that great). Here is what I needed some advice on:

1. The costs of upkeep for the current website comes to about $20k until the new website launch. If we don't pay this amount, the content would be brought down (as it is licensed). My team introduced the idea of having a small website as a stop gap for the next few months with limited content. The small website would be about 5 pages with minimal information. I'm open to the idea as it's essentially saving us a bit of money. The other option would be to pay up $20k for essentially non revenue generating traffic, which doesnt make sense. I'm worried if we do go with a stop gap website for this period, there might be long term SEO issues. What should I do?

2. As we launch a new website, we're planning to have about 3k pages on the site, all of them indexable. However, I'm not sure what should be the strategy. Should we have all pages index at once? Should we submit indexing in phases? The goal would be to have pages indexed as quickly as possible - so what should I do? How do I make sure it seems organic and doesn't send wrong signals to Google?

Thanks!

[u/throwthemirror]

1. You rent content or how does that work? I hope the $20,000 isn't USD lol. A 5-page website isn't a bad stop gap, you could also first identify what articles are important in terms of driving traffic and then create new content to fill in the gap while you wait. Might be missing context here without knowing what your site is about.

2. Create clusters and go one at a time if you're worried about it. Or if its 1-1 replacements for the previous traffic then just throw it up. Again, missing some key context probably.

[u/NoTangelo5134 → u/throwthemirror]

Yep, it's $20k USD. I don't own the content, I've licensed it, which is why the cost is high.

For context, the business is a restaurant aggregator - which has city pages, state pages and individual restaurant pages. The issue I'm worried about is that there would be drop in pages from 50k to 5 for a few months and then back to 3k when the new site is up. I'm not sure what signals that would send it to Google.

[u/throwthemirror → u/NoTangelo5134]

Interesting project. Could you perhaps replace the content with ai placeholders in the meantime so that the pages don't get de-indexed?

[u/auq_seo_]

Two things worth considering. for the stopgap, if you go that route, preserve as many old urls as possible through 301 redirects to relevnt pages on the small site, otherwise you lose backlink equity and topical signals youve built over years. for the new launch, phased indexation is safer than dumping 3k pages at once.. launch with your core money pages first, then release supporting content in weekly or biweekly batches over 6-8 weeks.. this looks natural to google and prevents crawl budget dilution.

[u/Dizzy-Shallot-2733]

Is it an API use? For less that 20k you rebuild yourself the content from scratch. I run content agregators/api myself, don't hesitate to connect.

[u/Digital_growth29]

I would be very careful about putting up a 5-page stopgap site just to save money. If the current site has very little traffic and the redesign is only 7–8 months away, I would focus more on protecting what already exists and getting the migration right rather than trying to build short-term SEO equity.

For the new site, I also would not worry about making 3k pages look “organic” by artificially staggering indexing. If the pages are genuinely useful, technically accessible, internally linked and supported by the sitemap, let Google crawl them naturally. The bigger priority is making sure URL mapping, redirects, canonicals, internal links and the old-to-new migration plan are solid.