What are your suggestions for a page with many visitors?

[Guest]

Hey all, need some recommendations!

A website I'm now working on has a niche webpage that draws huge traffic (as it's useful information generally) and holds the highest SERP rank without the team before me doing any SEO on it.

But it's not actually of value to our goals and it's sitting in the wrong place so messing up a section I really need to work on as it's keybto conversion goals.

If I move it, I'll need to change the URL, will this impact it's ranking heavily?

I want to add to the existing page so it starts to add a bit of value (page exit rate is 85%...) and don't want to stop providing this info. Any suggestions?

[David]

If it's currently no value to you then what do you care what happens to it? It has to provide some level of value to you/the business otherwise you wouldn't be worried about it.

Random traffic doesn't just show up. The page and your site is ranking for a reason.

I would take a second look at what the intent is of the queries your page is ranking for. See what value the page brings to users and enhance that not knock it down for another intent.

Once maintaining or enhancing the page then you can correlate it with the new page you want and link to it so first page serves more of an assistive role to conversion (site goals).

So take a look at the page queries and most common next page paths from the first page from your analytics as a basis for aligning this current page to your new one. This way this maintains your high rankings but lowers your exit rate.

[Philipp]

You should be fine with a 301 redirect. Sometimes it causes a slight dip (i guess until the changes are propagated to all google servers) but then it should get back to normal within a couple of days