Is this Domain Change Worthwhile?
-
Hi-
I have a client who has setup a new criminal law firm in the last few months. The URL is like:
['somename' is the same # characters as their company name]
I have run a successful AdWords a/c for them and many of the big traffic and conversion keywords include 'criminal lawyers'. From a SEO perspective, the long goal is to get traffic for 'criminal lawyers' and keywords that phrase match that.
So I am considering migrating them to www.somenamecriminallawyers.com.
I have researched this issue and understand the technicalities involved in moving. My question here is 'is this change worthwhile'.
I think it is worthwhile because it really is in a sense rebranding them to be more clearly in a specific business domain, ie. criminal law. Also, they are a new outfit so they don't have a lot of backlinks yet. And mainly, they will get a SEO boost to their core keywords 'criminal lawyers'.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts-
Jules
-
Great. I'll investigate the localization options and 'criminal law'. Thanks a lot for the help!
-
Absolutely. Too often with law firms and other pro practices their first pass is all about the site and name being an icon to their current or soon to be greatness. You have to focus on what do people query in the search bar (and get them to understand that is what you do): Felony theft, DWI/DUI Defense/Criminal assault, etc.
Typically, with local firms, I find the terms with localization are best with the query term. So, Omaha-criminal-lawyers.com, omaha-criminal-defense.com, etc. Out of curiosity I checked the following in adwords with keyword tool: Criminal defense, dwi defense, criminal lawyer. (I used Omaha as I have no clients there).
What came back was interesting: Criminal Lawyers has many more queries than criminal defense, but when you look at one Google through out along with mine - criminal law, it gets as many queries as criminal lawyer/lawyers and is much less competitive.
You will have to look with the local added, but I think it is a good change as long as you url to url 301 for all that are applicable from old to new site.
Hope it helps, PM me and let me know how it works out.
-
Thanks Robert that all makes sense and is useful.
I presume you do think the domain change is worth the effort?
Thanks-
Jules
-
Jules
We work with quite a few law firms and I understand what you are wanting to accomplish. Since they are criminal lawyers, I will assume they are not trying to go nationwide with say...mesothelioma. Most criminal firms work within a city so my suggestion would be to use the city name as opposed to their name(s). This will also help with optimizing them locally (Google Places, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local).
Given they are a "new outfit," now is the time to make a change. Assuming you already have some ranking and some links, you do not want to have to redo that. You want to 301 redirect from url current site to url new site. This will preserve what you have. The only negative would be losing the authority or rank you now have so this will handle most of that (you will get roughly 90%).
On new site, make sure each attorney has a local listing as well as the firm. Being you are already doing Adwords, I would think the rest will be easy for you.
-
Jules
We work with quite a few law firms and I understand what you are wanting to accomplish. Since they are criminal lawyers, I will assume they are not trying to go nationwide with say...mesothelioma. Most criminal firms work within a city so my suggestion would be to use the city name as opposed to their name(s). This will also help with optimizing them locally (Google Places, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local).
Given they are a "new outfit," now is the time to make a change. Assuming you already have some ranking and some links, you do not want to have to redo that. You want to 301 redirect from url current site to url new site. This will preserve what you have. The only negative would be losing the authority or rank you now have so this will handle most of that (you will get roughly 90%).
On new site, make sure each attorney has a local listing as well as the firm. Being you are already doing Adwords, I would think the rest will be easy for you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can’t put a finger on, what is causing 12 year domain, SEO optimized and decent link profile to rank lower than other less superior domains.
Can’t put a finger on, what is causing 12 year domain, SEO optimized and decent link profile to rank lower than other less superior domains. I have dissected the site and link, content, etc profile using ahrefs tools, still no luck, and unfortunately they do not have a community to ask anyone opinion. Hoping someone on Moz will be able to provide me with a secondary opinion or something I obviously missing here. Looking for any constructive feedback/professional opinion with fresh look on what maybe the cause of our down rankings and what may be a cause of it. Any feedback is very much appreciated. Search Term: 3030 aventura condos / One of our link samples (SE Position #6): https://goo.gl/FbYj4V Competing Domains (SE Position #1): https://goo.gl/fLPKX5 Competing Domains (SE Position #2): https://goo.gl/GqXGse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Im_Jake0 -
Impact of Domain Authority on Keyword ranking
Experts Please advise if there is any impact on Keyword rankings due to high or low Domain authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | INN0 -
Changing your URL? Impact on rankings?
I have been thinking about changing our webadres for quite a while but I'm too afraid of the impact on my SERP. I understand I would need to use the Google Change of Address tool & 301 redirects. Am I missing something? What is your experience with changing the URL of a website? How has this impacted your SERP? In the past I heard someone say it will damage the linkjuice by 20%. Is that accurate? If you change the URL, is there a blank period of where your old site nor your new site are indexed? Or does Google handle this transition well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Best Way to Consolidate Domains?
Hello, My company has four websites in the same vertical and we're planning to integrate them all on our main company site. So instead of www.siteone.com, www.sitetwo.com, www.sitethree.com, etc. It would be www.branddomain.com/site-one, www.branddomain.com/site-two, etc. I have a few questions... Should we redirect the old domains to the new directories or leave the old domains and stop updating them with new content... Then have the old content, links, etc. 301 to the same content on the new site? Should we literally move all of the content to the new directories? Any tips are appreciated. It's probably pretty obvious that I don't have a ton of technical skills... my development team will be doing the heavy lifting. I just want to be sure we do this correctly from an SEO perspective! Thanks for the help, please let me know if I can clarify anything. E
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
301 of EDM domains
If I buy a keyword EDM domain and 301 redirect it to my site, will I rank better for that keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creaturmedia0 -
Virtual Domains and Duplicate Content
So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains. Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL. Example: sub.agencysite.com/store sub.brandsite.com/store Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content. Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask) I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site. They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers) Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up. So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology? I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new. My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup? I mean on one hand I am saying
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!" So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?0 -
Hosting images on multiple domains
I'm taking the following from http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html "Splitting components allows you to maximize parallel downloads. Make sure you're using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. For example, you can host your HTML and dynamic content on www.example.org and split static components between static1.example.org and static2.example.org" What I want to do is load page images (it's an eCommerce site) from multiple sub domains to reduce load times. I'm assuming that this is perfectly OK to do - I cannot think of any reason that this wouldn't be a good tactic to go with. Does anyone know of (or can think of) a reason why taking this approach could be in any way detrimental. Cheers mozzers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0 -
Renaming primary domain advice
Hi, We have a site www.anteater.com.au. It's a pest control company here in Sydney Australia. Now I've just renamed it to www.anteaterpestcontrolsydney.com.au yesterday for SEO purposes. I'm doing 301 redirects. My question is, is it worth it to do this? Will we have any advantage in the long run with just this URL change? Or would it be better to just leave it as is as www.anteater.com.au Any comments would be appreciated. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590