Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Considering Switching Domain from .ca to .com for Service Area Business - What is the Risk / Reward?
-
Hello,
Thank you to anyone who takes the time to share their thoughts on this. I will preface this by saying that I am very new to the community and have lots to learn, so please forgive any obvious errors on my part. That having been said am very happy to receive positive criticism and feedback
Quick Background:
- We are a high end mobile wellness business based in Toronto Canada offering in home/office servicing including: yoga, pilates, nutrition, meditation, chiropractors, etc...
- As we are expanding  we are transitioning form new leads coming from business partners and word of mouth to driving new business online
- As such we have an new Squarespace site (which is the first site I ever built, so any feedback is welcome) and are venturing into social media, SEO, local citations etc... for the first time
- We have a significant content catalogue originally  for client and instructor education that we are now repurposing for this new digital adventure but have not yet deployed
- While currently focused in Torotno, we have plans to expand to several other countries in the next two years.
- As the site is quite new and we have little content or incoming links I was thinking now is the time to switch to .com from .ca before we roll out
Website: www.anahana.ca
Risk Reward? & Other Issues?
- Both domains are currently verified with Squarespace, and it seems easy enough to switch. What could blow up by making this switch which I might not be aware of?
- Our emails and business card use the .ca, but I don't think this would matter too much 6-12 months out... is there something else I might be missing on this?
- .com and using subfolders or subdomains as opposed to country specific TLDs ? This is something I am still working on understanding, but from what I have learned thus far, if we are going to progressively roll out a large content library, is it not better from an SEO standpoint to have this all in one domain?
- Local SEO and legal considerations for TLDs when operating local Service Area Businesses.
I am sure there are many other angles here that I am missing and am not really looking for any hard answer on much of this, but any general advice, suggested resources, and experienced insights would be extremely helpful.
Thanks so much,
cj
-
This is very helpful. Thank you very much for the answer.
There is lots to learn!!
-
Usually when you move pages from one URL to another, you can notice a minor dip in performance initially. This is because backlinks which hit your site through 301 redirects will give you less SEO equity than those which hit your website directly
That's just at the page level, but when the URL of every single page on a site changes, you get the same thing (it just encapsulates your total SEO performance rather than a small fraction of it). As long as the redirect migration project is handled properly by an expert at a high level of granularity, usually any performance dip (even for a whole website) is minimal
Even if your architecture doesn't change and there's no redesign, if all of your pages move from one domain to another that still counts as a 'migration' in SEO terms and you still need to take extensive measures to prevent traffic tail-off
An SEO expert should be crawling all of your current site's pages **AND **adding in historic URL (which may no longer be live) from Analytics / Omniture / Search Console. In that way, even legacy pages which may previously have been ignored can be properly redirected (rather than 'just' your live URLs before the move) which can add a little extra padding and security
You need to retain hosting on the old domain so that it can continue to host either a .htaccess or web.config file (Apache (Linux) vs IIS (Windows). This file will coordinate your granular and rule-based redirects
Having a list of your currently live (old domain) and legacy (no longer live) URLs is great but it's not enough. It's even better to scan all of those URLs using something like URL Profiler (which relies upon API keys and subscriptions to multiple other data sources, including Moz) to determine for yourself - which of these URLs are worth using your granular redirects on?
Typically you end up with a big spreadsheet that looks like this:
Because you're aggregating data from multiple sources, leave it to a data analyst. Don't allow such a project to be handled by an amateur. Invest in insuring your SEO performance by working with pros...
-
Hi there, if anything it'll help with local SEO as a type of trust signal
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
-
New business / content marketing
Hi all SEO experts, if a website is brand new, so published in the last 3 months- new domain name and website design. We have rebranded recently, using a new domain as entered new business partnership, there doesn’t seem to be much guidance on this at all, from various SEO websites, so our question is would you delay publishing new blog posts / content marketing as frequently because the company website is brand new? So would SEO’s decrease the frequency of publication of blog posts, because the website is new? Or perhaps it does not matter, and would still post every week as you would if the website has been live for a long time? So, in nutshell, what we are wondering is, is the “Google Sandbox” still in use?
Local SEO | | Ryan070 -
How to rank in Google against a business with the same name?
My client has a coworking space in London, but shares its name with a recruitment company also in London. When searching for my client's brand name, they don't appear anywhere on the first page as this recruitment company dominates. How can I rank prominently for my brand term if there is someone else in these top spots who isn't a direct competitor (in the typical sense)? Thank you!
Local SEO | | WhitewallGlasgow0 -
Local SEO for a business serving multiple small cities
We have a local business that has a showroom in one city, and serve other 5 different small cities (in total 6 small cities). Search volume for the targeted keyword is very low (around 100 each plus minus) with a variety of competition levels. The product is expensive so this justifies the low search volume with a serious user intent.
Local SEO | | Nadiamo44
My question is given the low search volume for each keyword, what would be the best local SEO tactic for this. The website has a DA of 20 with competitors who has similar and higher DAs. Options I am considering: 1. Create unique pages for each location with unique content (no address available so I will have to use a city name postcode)
2. Create pages with the same content (but changing the area of service on the URL, H1 and mention the postcode and the radius of coverage twice in the content) and using a canonical tag to solve the duplicate issue.
In this scenario, I will create the main product pages with the address of the showroom, and mention the area of service covered for the other 5 cities.
3. Given that the 6 cities are part of a greater area, use the greater area to target them all. The keyword of the greater area has a lower search volume than the city keyword. This might work for keywords with low competition but not for ones with high competition levels. Not sure how well search engines will rank the keywords that include the greater area and show the pages for searches in small cities. Any advice on which option to go with or any recommendations for other solutions?0 -
Keyword rich domain names -> Point to sales funnel sites or to landing pages on primary domain?
Hey everyone,Â
Local SEO | | Transpera
We have a tonne of old domains we have done nothing with. All of them are keyword-rich domains.
Things like "[City]SEOPro" or "[City]DigitalMarketing" where [city] is a city that we are already targeting services in.  So all of these domains will be targeted for local cities as keywords. We have been having an internal debate about whether or not we should just host sales funnel pages on these domains, that are rich in keywords and content......... ... Or ... ... Should we point these domains to landing pages on our existing domain that are basically the same as what we would do with the sales funnel pages, but are on our primary site? (keyword rich, with good and plentiful content) Then, as a follow-up question... Should these be set as just 301 redirects on these domains to our actual primary domain so the browser sees the landing page domain instead of the actual keyword-rich domain? ( [city]seopro.com ) Thanks guys. I know for some, the response will be an obvious one. However; we have probably way over thought this and have arguments for almost every scenario. We think we have an answer but wanted to send this out to the community first. I won't post what we are thinking yet, so that the answers can remain unbiased for now and we can have a conversation without it being swayed any one way. We understand that 301 redirects would be seen as a doorway page.Â
We are also only discussing in the context of organic search only.Â
If we ran the domains as their own sites, they would be about 3 pages of content only. Pretty static, but good content. Think of a PAS style sales funnel. Problem -> Acknowledgement -> Solution.0 -
What is the 2020 Google ranking weight for EMD (exact matching domains)
I know EMD's ranking factor have been significantly reduced in the past decade, but do you think it can help at all in 2020? Thanks, Ryan
Local SEO | | RyanMeighan0 -
How can I personalize content based on a state/region? Is it possible?
I'm getting a lot of traffic from different regions throughout the US. I need to personalize the content in my website or on a certain landing page based on the users state/region. Is it possible? For example, forwarding a user that lands on page "x" to page "y" if he's from California and to page "z" if he's from South Carolina. And of course, can this somehow affect my rankings in Google? Thanks!!
Local SEO | | OrendaLtd0 -
Google My Business Locations Query- Do I need unqiue Picture File Names for every location
Hello All, I am just in the process of updating all my google business locations for each of my depots. I have been uploading photos but I am wondering if the file names of the photo's need to be unique for every location ? I know I need to describe the picture in the filename so it's good use of keywords but I am wondering if google will see it as spaming if I upload the same product pictures etc to ever google business location ? thanks Pete
Local SEO | | PeteC120 -
Significant organic traffic increase from outside of my service area
I run a local service based business. About 6 months ago, I updated my homepage title tag to incorporate the phrase "near me" (I performed other optimizations as well). Over the last few months, I've noticed increased traffic, calls and online bookings from different areas around the country. I was perplexed, I thought I may have mis-targeted my ppc campaign. After some digging, I found out that my home page ranks #2 in the organic listings for a couple core service keywords with the "near me" phrase added. Of course, my bounce rate, from these visitors outside of my local area, is pretty high (65%). Also, the majority of these visitors are using mobile devices. I see an opportunity here to possibly provide relevant information to the searchers, based on their geographic area. The problem is that, I can't risk modifying my website for the sake of this "out of area" traffic. If I were to provide a page to a visitor based on their ip, could that be considered a black hat tactic? I don't want to do anything that will compromise my core business. Any advice will be welcomed.
Local SEO | | CWG75750