Branding/Domain Challenge
-
A year and a half ago, SEO was all new to me and I may have made a mistake that looks to be a problem now. In a misguided quest to rank higher and faster, I used a domain for it's keywords and quick ranking potential rather than using my business' name URL.
I've built the links and authority to where I'm now ranking well for many of my local search terms which is important for my local business success. The situation is that now I want to expand my business nationally as a franchise which will require my company's name in the domain(?), and the addition of entirely new pages and terms.
My company's name' URL> www.ImpactMMAfitness.com is pointed to my site www.austinfitnessgyms.com and GA shows a significant # of visitors type our name in to find us. I also think it would be odd for someone outside my town looking for franchise info to be pointed to a different domain with Austin in it.
I was wondering what option would be best:
- Keep as is
- Change domains - ouch!?
- Make a new second site
- ?
I have 'ImpactFranchise.com I could use for a new site just for franchising but I would be starting at the bottom for any rankings.
Is there a solution, or did I dig myself into a hole?
-
Thank you your insights and advice. Now that I know the direction my business is growing, there are three changes I want to make for my business site:
- Change the hosting from GoDaddy to Bluehost - do you agree?
- Replace my Wordpress theme from Thesis to the new Headway Themes 3.0 (so site can grow w/o me learning or hiring a coder)
- and of course changing the current domain to www.ImpactMMAfitness.com - Thank you for your help with this!
In which order or combination should I proceed with these steps?
Sincerely,
Steve
-
Thanks for the advice - the business has always been named Impact MMA Fitness, I just set up the website trying to rocket to the top of the SERP's with a Keyword rich domain - wrong choice!
-
Thank you for your help - sorry for the delay in thanking you!
-
Steve, Alan and Joshua have some good points here. If your desire is to franchise, you almost certainly have to go with a 301 redirect to the site you wish to brand with. You also don't want those typing in that brand to end up on a site where the URL is AustinFitnessGyms.com on a lot of levels.
But, you are going to have to be very careful with what you do or you will have a real problem on your hands. As it is now, you are redirecting the MMA site to the Austin Fitness site. When you have the 301's already set, if you go into MMA and set new ones you are going to create an endless loop and your pages may not show. This is a pain to deal with so take it one step at a time.
As a franchisor, if you had two locations, you could just keep the Austin Fitness and use the other location for inclusion in your Franchise Offering Circular. If you are selling franchises it will be hard to do so without a proven product so leaving it as Austin Fitness will be hard. You probably need to insure the signage, etc. is all MMA. You could start a new site, but that will likely not solve the problem and you will have to build links for it.
When you did the 301 from MMAsite to Fitness site did you do every url and did you use the .htaccess file? The reason I ask is that when you put in the www.impactMMAFitness.com and the non www of impactMMAfitness.com it returns two different results in OSE.
My suggestion is this: Choose to reverse the way you have the 301 and do it methodically. First, take the 301's off of any of the ImpactMMAFitness.com (check each url as Screaming Frog does not show each having a 301). After you do that, resubmit the site map to Google. Then, go into the .htaccess file of the AustinFitnessGyms.com site and use a 301 on each url to the respective url on ImpactMMAFitness.com) also go into Google and select a prefered site for ImpactMMAFitness.com - www. or non www. Make sure you have done the same on AustinFitnessGyms.com, so that either iteration redirects the juice to the Impact site.
Once you do that, resubmit the sitemap to the engines. I believe, this will fix the error of choosing a domain that was best at the time. For your local, you leave it the same as it will end up on the main site. You should also look at the rules around franchising and the Internet when it comes to marketing. Think of someone having a location in San Antonio or even San Marcus and their being a conflict of borders.
Hope this helps. Please remember when you redirect from the Austin to the MMA, if you have not taken the 301's off of Austin it will likely bite you in the butt.
-
I would bite the bullet and start the new URL, redirecting all the links from the previoius domain across to the new site. Sure it will hurt a little bit to start with, but you should still get most of that branded traffic if you set up a page within your new site dedicated to the old brand name.
If you do it that way you can set the title tags and meta decription so as the consumers know you have re-branded and come through to the new site. Just make sure you keep the look and feel consistent for the first month or two at least.
-
Having more than one site means having to promote more then one and that’s hard to do. The only time I would do this is if you have an exact match domain that is really ranking well. Then I may have 2, but I would promote the brand name site not the exact keyword site, if the exact match is not ranking without more links I would not bother. Remember the exact match only has an raking advantage for the keywords in the domain.
I would link to my new brand name site, but I would not link back again. This way you are giving something to your new site from the old.The more standard advice is to 301 redirect to your new site. You will see a drop for a few weeks and then it will regain to about where it was.
You will lose a bit as 301 redirect’s leak of link juice.
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
-
Domain: Product brand or company brand?
I work for a company with a very strong brand. We have a product with an even stronger brand. Right now, our product marketing pages look like this: https://www.company.com/product/.... I believe this leads to URL bloat, and I think we're probably missing some search rank on product-branded keywords that we would automatically get if, instead, our product marketing was here: https://www.product.com/.... An example of this structure is Colgate Palmolive (http://www.colgatepalmolive.com/en/us/corp), the makers of Colgate toothpaste (http://www.colgate.com/en/us/oc/). We already own both domains, but of course right now SEO rank is entirely owned by company.com. If we put product marketing at product.com, of course the company site can still link to the product site anywhere, and vice-versa, which means (I think) that both domains help each other out. But we wouldn't have to spend as much time worrying about the branded keyword in product content. I have found some posted opinion that tends to support my hunch here, but I haven't seen anything more concrete in support of it. Has anyone got direct experience with this question?
Branding | | hoosteeno0 -
Re-Branding Website
Hi everyone! I'm currently in the process of re-branding a website, and am really worried about the SEO consequences of doing so... The site I'm working on has recently been seeing a large increase of organic search traffic (almost 25% each month for the past 3 months) and I want to do my best to avoid screwing that up in the process of changing the aesthetic of the site. A couple specific questions I have are: Does changing the stylesheet, but none of the on-page content affect SEO? Would condensing menu items (i.e. putting all services under 1 item named "services") have a positive or negative effect? Neither? Any advice, tips, or previous experiences on this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Branding | | Derrald0 -
International domain query
my client is a financial services company with some ccTLDs for brand name but does not own the .com eg: brandname.ch, brandname.ro etc we need to launch a brand UK site plus a global site. should we go for another name on the .com: brandname_financial.com_, and: brandname_financial.ch_, brandname_financial.ro_ etc or could we go for instead brandname.uk.com and brandname.eu.com? i'm worried the owner of brandname.com will build a site and out rank us.....however the alternative is a longer url but owning the .com hope that makes sense and any advice would be gladly received! Many thanks
Branding | | bisibee10 -
High authority brand expanding product line, domain question
Hi MOZers, I've been given a handy little domain puzzle to deal with and would love insight from the community. Here's the situation: We're retailers of one specific, big, nationally known product. Let's pretend it's the Snuggee (IT'S NOT). People search for it and buy it from our site, or from Amazon or other retailers that we distribute it to. We're about to expand to carry a bunch of related, but different products - so from a one-product brand to 5 or 6 different items, relating to different keyword searches. Imagine Snuggee people want to start selling a whole bunch of products that solve the same needs of warming the front of your body and making you look silly. The owners want to change the main domain from [specific product] to [name similar to specific product, but is more general]. What concerns me is how to handle the fame of the branded product in terms of domain names. Current domain, based on that product, has a ton of links and a decent age. Owners are thinking to redirect everything to fresh new unestablished domain. While I know 301s will pass most link value, it will also be a home page that will be about a bunch of products - not just that main known one. In fact, we're considering making a URL for each product as landing page, of which old famous product would be one of 5 or 6 pages. Two main options we're considering right now: Keep old domain as a doorway page featuring just old product, with same look and feel, and from which any links would point to the new domain. Try to keep this as ranking for top result for this search, which should be easy. Unify everything under new domain, with old product being featured on a separate page / subdirectory. Hope that new home page still can rank pretty well for our old product, even though it will be talking about other products now as well. What we'd stand to lose would be the SERP for old products featuring too many big box retailers that sell our stuff and take a chunk out of our margins. The goal is to help us become known for many things, while still being always the best search result for what we're already known for. Which of those two options seem best, or is there another I'm missing altogether? Thank you!
Branding | | advancedSemiotics0 -
Organic fluctuations after domain migration ?
I'm working on the rebranding of an ecommerce site We're going to do a domain migration and since half of the current traffic is coming from organic searches I'd like to estimate possible fluctuations on this channel. **Do you have any rebranding experience? or can suggest good case studies on this? ** (Technically speaking we know the protocol and also on the communication/strategy side we're covered.. we just need an estimate of the organic drop.. in the worst case scenario)
Branding | | homeonline0 -
Google+ Vanity Urls: Brand vs Keyword
We have recently been assigned a Google+ vanity URL for our Google page. By default, Google has assigned to us our top performing non-branded keyword. (Probably roughly twice the highly targeted search volume of our brand) My question is: Should I go with my BRAND NAME as my Google+ vanity url, or should I go with my TOP KEYWORD as my Google+ vanity url?
Branding | | Czarto0 -
Splitting our main website in Two... What is the fastest way for the new sites to become a brand in Googles eyes.
In a couple weeks our main website (which generates all of the revenue) will be split into two because of a long term branding / identity crisis. So my question is, how can i make sure (besides obvious 301 redirects) that these 2 new fresh urls become a brand as quick as possible in googles eyes? So far i am thinking of things like: press releases, blog posts with brand mentions. I am not ignorant and expect this to happen overnight, but we need a strong foundation to build on, which is why i am asking Anyone got a list / case study / advise so I can really blow it up on launch week? Thanks 🙂
Branding | | Hyrule0 -
Effective & Creative Ways to Market Detailed Buyers Guide/Whitepaper
My company has developed a detailed white paper/buyers guide for a specific type of widget that we sell, and we're looking for creative ways to market this content. We will be marketing it on our blog, plus via our ecommerce store's navigation. Any other suggestions?
Branding | | stevenmusumeche0