Branding-Advantages of New Domain

[Kingalan1]

Our current domain (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) is spammy, using 2 hyphens and several keywords. So we are planning on migrating to a new domain. Our company is Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc.. We are Manhattan commercial real estate brokers specializing in office and commercial leasing.

For 5 years we have owned an alternative domain but never migrated the site to it. The alternative domain is www.metro-manhattan.com. But I am not sure it is a good choice since it contains one hyphen.

Any suggestions for creating a strong URL for rebranding? It appears the really good names are already taken.

Thanks, Alan

[Kingalan1]

Hi Patrick:

Thanks so much for your detailed and thorough response!!!

While I have some doubts about our brand name, we were solely considering changing our very spammy sounding URL that contains the two hyphens. But from what you say, even if we do that, we may have a limitation in that the company name "Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc." contains the match anchor text of "Manhattan Office Space".  So if we need to stay away from match anchor text in both the domain in the URL, this rebranding is going need to go a lot deeper than anticipated. My thoughts were solely to replace www.nyc-officespace-leader.com with www.metro-manhattan.com but this is still problematic.  Perhaps a domain of www.mmos.com (abbreviation of Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc.) would be better? Or www.lastNameerealestate.com possible?

Thanks for the resources on the migration. I understand that special care must be taken regarding NAP information for the move to be successful. But I would think this is less of an issue if we are only changing the domain name.

Could we keep our company name and solely change the URL or this an incomplete job?

Are there any resources you can think that would help us think up both a new corporate name and domain name? Maybe we should consider tackling both at the same time as www.nyc-officespace-leader.com plus the corporate name of Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc. don't sound like the most SEO friendly combination.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

You are right to assume that hyphens come across spammy in your top level domain. If it were me, I would pick a domain name that is going to branded and easy to remember. The issue I am having is your brand name sounds like exact match anchor text, meaning I would search "manhattan office space" or "metro manhattan office space" in search without even knowing your company is called that.

So, whatever branded domain you choose is going to see a bit spammy, but I as long as your local SEO and citations are consistent with the brand and NAP information, you should be okay as crawlers will recognize this as your business name.

I would also make sure that you take the time to go through this web site migration guide and a backlink audit to either remove toxic links or update the ones you wish to keep.

You have a lot of work ahead of you, but this will get you started in the right direction! Good luck!