The Consequences & Best Practices In Changing Domains

[94501]

Working with a long established/organic successful site that, for brand reasons I disagree with, is verging on changing its domain name.

Other than 301ing individual pages to their new domain name equivalent, getting canonicals updated, updating SSL certificates,  new Google Search Console with old settings, maintaining the old robots.txtetc what else is worth paying attention to?

Assuming I do all of that, how bad a hit to organic over what period of time might this result in? 6 months ago we migrated to https and that was hardly felt, but this is really a brand new domain name altogether.

Thanks!

[JordanLowry]

I believe it took them a few years. They still had not recovered all their organic traffic when I worked on them but we did see a sharp increase in conversion rate. Revenue actually improved I think Moz has a case study out from when they changed from Seomoz to just Moz.

I would just make sure the client understands improving organic traffic after the rebrand will be a steady process. You could look at supplementing organic with a PPC campaign or venture into social media advertising and blogging until you see improvements.

Hope that helps some.

[94501]

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for the message. How long did it take to crawl out of the 30% drop? I imagine the 30% centered around their most competitive keywords, potentially better converting is why more competitive.

What would you consider a worst case scenario?

Thanks!

[JordanLowry]

I worked with a company that had done this same thing a few years back and experienced roughly a 30% drop in traffic and revenues. Of course with solid SEO and digital marketing you will slowly start to build everything back up. However the new branding initiative could be a good thing too and the company may see improvements in revenue.

Here are some resources to help with your rebrand:

https://moz.com/ugc/overcoming-a-rebrand-seo-search-engine-opportunities

http://searchengineland.com/rebranding-seo-important-considerations-184208