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 Transition: Moving over paid traffic campaigns first
We're planning a domain name (rebrand) transition, and considering our options. We rely heavily on paid traffic. To reduce risk, we’re considering moving AdWords and Bing Ads over campaign-by-campaign to the new domain first, while organic traffic continues to direct to the old domain. Each of our ad groups has a custom, noindex’d landing page. In order to serve paid traffic, we’d at minimum need a front page, and likely a privacy policy page in addition. Here’s a rough outline of what I think a transition like this might look like: Launch new domain with a simple front page, and privacy policy. Move over ppc landing pages on the new domain (noindex'd, robots.txt) Create new ads in existing ad groups directing to the new domain. Monitor ad groups for some time period to verify sustainability. Once we're satisfied with ppc performance, and planned the rest of the organic page migrations, 301 redirect everything to the new domain. Is there any problems or things we should be concerned about with this approach? I'd think it should be fine, but I've been bitten enough from large-scale redirects in the past, that I know I should be nervous.
Branding | | dsbud0 -
How to measure adwords campaing success on an non ecommerce/leads website
Hello,
Branding | | teconsite
We have a website of a furniture company that runs an Adwords campaign. This company has a lot of distributors. They have several objetives: people explore the online catalog people visit the distributor page (where they can find the nearest distributor in his/her area) people share the pictures and info in social media. (For example: pictures in pinterest) people watch videos new distributors contact them to be a new distributor and so on. As this is not an eccommerce website they can not buy We have created objectives in analytics to meassure those engament results.
My question is how to measure this in Google Adwords...
If I import GA objetives into adwords, I get conversions rates of 350% and even more, and the number of conversions is to high. For example. If one objetive is to visit Distributors page (the one where users can see a map and search for the nearest distributor), I find with a lot of conversions of this type. I was thinking in importing some objectives and giving them a value in $ and instead of evaluating conversion rates, evaluate ROAS. But I really would like to know, what you are doing with this kind of companies. How do you measure the campaign success when most of the objetives are measuring engagement. Please, could you give me any advice? Thank you!0 -
Any experiece with Buying Domains?
Hi! My company is looking to purchase a domain that is more relevant to our business. The company that we are looking to purchase the domain from was actually bought out a few years back and no longer brands itself by that particular domain. Does anyone have any experience buying domains or working with domain brokers? My preference is for a broker but I am open to hearing any suggestions. In the past we had approached this company to purchase the domain and it just didn't work out. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Branding | | IFSNA0 -
Brand Search Results- how do you make sure spammy links don't hurt your brand
We are seeing a spammer start ranking #4 for our branded search result on google. This could potentially be hurting our brand. Any suggestions that have worked for you recently? For more context we already have: Create Social profiles (Linkedin, G+, FB etc) which are engaged and frequently updated Analyzed Domain Authority, Links and recency of the spammy article. The domain and the page authority seems weak, and the spammy article is dated Dec of last year Looked at various posts on http://moz.com/community/q/reputation-management. Thanks in advance!
Branding | | SEMEnthusiast0 -
ECommerce Sites: Sub domain vs. Unique Domains
Hello everyone! I manage 3 large eCommerce sites that sell textbooks, digital learning solutions, electronic teaching resources, etc., to three different markets in the education space (K-12, College, and Post-College/Career Search). Currently, the 3 sites live on three different sub domains of the companies main domain. Is this best practice? I assume we want all three under the same domain to consolidate domain authority. But... What if I told you that we have dozens of sub domains of the companies main domain? Some are for marketing sites, some are for digital products, some are customer-specific sites, etc. We probably have close to 100 sub domains that are used regularly. Then what if I told you that the company doesn't hardly even use the root domain (other than a handful of old pages)? Even the root domain redirects to a sub domain. Just looking for some insight on this, as I will be doing an SEO/marketing/conversion overhaul going forward. On a side note, we use Magento as an eCommerce platform, and it's rampant with duplicate content, duplicate page titles, pages with too many links, and so on and so forth. That's another problem for another day...
Branding | | brad.s.knutson0 -
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 -
Subject: Brand anchor text distribution. Does the HP url classify as brand anchor?
Hi guys, I just wanted to know what your take is on this and whether anyone knows if google has published any info on this. I am wanting to analyse a fairly large backlink profile. The idea is to discover how far it correlates alongside recent SERPS ranking data (based on anchor text distribution) information that has been published across the web. There is so much data to categorise and segment. This is due to overlaps in categorisation, (which is possibly a good thing as it appears more natural) though I often it difficult to decide which goes where. My question today relates to brand anchor text - in determining the % of overall brand distribution for a backlink profile - Which out of the below do you think rings true? 1.) Should I be considering the homepage url anchor text as a branded link anchor? 2.) Should the brand % just be 'pure brand' anchor text? 3.) Should it contain partial brand + KWD data? 4.) Should it comprise of all of the above elements? 5.) Should I divvy up / segment partial brand, pure brand, brand + kwd, citations etc into new sub categories and see how this individual data correlates to current ranking factors in the SERPS? (Not sure if there is any recent published data in this amount of detail) Anyway, I just wondered what you guys thought about this in the eyes of Google., and also to find out how you go about classifying and segmenting backlink profile data. Thanks for now
Branding | | Turkey0 -
List Quick and Dirty places to seo-tag images/content for new brands
I'm helping a new brand (service industry) to try to dominate the first page for their own name. They have a name that also exists in another state AND a negative Yelp review which (shows up #4, whilst they show up #1 on google unpersonalized search). Aside from Linkedin/Facebook/twitter, what are good places to Tag Images and have them show up under the search for this company's name. This is a picture/heavy industry (jewelry) and I'm looking to create profiles on several sites that would immediately show up if I tag the content properly. Are quora/pinterest good choices? I need to grab-bag as many properties as possible. Secondary question: would these properties on quora etc, respond well to exact-match anchor text links to shoot them past the negative yelp rating that is showing up #4 for their brand?
Branding | | ilyaelbert0