Would switching domain names be a good move?
-
Hi All,
I'm trying to decide whether to switch to a more relevant domain name for an SEO project.
For a while now I've already been doing the standard SEO work on an existing website, content optimization, link building etc but I can't help feeling I won't ever get the full benefits of SEO until I also change the domain name.
The current website is for a law firm in new jersey called sandz.net which obviously has no immediate impression it is for a law firm so I'm looking at setting up a new domain and doing 301s to a new site.
My concerns are that as its a highly competitive market, I've initiated the campaign to target local searches so I'm wondering just how beneficial buying a domain name with the term lawyer or attorney which actually be.
And of course the ideal domain names such as njlawyer, NJattorney .COMs are all taken so I would be looking at perhaps a .ORG with the intention that all printed material the firm has still contains their original name, sandz.net and by word of mouth they should tell people their site is sandz.net as its easy to remember but for the sake of SEO and links then these should all be focused on a new domain..
Any thoughts appreciated..
Thanks
-
Hi David,
I'm updating older, unanswered threads. I'm really curious to hear what you decided to do in this situation and what the effect has been. Can you give us an update and any lessons you learned?
Thanks!
-
I understand where you're coming from, I really do. However, you're always better off going the harder route. I know that isn't what you wanted to hear because your client is paying you to do a job.
However, how pissed are they going to be when one day they pull the switch on the EMD's and they lose their ranking overnight? You're back at square one and your client will feel like a bait and switch was pulled on them.
There is absolutely no reason why you cannot rank a brand website within a few months. It's just a matter of high quality content, on-page optimization, and then link building. Work in the social aspects and you'll easily get them up there with the big dogs.
If you chase the algorithm, you'll be left high and dry.
Just my 2 cents!
-
Hi David, Thanks for your reply.. Although thats not what I was expecting
As I'm up against BIG law firms with buckets of dosh and lots of content on site, wouldn't an EMD give me some leverage against the big guys as they tend to only use their exact firm name in their domain name choice.
And if Google does eventually down rank sites with keywords in the name, I could always switch back to the firm names as the domain name when that day comes?
-
Do NOT go with an Exact Match Domain. Focus on building up a brand. EMD's will one day be going by the wayside and you'll be left with nothing. Trust me, building a brand is the best method to use. You won't get the SERP boost an EMD will give you, but you can easily compensate by using super amazing content that is relevant and doing some nice link building.
Focus on the brand, amazing content, amazing links, and they'll be ranking in no time. Seriously!
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
-
Can’t put a finger on, what is causing 12 year domain, SEO optimized and decent link profile to rank lower than other less superior domains.
Can’t put a finger on, what is causing 12 year domain, SEO optimized and decent link profile to rank lower than other less superior domains. I have dissected the site and link, content, etc profile using ahrefs tools, still no luck, and unfortunately they do not have a community to ask anyone opinion. Hoping someone on Moz will be able to provide me with a secondary opinion or something I obviously missing here. Looking for any constructive feedback/professional opinion with fresh look on what maybe the cause of our down rankings and what may be a cause of it. Any feedback is very much appreciated. Search Term: 3030 aventura condos / One of our link samples (SE Position #6): https://goo.gl/FbYj4V Competing Domains (SE Position #1): https://goo.gl/fLPKX5 Competing Domains (SE Position #2): https://goo.gl/GqXGse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Im_Jake0 -
Handling alternate domains
Hi guys, We're noticing a few alternate hostnames for a website rearing their ugly heads in search results and I was wondering how everyone else handles them. For example, we've seen: alt-www.(domain).com test.(domain).com uat.(domain).com We're looking to ensure that these versions all canonical to their live page equivalent and we're adding meta robots noindex nofollow to all pages as an initial measure. Would you recommend a robots.txt crawler exclusion to these too? All feedback welcome! Cheers, Sean
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanginnaw0 -
Content From One Domain Mysteriously Indexing Under a Different Domain's URL
I've pulled out all the stops and so far this seems like a very technical issue with either Googlebot or our servers. I highly encourage and appreciate responses from those with knowledge of technical SEO/website problems. First some background info: Three websites, http://www.americanmuscle.com, m.americanmuscle.com and http://www.extremeterrain.com as well as all of their sub-domains could potentially be involved. AmericanMuscle sells Mustang parts, Extremeterrain is Jeep-only. Sometime recently, Google has been crawling our americanmuscle.com pages and serving them in the SERPs under an extremeterrain sub-domain, services.extremeterrain.com. You can see for yourself below. Total # of services.extremeterrain.com pages in Google's index: http://screencast.com/t/Dvqhk1TqBtoK When you click the cached version of there supposed pages, you see an americanmuscle page (some desktop, some mobile, none of which exist on extremeterrain.com😞 http://screencast.com/t/FkUgz8NGfFe All of these links give you a 404 when clicked... Many of these pages I've checked have cached multiple times while still being a 404 link--googlebot apparently has re-crawled many times so this is not a one-time fluke. The services. sub-domain serves both AM and XT and lives on the same server as our m.americanmuscle website, but answer to different ports. services.extremeterrain is never used to feed AM data, so why Google is associating the two is a mystery to me. the mobile americanmuscle website is set to only respond on a different port than services. and only responds to AM mobile sub-domains, not googlebot or any other user-agent. Any ideas? As one could imagine this is not an ideal scenario for either website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Moving Entire Domain to New Site with New File Extensions
I have been looking for a while for a good an clear Step by Step guide for moving a site from an old to a new domain... so I guess a good discussion here, could help many web masters have a smooth transition. So in your opinion, beside the obvious, what are the most important steps you must take? Here is what I do: 1. 301 old site to new one and TEST.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dhidalgo1
2. Check Internal Links - Double Check for 404's.
3. Update your Social Profiles with new URL.
4. Let GWT and BWT of the change and request a Crawl.
5. Contact as Many of Webmaster as you possibly can to point your links to your new domain. What's missing? What have you found helpful and/or Effective?0 -
Need to move highest content pages into a sub-domain and want to minimize the loss of traffic - details inside!
Hi All! So the company that I work for owns two very strong domains in the information security industry. There are two separate sections on each site that draws a ton of long tail SEO traffic. For our corporate site we have a vulnerability database where people search for vulnerabilities to research, and find out how to remediate. On our other website we have an exploit database where people can look up exploits in order to see how to patch an attackers attack path. We are going to move these into a super database under our corporate domain and I want to ensure that we maintain or minimize the traffic loss. The exploit database which is currently on our other domain yields about three quarters of the traffic to the domain. It is obviously OK if that traffic goes directly to this new subdomain. What are my options to keep our search traffic steady for this content? There are thousands and thousands of these vulnerabilities and exploits so it would not make sense to 301 redirect all of them. What are some other options and what would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatBausemer0 -
301 Redirecting multiple domains to brand new domain
Hi guys, I have read quite a bit of stuff on 301 redirects after Penguin. Hoping someone could help me out. im looking at a way to do a legit 301 redirect without passing the penalty. I have acquired two businesses, business1 and business2, that both had websites that were hit by penguin. Ive anaylsed there backlinks and theres a lot of spammy forum links and comments and I was also informed they were both using buildmyrank. A side note, buiness2 only started using BMR after it noticed business1 have large amounts of high PR links. business1.com was ranking at position 1 till the penguin hit. Business2.com was ranking around page 2 I work in the same arena as these two businesses and didnt generate any business via the internet. When these 2 businesses failed (due to loss of rankings and traffic) i decided to take them over. What I am thinking of doing is 301'ing both business domains to my brand new, zero links, domain which will be the name of my new company. I will combine the content from both sites, around 1000 pages, in to the new one. So my question is, does 301'ing multiple domains, that target the same keywords, and operate in the same niche, look less "spammy" then 301'ing 1 domain? I'm trying to look at it in the eyes of google. It is a legit merging of businesses. Thanks for your help, really appreciate your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Branching out from .com... good idea?
Lets say I want to branch out from the normal ".com" genre, can you Rank a ".ly" in google search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HCGDiet0 -
How important are domain names?
Hi All, Question: How important are domain names when trying to rank for a competitive keyword? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850