Branding/Domain Challenge

[OhYeahSteve]

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:

1. Keep as is
2. Change domains - ouch!?
3. Make a new second site
4. ?

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?

[OhYeahSteve]

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:

1. Change the hosting from GoDaddy to Bluehost - do you agree?
2. 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)
3. 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

[OhYeahSteve]

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!

[OhYeahSteve]

Thank you for your help - sorry for the delay in thanking you!

[RobertFisher]

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.

[Dekoda_Jones]

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.

[AlanMosley]

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.