As a business owner in the construction industry, your website is often the first point of contact with potential clients. If you’re considering a domain change—whether for rebranding, a merger, or another reason—it’s crucial to understand how to do so without compromising your hard-earned SEO rankings. When done incorrectly, changing domains can lead to a drop in search engine visibility, loss of traffic, and decreased rankings. However, with the right steps, you can transfer your domain while preserving SEO performance.
This guide will walk you through the process of transferring your domain without losing your SEO rankings, covering essential steps like setting up redirects, keeping track of backlinks, and ensuring Google recognizes your new site structure.
What You’ll Learn in This Guide:
- How Changing Domains Affects SEO: Understanding the impact of domain changes on your site’s search rankings.
- Steps to Preserve SEO When Changing Domains: Best practices to avoid losing traffic and rankings during a domain transition.
- Reasons to Change Your Domain: Key situations when a domain change might be necessary for your business.
- How to Monitor SEO Performance After Changing Domains: Ensuring the changes don’t negatively impact your long-term SEO strategy.
How Changing Domains Affects SEO
When you change your domain, you essentially start with a clean slate as far as SEO is concerned. Google treats your new domain as a fresh website, which means it has to go through the process of building authority, indexing, and ranking all over again. This can lead to fluctuations in rankings, and in some cases, a temporary loss of search engine visibility. These changes are a normal part of the process and should be expected, especially when combining other changes such as a website redesign.
While it’s common to experience a dip in performance after transferring your domain, the good news is that with a proper migration strategy, you can recover these losses and potentially regain or even improve your rankings in the long run. By following the steps outlined below, you can preserve your SEO value and maintain your online presence during the transition.
Steps to Protect Your SEO When Changing Domains
1. Confirm Your New Domain Name
The first and most crucial step is selecting your new domain name. It should align with your business values, be memorable, and include relevant keywords if possible. Your domain name consists of two main parts:
Second-Level Domain (SLD):
This is the core name, such as yourcompanyname.
Top-Level Domain (TLD):
This refers to the suffix, such as .com, .net, or .org. For global businesses, a .com is the most recognized, while region-specific businesses may use a country code TLD (e.g., .au for Australia).
Choosing the right TLD is essential because it signals to Google the geographical or business focus of your site. Ensure your TLD reflects your target audience. If you’re targeting clients in Perth or Western Australia, consider using the .com.au extension for local recognition.
2. Record Your Backlinks and Update Them
Backlinks are a crucial part of SEO. They help build your website’s authority by showing search engines that other reputable websites trust your content. However, when you change your domain, you risk losing these valuable backlinks.
To mitigate this, it’s important to track all your existing backlinks and update them with your new domain. Contact website owners or partners who link to your site and ask them to update the URLs to the new domain. This helps retain the SEO equity built by those links and ensures your domain authority stays intact.
For websites with high authority, a more proactive approach might be needed. Consider asking for a link swap or a dedicated page with your updated domain to fully leverage your backlinks.
3. Migrate Your Old Site to Your New Domain
Migrating your old site to the new domain involves several technical steps. If you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, there are plugins available to streamline the process, such as the Duplicator Plugin, which helps migrate your content smoothly.
For other platforms, the migration process may be more manual, but it’s equally important to follow best practices and ensure the structure and content are correctly transferred.
4. Set Up 301 Redirects
After migrating your content, setting up 301 redirects from your old domain to your new one is essential. A 301 redirect tells search engines that the content has permanently moved to a new location. This ensures that visitors and search engines are automatically directed to the new domain without running into broken links (404 errors).
Failure to set up redirects correctly can result in a significant loss of traffic and can negatively impact your rankings. Be sure to redirect both your internal links and backlinks. Implementing a 301 redirect strategy helps preserve SEO value by transferring link equity from the old domain to the new one.
5. Re-index Your New Domain in Google Search Console
Once your site is live on the new domain and 301 redirects are in place, the next step is to notify Google about the domain change. Use Google Search Console to submit your new website’s sitemap and URL structure. This allows Google’s crawlers to re-index your site and ensure it’s appropriately recognized in search engine results.
Make sure the new domain is indexed, and double-check that no “no-index” settings are accidentally applied, which can prevent Google from crawling and indexing the new site. Monitoring this step closely is crucial for avoiding missed traffic and rankings.
6. Monitor Your Results Post-Change
Once your new domain is live, it’s vital to closely monitor your SEO performance. Track key metrics such as search rankings, organic traffic, and user engagement using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This will allow you to spot any unexpected issues, such as broken links or slow load times, that could affect your rankings.
Regularly check the status of your redirects and ensure that they are functioning properly. If your website starts to experience problems, take corrective actions as soon as possible to avoid prolonged ranking drops.
Reasons to Change Your Domain Name
Changing your domain is not a decision to be made lightly. However, there are valid reasons why you might consider it:
1. Rebranding
If your business has gone through a major rebrand or you’re changing the services you offer, updating your domain name to reflect the new brand identity is essential. A domain that aligns with your business’s evolution can help improve visibility and resonate more with your target audience.
2. Merger or Acquisition
When businesses merge or one company acquires another, the brand name and domain might change to reflect the new business structure. This is particularly important if the merger leads to a new identity or a shift in target markets.
3. Reputation Management
If your domain name has a negative connotation or no longer aligns with your audience’s values, it may be time to change. Public feedback or internal company shifts could necessitate a change to enhance brand perception and appeal to a broader market.
4. Legal Issues
Sometimes, legal challenges arise when another entity claims that your domain infringes on their trademarks. To avoid potential litigation, changing your domain may be necessary to protect your business’s long-term interests.
Get a Free Demo Today!
If you’re planning to change your domain, you’ll need a solid digital marketing strategy to maintain your SEO rankings. Don’t leave this critical transition to chance—get a free demo of our web design services today! We can help you migrate your domain smoothly, preserve your SEO rankings, and set your business up for long-term success.
Changing domains can be a tricky process, but by following the proper steps and taking the necessary precautions, you can transfer your domain without losing SEO rankings. With careful planning, maintaining backlinks, setting up redirects, and monitoring performance, you can ensure a seamless transition while safeguarding your search engine visibility.
