Is this Domain Change Worthwhile?
-
Hi-
I have a client who has setup a new criminal law firm in the last few months. The URL is like:
['somename' is the same # characters as their company name]
I have run a successful AdWords a/c for them and many of the big traffic and conversion keywords include 'criminal lawyers'. From a SEO perspective, the long goal is to get traffic for 'criminal lawyers' and keywords that phrase match that.
So I am considering migrating them to www.somenamecriminallawyers.com.
I have researched this issue and understand the technicalities involved in moving. My question here is 'is this change worthwhile'.
I think it is worthwhile because it really is in a sense rebranding them to be more clearly in a specific business domain, ie. criminal law. Also, they are a new outfit so they don't have a lot of backlinks yet. And mainly, they will get a SEO boost to their core keywords 'criminal lawyers'.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts-
Jules
-
Great. I'll investigate the localization options and 'criminal law'. Thanks a lot for the help!
-
Absolutely. Too often with law firms and other pro practices their first pass is all about the site and name being an icon to their current or soon to be greatness. You have to focus on what do people query in the search bar (and get them to understand that is what you do): Felony theft, DWI/DUI Defense/Criminal assault, etc.
Typically, with local firms, I find the terms with localization are best with the query term. So, Omaha-criminal-lawyers.com, omaha-criminal-defense.com, etc. Out of curiosity I checked the following in adwords with keyword tool: Criminal defense, dwi defense, criminal lawyer. (I used Omaha as I have no clients there).
What came back was interesting: Criminal Lawyers has many more queries than criminal defense, but when you look at one Google through out along with mine - criminal law, it gets as many queries as criminal lawyer/lawyers and is much less competitive.
You will have to look with the local added, but I think it is a good change as long as you url to url 301 for all that are applicable from old to new site.
Hope it helps, PM me and let me know how it works out.
-
Thanks Robert that all makes sense and is useful.
I presume you do think the domain change is worth the effort?
Thanks-
Jules
-
Jules
We work with quite a few law firms and I understand what you are wanting to accomplish. Since they are criminal lawyers, I will assume they are not trying to go nationwide with say...mesothelioma. Most criminal firms work within a city so my suggestion would be to use the city name as opposed to their name(s). This will also help with optimizing them locally (Google Places, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local).
Given they are a "new outfit," now is the time to make a change. Assuming you already have some ranking and some links, you do not want to have to redo that. You want to 301 redirect from url current site to url new site. This will preserve what you have. The only negative would be losing the authority or rank you now have so this will handle most of that (you will get roughly 90%).
On new site, make sure each attorney has a local listing as well as the firm. Being you are already doing Adwords, I would think the rest will be easy for you.
-
Jules
We work with quite a few law firms and I understand what you are wanting to accomplish. Since they are criminal lawyers, I will assume they are not trying to go nationwide with say...mesothelioma. Most criminal firms work within a city so my suggestion would be to use the city name as opposed to their name(s). This will also help with optimizing them locally (Google Places, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local).
Given they are a "new outfit," now is the time to make a change. Assuming you already have some ranking and some links, you do not want to have to redo that. You want to 301 redirect from url current site to url new site. This will preserve what you have. The only negative would be losing the authority or rank you now have so this will handle most of that (you will get roughly 90%).
On new site, make sure each attorney has a local listing as well as the firm. Being you are already doing Adwords, I would think the rest will be easy for you.
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
-
Gradual Increase in Domain Authority After Domain Migration But No Improvement in Organic Traffic Yet
We migrated our domain in early April and simultaneously added an SSL certificate. Everything was done by the books. All redirects implemented perfectly, very few errors. Google notified via Search Console. Despite all steps being done perfectly our domain authority dropped from 24 to 8. Organic traffic dropped from about 80 per day to about 10. Each month domain authority increases by 2 or 3. We are now back up to a DA of 16. But no improvement in organic traffic yet. At what point should organic traffic start to return? Hopefully the consistent improvement in DA is a good sign. I have been told that adding SSL and moving the domain at the same time was a very bad idea. We are starting link building next week. Hopefully that will help further. Any ideas as to when this situation will improve? Needless to say it has been awful for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Temporary Domain Changes
Hi All, Our development team needs to do a temporary site name change from www.sitename.com to new.sitename.com and then wants to return to www.sitename.com. They need to do this for the whole site due to how it's built with single sign on (SSO) and how certain post login pages utilize pre login pages and need to keep people logged in. This process is changing with a CMS upgrade and website and post login pages will be independent of the pre login pages moving forward. My question is what is the best way to manage this transition? Right now it seems like the best solution I've been able to work out with development is to reduce the domain shift down to one week and use 302 Redirects, don't index the new.sitename.com site, and for that week and take my lumps as they come from search. Looking for any other suggestion that may help marketing work with dev without casting blame on any teams for drops in organic traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dapacifi0 -
Domain changed 5 months ago still see search results on old domain
Hi, We changed our domain from coedmagazine.com to coed.com in April'13. Applied 301 redirects on all pages, submitted 'change of address' to google but we still see site:coedmagazine.com fetching 130K results on google as opposed to site:coed.com fetches 40K results. Can anybody here throw some light on what might be going wrong? [ Site runs on wordpress, hosted with wordpress as well ] thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Changing the spellings of titles and URl changes
Hi, Changing the spellings of titles and URl changes We identifies 500+ titles with some issues like spellings and punctuations and short or too long. We want to change them, but the titles are connected with the URL's when we change the titles the URl's change as well. My questions are 1. Is it a good way to change them all in one shot or do few daily 2. As the URl's change will Google index drop the old pages as they would be 404 and index new ones? 3. Will we have chances to have drop in traffic due to this? 4. Any way to redirect? as we have a Drupal website Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Change of language
Hi everyone, We bought a domain which had content in German for over 8 years. So the rankings it had were in another search engine aswell. So i've changed the language of the content + targetting in webmaster tools to Dutch. (i've created unique content, in case your wondering)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online_Supply
Now we don't rank in the targetted search engine, nor in the search engine the website was previously ranked. My question is how can we fix this so we are going to get indexed and ranked for the targetted search engine. Thanks in advance.0 -
Changing website providers
After increasing suffering down time from my current website provider, I am seriously considering finding a new one. My only concern is the effect on SERP. Does anyone have any experience with this and what to do and avoid?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Could Sub domains damage our SEO?
Hi there, We're currently looking into integrating a new internal search function to our site which will involve housing the search results on a sub domain of our site. We have no intention of these search result pages becoming landing pages for organic traffic but would the inclusion of a sub domain affect the optimization of the main domain? i.e. could it effect our authority? Nige
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NigelJ0 -
Penalty for using expired domain?
I was wondering if anyone has any experience using dropped/expired domains with old "clean" backlinks for new sites. Is there be a penalty for doing this (with good intent)? Worth a reconsideration request?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdgySEO0