undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Local SEO
  4. Considering Switching Domain from .ca to .com for Service Area Business - What is the Risk / Reward?

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Considering Switching Domain from .ca to .com for Service Area Business - What is the Risk / Reward?

Local SEO
3
4
1.1k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • CJ777
    CJ777 last edited by Dec 18, 2018, 11:25 PM

    Hello,

    Thank you to anyone who takes the time to share their thoughts on this. I will preface this by saying that I am very new to the community and have lots to learn, so please forgive any obvious errors on my part. That having been said am very happy to receive positive criticism and feedback 🙂

    Quick Background:

    • We are a high end mobile wellness business based in Toronto Canada offering in home/office servicing including: yoga, pilates, nutrition, meditation, chiropractors, etc...
    • As we are expanding  we are transitioning form new leads coming from business partners and word of mouth to driving new business online
    • As such we have an new Squarespace site (which is the first site I ever built, so any feedback is welcome) and are venturing into social media, SEO, local citations etc... for the first time
    • We have a significant content catalogue originally  for client and instructor education that we are now repurposing for this new digital adventure but have not yet deployed
    • While currently focused in Torotno, we have plans to expand to several other countries in the next two years.
    • As the site is quite new and we have little content or incoming links I was thinking now is the time to switch to .com from .ca before we roll out

    Website: www.anahana.ca

    Risk Reward? & Other Issues?

    • Both domains are currently verified with Squarespace, and it seems easy enough to switch. What could blow up by making this switch which I might not be aware of?
    • Our emails and business card use the .ca, but I don't think this would matter too much 6-12 months out... is there something else I might be missing on this?
    • .com and using subfolders or subdomains as opposed to country specific TLDs ? This is something I am still working on understanding, but from what I have learned thus far, if we are going to progressively roll out a large content library, is it not better from an SEO standpoint to have this all in one domain?
    • Local SEO and legal considerations for TLDs when operating local Service Area Businesses.

    I am sure there are many other angles here that I am missing and am not really looking for any hard answer on much of this, but any general advice, suggested resources, and experienced insights would be extremely helpful.

    Thanks so much,

    cj

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • CJ777
      CJ777 @effectdigital last edited by Dec 21, 2018, 5:10 PM Dec 21, 2018, 5:10 PM

      This is very helpful. Thank you very much for the answer.

      There is lots to learn!!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • effectdigital
        effectdigital last edited by Dec 21, 2018, 5:10 PM Dec 20, 2018, 7:51 AM

        Usually when you move pages from one URL to another, you can notice a minor dip in performance initially. This is because backlinks which hit your site through 301 redirects will give you less SEO equity than those which hit your website directly

        That's just at the page level, but when the URL of every single page on a site changes, you get the same thing (it just encapsulates your total SEO performance rather than a small fraction of it). As long as the redirect migration project is handled properly by an expert at a high level of granularity, usually any performance dip (even for a whole website) is minimal

        Even if your architecture doesn't change and there's no redesign, if all of your pages move from one domain to another that still counts as a 'migration' in SEO terms and you still need to take extensive measures to prevent traffic tail-off

        An SEO expert should be crawling all of your current site's pages **AND **adding in historic URL (which may no longer be live) from Analytics / Omniture / Search Console. In that way, even legacy pages which may previously have been ignored can be properly redirected (rather than 'just' your live URLs before the move) which can add a little extra padding and security

        You need to retain hosting on the old domain so that it can continue to host either a .htaccess or web.config file (Apache (Linux) vs IIS (Windows). This file will coordinate your granular and rule-based redirects

        Having a list of your currently live (old domain) and legacy (no longer live) URLs is great but it's not enough. It's even better to scan all of those URLs using something like URL Profiler (which relies upon API keys and subscriptions to multiple other data sources, including Moz) to determine for yourself - which of these URLs are worth using your granular redirects on?

        Typically you end up with a big spreadsheet that looks like this:

        • https://d.pr/i/9dvkot.png

        Because you're aggregating data from multiple sources, leave it to a data analyst. Don't allow such a project to be handled by an amateur. Invest in insuring your SEO performance by working with pros...

        CJ777 1 Reply Last reply Dec 21, 2018, 5:10 PM Reply Quote 1
        • jasongmcmahon
          jasongmcmahon last edited by Dec 19, 2018, 8:14 PM Dec 19, 2018, 8:14 PM

          Hi there, if anything it'll help with local SEO as a type of trust signal

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • 1 / 1
          1 out of 4
          • First post
            1/4
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          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.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • Ryan07

            New business / content marketing

            local seo

            Hi all SEO experts, if a website is brand new, so published in the last 3 months- new domain name and website design. We have rebranded recently, using a new domain as entered new business partnership, there doesn’t seem to be much guidance on this at all, from various SEO websites, so our question is would you delay publishing new blog posts / content marketing as frequently because the company website is brand new? So would SEO’s decrease the frequency of publication of blog posts, because the website is new? Or perhaps it does not matter, and would still post every week as you would if the website has been live for a long time? So, in nutshell, what we are wondering is, is the “Google Sandbox” still in use?

            Local SEO | Mar 1, 2024, 6:53 PM | Ryan07
            0
          • Nadiamo44

            Local SEO for a business serving multiple small cities

            We have a local business that has a showroom in one city, and serve other 5 different small cities (in total 6 small cities). Search volume for the targeted keyword is very low (around 100 each plus minus) with a variety of competition levels. The product is expensive so this justifies the low search volume with a serious user intent.
            My question is given the low search volume for each keyword, what would be the best local SEO tactic for this. The website has a DA of 20 with competitors who has similar and higher  DAs. Options I am considering: 1. Create unique pages for each location with unique content (no address available so I will have to use a city name postcode)
            2. Create pages with the same content (but changing the area of service on the URL, H1 and mention the postcode and the radius of coverage twice in the content) and using a canonical tag to solve the duplicate issue.
            In this scenario, I will create the main product pages with the address of the showroom, and mention the area of service covered for the other 5 cities.
            3. Given that the 6 cities are part of a greater area, use the greater area to target them all. The keyword of the greater area has a lower search volume than the city keyword.  This might work for keywords with low competition but not for ones with high competition levels.  Not sure how well search engines will rank the keywords that include the greater area and show the pages for searches in small cities. Any advice on which option to go with or any recommendations for other solutions?

            Local SEO | Apr 1, 2024, 6:17 PM | Nadiamo44
            0
          • Transpera

            Keyword rich domain names -> Point to sales funnel sites or to landing pages on primary domain?

            Hey everyone, 
            We have a tonne of old domains we have done nothing with. All of them are keyword-rich domains.
            Things like "[City]SEOPro" or "[City]DigitalMarketing" where [city] is a city that we are already targeting services in.   So all of these domains will be targeted for local cities as keywords. We have been having an internal debate about whether or not we should just host sales funnel pages on these domains, that are rich in keywords and content......... ... Or ... ... Should we point these domains to landing pages on our existing domain that are basically the same as what we would do with the sales funnel pages, but are on our primary site? (keyword rich, with good and plentiful content) Then, as a follow-up question... Should these be set as just 301 redirects on these domains to our actual primary domain so the browser sees the landing page domain instead of the actual keyword-rich domain? ( [city]seopro.com ) Thanks guys. I know for some, the response will be an obvious one. However; we have probably way over thought this and have arguments for almost every scenario. We think we have an answer but wanted to send this out to the community first. I won't post what we are thinking yet, so that the answers can remain unbiased for now and we can have a conversation without it being swayed any one way. We understand that 301 redirects would be seen as a doorway page. 
            We are also only discussing in the context of organic search only. 
            If we ran the domains as their own sites, they would be about 3 pages of content only. Pretty static, but good content. Think of a PAS style sales funnel. Problem -> Acknowledgement -> Solution.

            Local SEO | Jan 31, 2020, 8:48 AM | Transpera
            0
          • RyanMeighan

            What is the 2020 Google ranking weight for EMD (exact matching domains)

            I know EMD's ranking factor have been significantly reduced in the past decade, but do you think it can help at all in 2020? Thanks, Ryan

            Local SEO | Jan 31, 2020, 11:47 AM | RyanMeighan
            0
          • Ryan_Marshall

            Company with multiple services | multiple locations/states

            I have a company that rents, repairs, and sells product both new and used. They also have 3 locations in 3 states and service multiple cities out of the locations (ie... los angeles and orange county). Having a hard time redesigning the website so that it fits for customers to look around and for the best of Organic SEO. The issue seems to be fitting the locations in the mix in order to get the customer to the right area without being too confusing. In the end, I'm thinking well maybe the homepage should just be some content to get them to choose the location first then they can go into silos where they pretty much remain in the location for rentals, repairs, and sales but I'm not sure how having the locations on the home page would affect the site. Obviously, we would be trying to rank the silo locations more but they would be 2-3 pages in on clicks to get to the right section 'if' they started from the home page. We need to do this right from the beginning though because we are working on expanding nationwide one day. Thanks for any help on this manner. (PS> Thought about doing subdomains like locations.example.com or state.example.com and rentals.example.some and shop.example.com but I think that will dilute the rankings)

            Local SEO | Nov 21, 2018, 7:13 PM | Ryan_Marshall
            1
          • Gavo

            How important is citations for an online business?

            If you run an online business, just how important is citation building? Our client does not want to disclose her physical home address from where she operates and the campaign does not consist of any local keywords. Should we then focus on link building and growing the site's DA instead? As well as getting onpage elements optimised. Many thanks in advance for your input!

            Local SEO | Apr 1, 2024, 6:19 PM | Gavo
            0
          • AL123al

            Two websites, same business name, same NAP

            Hi, A client of mine offers loft conversions and wants to make a go of it. So he has a website dedicated to loft conversions. He is also a joiner/carpenter and has another old website which offers general joinery work and insurance work. Both websites have the same business name and same address and phone number. There is only one Google place page for the loft conversions website. The loft conversions website is not ranking as well as we would like locally. Could it be due to the same NAP? What are the best options? Redirect the old website to the loft conversions one (he might not like that idea) Change the address and phone number on one website?(and all subsequent citations?) Would love some help on this!

            Local SEO | Aug 28, 2015, 4:07 PM | AL123al
            0
          • CWG7575

            Significant organic traffic increase from outside of my service area

            I run a local service based business. About 6 months ago, I updated my homepage title tag to incorporate the phrase "near me" (I performed other optimizations as well). Over the last few months, I've noticed increased traffic, calls and online bookings from different areas around the country. I was perplexed, I thought I may have mis-targeted my ppc campaign. After some digging, I found out that my home page ranks #2 in the organic listings for a couple core service keywords with the "near me" phrase added. Of course, my bounce rate, from these visitors outside of my local area, is pretty high (65%). Also, the majority of these visitors are using mobile devices. I see an opportunity here to possibly provide relevant information to the searchers, based on their geographic area. The problem is that, I can't risk modifying my website for the sake of this "out of area" traffic. If I were to provide a page to a visitor based on their ip, could that be considered a black hat tactic? I don't want to do anything that will compromise my core business. Any advice will be welcomed.

            Local SEO | May 1, 2014, 11:49 PM | CWG7575
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.