Making changes to your brand is a huge step, and while it's sometimes the best path forward, it isn't one to be taken lightly. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers some guidance to marketers who are wondering whether a rebrand/redirect is right for them, and also those who are considering consolidating multiple sites under a single brand.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!
To rebrand, or not to rebrand, that is the question
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to chat a little bit about whether you should rebrand and consider redirecting your existing website or websites and whether you should potentially consolidate multiple websites and brands that you may be running.
So we've talked before about redirection moves best practices. We've also talked about the splitting of link equity and domain authority and those kinds of things. But one of the questions that people have is, "Gosh, you know I have a website today and given the moves that Google has been making, that the social media world has been making, that content marketing has been making, I'm wondering whether I should potentially rebrand my site." Lots of people bought domains back in the day that were exact match domains or partial match domains or that they thought reflected a move of the web toward or away from less brand-centric stuff and toward more keyword matching, topic matching, intent matching kinds of things.
Maybe you're reconsidering those moves and you want to know, "Hey, should I be thinking about making a change now?" That's what I'm here to answer. So this question to rebrand or not to re, it is tough because you know that when you do that rebrand, you will almost certainly take a traffic hit, and SEO is one of the biggest places where people typically take that traffic hit.
Moz previously was at SEOmoz.org and moved to moz.com. We saw a dip in our traffic over about 3 to 4 months before it fully recovered, and I would say that dip was between 15% and 25% of our search traffic, depending on week to week. I'll link to a list of metrics that I put on my personal blog, Moz.com/rand, so that you can check those out if you'd like to see them. But it was a short recovery time for us.
One of the questions that people always have is, "Well wait, did you lose rankings for SEO since SEO used to be in your domain name?" The answer is no. In fact, six months after the move, we were ranking higher for SEO related terms and phrases.
Scenario A: Rebranding or redirecting scifitoysandgames.com
So let's imagine that today you are running SciFiToysAndGames.com, which is right on the borderline. In my opinion, that's right on the borderline of barely tolerable. Like it could be brandable, but it's not great. I don't love the "sci-fi" in here, partially because of how the Syfy channel, the entity that broadcasts stuff on television has chosen to delineate their spelling, sci-fi can be misinterpreted as to how it's spelled. I don't love having to have "and" in a domain name. This is long. All sorts of stuff.
Let's say you also own StarToys.com, but you haven't used it. Previously StarToys.com has been redirecting to SciFiToysAndGames.com, and you're thinking, "Well, man, is it the right time to make this move? Should I make this change now? Should I wait for the future?"
How memorable or amplifiable is your current brand?
Well, these are the questions that I would urge you to consider. How memorable and amplifiable is your current brand? That's something that if you are recognizing like, "Hey I think our brand name, in fact, is holding us back in search results and social media amplification, press, in blog mentions, in journalist links and these kinds of things," well, that's something serious to think about. Word of mouth too.
Will you maintain your current brand name long term?
So if you know that sometime in the next two, three, four, or five years you do want to move to StarToys, I would actually strongly urge you to do that right now, because the longer you wait, the longer it will take to build up the signals around the new domain and the more pain you'll potentially incur by having to keep branding this and working on this old brand name. So I would strongly urge you, if you know you're going to make the move eventually, make it today. Take the pain now, rather than more pain later.
Can or have you tested brand preference with your target audience?
I would urge you to find two different groups, one who are loyal customers today, people who know SciFiToysAndGames.com and have used it, and two, people who are potential customers, but aren't yet familiar with it.
You don't need to do big sample-sizes. If you can get 5, 10, or 15 people either in a room or talk to them in person, you can try some web surveys, you can try using some social media ads like things on Facebook. I've seen some companies do some testing around this. Even buying potential PPC ads and seeing how click-through rates perform and sentiment and those kinds of things, that is a great way to help validate your ideas, especially if you're forced to bring data to a table by executives or other stakeholders.
How much traffic would you need in one year to justify a URL move?
The last thing I think about is imagine, and I want you to either imagine or even model this out, mathematically model it out. If your traffic growth rate -- so let's say you're growing at 10% year-over-year right now -- if that improved 1%, 5%, or 10% annually with a new brand name, would you make the move? So knowing that you might take a short-term hit, but then that your growth rate would be incrementally higher in years to come, how big would that growth rate need to be?
I would say that, in general, if I were thinking about these two domains, granted this is a hard case because you don't know exactly how much more brandable or word-of-mouth-able or amplifiable your new one might be compared to your existing one. Well, gosh, my general thing here is if you think that's going to be a substantive percentage, say 5% plus, almost always it's worth it, because compound growth rate over a number of years will mean that you're winning big time. Remember that that growth rate is different that raw growth. If you can incrementally increase your growth rate, you get tremendously more traffic when you look back two, three, four, or five years later.
Where does your current and future URL live on the domain/brand name spectrum?
I also made this domain name, brand name spectrum, because I wanted to try and visualize crappiness of domain name, brand name to really good domain name, brand name. I wanted to give some examples and then extract out some elements so that maybe you can start to build on these things thematically as you're considering your own domains.
So from awful, we go to tolerable, good, and great. So Science-Fi-Toys.net is obviously terrible. I've taken a contraction of the name and the actual one. It's got a .net. It's using hyphens. It's infinitely unmemorable up to what I think is tolerable -- SciFiToysAndGames.com. It's long. There are some questions about how type-in-able it is, how easy it is to type in. SciFiToys.com, which that's pretty good. SciFiToys, relatively short, concise. It still has the "sci-fi" in there, but it's a .com. We're getting better. All the way up to, I really love the name, StarToys. I think it's very brandable, very memorable. It's concise. It's easy to remember and type in. It has positive associations probably with most science fiction toy buyers who are familiar with at least "Star Wars" or "Star Trek." It's cool. It has some astronomy connotations too. Just a lot of good stuff going on with that domain name.
Then, another one, Region-Data-API.com. That sucks. NeighborhoodInfo.com. Okay, at least I know what it is. Neighborhood is a really hard name to type because it is very hard for many people to spell and remember. It's long. I don't totally love it. I don't love the "info" connotation, which is generic-y.
DistrictData.com has a nice, alliterative ring to it. But maybe we could do even better and actually there is a company, WalkScore.com, which I think is wonderfully brandable and memorable and really describes what it is without being too in your face about the generic brand of we have regional data about places.
What if you're doing mobile apps? BestAndroidApps.com. You might say, "Why is that in awful?" The answer is two things. One, it's the length of the domain name and then the fact that you're actually using someone else's trademark in your name, which can be really risky. Especially if you start blowing up, getting big, Google might go and say, "Oh, do you have Android in your domain name? We'll take that please. Thank you very much."
BestApps.io, in the tech world, it's very popular to use domains like .io or .ly. Unfortunately, I think once you venture outside of the high tech world, it's really tough to get people to remember that that is a domain name. If you put up a billboard that says "BestApps.com," a majority of people will go, "Oh, that's a website." But if you use .io, .ly, or one of the new domain names, .ninja, a lot of people won't even know to connect that up with, "Oh, they mean an Internet website that I can type into my browser or look for."
So we have to remember that we sometimes live in a bubble. Outside of that bubble are a lot of people who, if it's not .com, questionable as to whether they're even going to know what it is. Remember outside of the U.S., country code domain names work equally well -- .co.uk, .ca, .co.za, wherever you are.
InstallThis.com. Now we're getting better. Memorable, clear. Then all the way up to, I really like the name AppCritic.com. I have positive associations with like, "Oh year, restaurant critics, food critics, and movie critics, and this is an app critic. Great, that's very cool."
What are the things that are in here? Well, stuff at this end of the spectrum tends to be generic, forgettable, hard to type in. It's long, brand-infringing, danger, danger, and sketchy sounding. It's hard to quantify what sketchy sounding is, but you know it when you see it. When you're reviewing domain names, you're looking for links, you're looking at things in the SERPs, you're like, "Hmm, I don't know about this one." Having that sixth sense is something that we all develop over time, so sketchy sounding not quite as scientific as I might want for a description, but powerful.
On this end of the spectrum though, domain names and brand names tend to be unique, memorable, short. They use .com. Unfortunately, still the gold standard. Easy to type in, pronounceable. That's a powerful thing too, especially because of word of mouth. We suffered with that for a long time with SEOmoz because many people saw it and thought, "Oh, ShowMoz, COMoz, SeeMoz." It sucked. Have positive associations, like StarToys or WalkScore or AppCritic. They have these positive, pre-built-in associations psychologically that suggest something brandable.
Scenario B: Consolidating two sites
Scenario B, and then we'll get to the end, but scenario B is the question like, "Should I consolidate?" Let's say I'm running both of these today. Or more realistic and many times I see people like this, you're running AppCritic.com and StarToys.com, and you think, "Boy, these are pretty separate." But then you keep finding overlap between them. Your content tends to overlap, the audience tends to overlap. I find this with many, many folks who run multiple domains.
How much audience and content overlap is there?
So we've got to consider a few things. First off, that audience and content overlap. If you've got StarToys and AppCritic and the overlap is very thin, just that little, tiny piece in the middle there. The content doesn't overlap much, the audience doesn't overlap much. It probably doesn't make that much sense.
But what if you're finding like, "Gosh, man, we're writing more and more about apps and tech and mobile and web stuff on StarToys, and we're writing more and more about other kinds of geeky, fun things on AppCritic. Slowly it feels like these audiences are merging." Well, now you might want to consider that consolidation.
Is there potential for separate sales or exits?
Second point of consideration, the potential for separate exits or sales. So if you know that you're going to sell AppCritic.com to someone in the future and you want to make sure that's separate from StarToys, you should keep them separate. If you think to yourself, "Gosh, I'd never sell one without the other. They're really part of the same company, brand, effort," well, I'd really consider that consolidation.
Will you dilute marketing or branding efforts?
Last point of positive consideration is dilution of marketing and branding efforts. Remember that you're going to be working on marketing. You're going to be working on branding. You're going to be working on growing traffic to these. When you split your efforts, unless you have two relatively large, separate teams, this is very, very hard to do at the same rate that it could be done if you combined those efforts. So another big point of consideration. That compound growth rate that we talked about, that's another big consideration with this.
Is the topical focus out of context?
What I don't recommend you consider and what has been unfortunately considered, by a lot of folks in the SEO-centric world in the past, is topical focus of the content. I actually am crossing this out. Not a big consideration. You might say to yourself, "But Rand, we talked about previously on Whiteboard Friday how I can have topical authority around toys and games that are related to science fiction stuff, and I can have topical authority related to mobile apps."
My answer is if the content overlap is strong and the audience overlap is strong, you can do both on one domain. You can see many, many examples of this across the web, Moz being a great example where we talk about startups and technology and sometimes venture capital and team building and broad marketing and paid search marketing and organic search marketing and just a ton of topics, but all serving the same audience and content. Because that overlap is strong, we can be an authority in all of these realms. Same goes for any time you're considering these things.
All right everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to some great comments, and we'll see you again next week. take care.
Happy Friday!
Thanks for bringing up a great topic Rand.
Back in 2012, we realized we can't keep our domain anymore (it was ForexPros.com back then) simply because Forex has only been a part of what we offered.
Similar to your move to Moz.com, we realized we need to drop the "Forex". In the end of that year we bought the Investing.com domain and for my team the rebranding process took most of 2013. This wasn't a couple of weeks thing..
Besides the domain's cost, 2013 was our toughest year in terms of both revenue and growth. As expected, we lost quite a lot of our organic traffic in the first half of 2013.
But today when we look back, we know it was the company's best move. Especially if we take 2014's growth rate into account.
As you said Rand, if you know it's something you have to do, take the pain now and get it over with.
A few months after the move we got back to our original rankings. And from that point, everything became much easier. Getting different kinds of partnerships, PR coverage (or links in general), getting new paying customers, and even hiring new people--everything became easier with the new domain.
Since then, I had the chance to help 2 other companies with the same process, and it's totally doable. If you know that you have to do it for your brand, plan it well, and get it done.
Igal - thanks so much for sharing that experience. Fascinating to hear, and certainly matches up with our experience re: the SEOmoz.org to Moz.com move: https://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-...
Hi Rand,
I didn't found the link to the list of metrics when you migrated from SeoMOZ to MOZ.
I guess this is the post you were talking about:
https://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-...
Cornel
Yes! Thanks for including that.
"Change the Title, Silly Video Editor"
Superb wbf Rand - highly relevant and addresses the challenges web designers and SEOs are facing right now. It is also good to hear from someone who has just gone through such a change.
We have a very similar call to make right now. We are completely rebuilding a client website with a slightly (very) old school domain (containing 4 hyphens and lots of keywords). The domain name is awful, unmemorable, BUT performing ok in search.
I think what it often comes down to is future goals and objectives. If you want to build the site for long term future, then it is well worth taking a short term hit on traffic.
Great post Rand.
I really enjoyed the insight to the Moz re-brand. Especially encouraged to hear that after the initial traffic hit for natural that you moved back into positive growth and hopefully have continued that incremental growth rate.
I have a related question/s to scenario B - consolidation - what's your opinion on consolidating a single brand on multiple ccTLDs to a single .com with country specific subfolders?
Would the growth potential from consolidation of link equity and marketing focus on a single domain outweigh the potential risk of losing a strong location signal in the ccTLD.
It was encouraging to hear that everybody sees a drop off after changing and it may take a few months to come back back. Even more refreshing to hear that MOZ came back stronger for SEO terms than previous domain
We rebranded last year. I followed what Moz had done and am happy to say that our organic traffic increased by 260% over 2014 (and is climbing still). We did lose a bit of traffic in the first month, but after that we gained... and gained. If you follow what Moz did, you probably won't go wrong ;)
Hi Robert - I think it really depends on how important localization is to you and the degree to which your visitors care about the TLD. In some countries and industries, potential customers/searchers are less likely to click a ".com" because they've experienced frustration with those sites not serving them well in their country, and thus prefer a ".co.uk" or ".de" or ".co.za," etc. I'd focus mostly on what your market wants and whether you have people in each locale who can focus on marketing those sites.
Great Whiteboard Friday as always. I think websites should really focus on branding to be successful in 2015. Thanks Rand.
Again very requisite post Rand..! It's a very common issue with website owners and entrepreneurs about how to deal with it. Very thorough post, thanks for sharing..! Krishna :)
Hey Rand,
important topic and great efforts like always. I have question regarding the domain name. I appreciate that the domain name should not be complicated and it should be memorable and easy to pronounce.
Now my question is about having number in domain name for instance
hellotoeveryone.com
hello2everyone.com
Both sounds okay in saying however it can be easily get addle with each other. In this case what do you reckon? does it will make a difference?
Thank you
You really nailed it, Rand.
It's a very timely WBF both given the EMD vs. Brand discussion and the launch of 513 new top level domains since 2014 with hundreds more to come.
As you state .com is the gold standard, and will probably remain so over the next many years (in US it seems to be the only TLD), however I wouldn't ignore the new TLDs when rebranding. In your example with startoys.com you could actually rebrand the website to star.toys, if you had been out early securing that domain name.
While there's no snowballing effect to be seen in the near future when it comes to the use of new TLDs, I do think we will see a gradual change, where .com will be only one of many options.
Just recently I saw that at the end of the trailer for forthcoming blockbuster Self/Less with Ryan Reynolds, they use the domain name outlive.life for the movie's website. Hollywood has always (ALWAYS) used the domain name title+movie.com.
Christopher
I am based in Australia, we run scientific experiments on domains and impact on clickability. At this point in the experiments conducted for clients they are a negative factor on clickability. The search result has to have a strong brand, title and description to overcome.
Europe/US are usually ahead of us, have you seen any new top level domains successful on Search yet? They sound good but we cant recommend based on the data we get.
Hi John, can you let me in on your findings? There have been some studies (Searchmetrics, Total Websites, Globerunner) showing that you're now worse off with a new TLD vs. .com, so it would be interesting if your observations could spice up the discussion
Rand always rocks.
What a great WB Friday Rand! We are currently in scenario B, where we run four video games websites (Nintendo Only, PC Only, PlayStation Only and Xbox Only). As you can imagine the content and audience overlap is huge. I think 90% of the articles we post are on at least two sites and many of our visitors have two or more gaming devices that are generally not covered on the same site. If you talk about overlap, it's basically four circles on top of each other, haha.
We're moving everything to Gaming Only soon and I'm really looking forward to doing that, it will save me so much headaches, especially SEO wise. It's just impossible to work with so much duplicate content as we have.
My only fear right now is that when we put the 301 redirects in place there will be multiple pages redirecting to the same new page, because that news item on three of the sites in now only one news item. I've been reading up on this a lot (also on Moz) and it seems it's not really a big issue, but still, I'm not 100% sure about it.
Hi Jelle - I think you're making the right move. Based on our experience and that of others (including some generous folks who've shared their experiences here in the comments), you should expect a few months where search traffic is down, and then it will recover (assuming you get all the redirects/etc right). Best of luck!
Thanks for your answer Rand. The 301-redirects are something we are working very hard on already, so I'm pretty confident we'll get those right.
Fantastic video Rand! I'm tossing up a large consolidation at the moment - two established sites from the same company. Problem is the one I want to consolidate to is the weaker from an SEO perspective. The short term hit in overall visibility is offset in the time saving in focusing on one quality site.
Great WBF Rand, Rebranding or Redirecting is always a tedious task and setting up KPIs can really help measure things after this intricate process. Btw I really liked the memorability part, .com or .co.uk are better and easier to remember than the ones with .ly or .io.
Hi Rand, hi guys,
Very interesting board this week, I think you touch a topic we are all thinking about. In our case we have an internal discussion at the company on how we will need to proceed with the domains. Our main websites uses our company name www.flatworldcommunication.com, a horrible domain to remember but the website is effective and dives a lot of clients. Last year we set up a new websites with portfolio approach www.fwcadvertising.com much better than the other, due to the success of this portfolio theme we redesigned our main website with a more portfolio look. Now our discussion is if we should kill www.fwcadvertisign.com and point the domain to our main website and set this domain as the main one, or if we should keep it running.
What do you think?
Hey Pablo! Great question. It's actually perfect for our Q&A forum, where you're much more likely to get a helpful answer. :)
I rebranded and everything seemed to go well, but I can't get MOZ to see my new (redirected) domain at https://www.genesisclub.training . It's been a month now and still the PA is 1 and the DA is 1. But the PA for my old domain as it was before it was redirected is still in OSE and at 30+. How do I get OSE to recognise the redirect and give me results for that?
Turns out this might be because Moz STILL does not recognise the new TLDs. Please when are you going to add these? It's been months now.
Hi Rand,
I would like to get your opinion on SEO strategy for multi-national brands.
I have a client who has around dozen country-code Top-Level-Domains, and he wants to copy his main website across all these domains (e.g. mybran.com, mybrand.co.uk, mybrand.fr, etc). I read that it could be easier for brands to climb an search engine's ladder in another country if they have a domain with that country code. We could rewrite the content for .co.uk and translate it for other countries or use rel=canonical.
Would that be a good strategy or should we focus on .com and use subdomains or subdirectories to serve people from other countries?
Hey Rand,
Great article. Interesting enough, we were planning to merge 9th sphere and Convurgency to create a new brand - 9thCO about 2 years ago and wrote an article about it.
The Smart Way to Re-brand or Merge Your Brands Online
To the readers of Moz - If you are thinking of re-branding, please keep in mind these are the challenges - potential loss of revenue, negative effects on ranking, loss of ‘link juice’ as well as working around a search engine penalty.
Not sure if we are allowed to share the URL here. Looking forward to the next White Board Friday.
Another Great whiteboard Friday Rand.
i think moz.com is already an example for that,SEOmoz.org terns to moz.com. you have nicely explain the question that you put in the Title. i think somewhere it is depend upon the business targeted country and business type.
Hi , My point of view the websites should be really focus on branding to be successful in 2015 . Thanks for sharing this useful article. Now coming days the branding is one of the best way to get traffic and better search engine reuslts.
Hi Rand, this is a hot topic for me and very timely for a current discussion at the corporation where I work. Can you recommend an SEO agency with specific experience with multi-brand websites, pros/cons and provide guidance to our specific situation? I know MOZ doesn't do consulting work, otherwise I'd prefer to work with you directly. Let me know how I can reach out directly.
My own domain could be said to fall in that category, but it's also a perfect description of our content. I swear! :)
Does anyone have the link that Rand describes at the beginning of this video on his blog Moz.com/rand to see the link metrics when seomoz.org moved to moz.com - I can't seem to find it in the transcript.
Hi Matt - yes, it's right here: https://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-...
I'll include in the transcript as well. Thanks!
Very interesting WBF, thank you. I would like an advice on a particular situation, We are an agency working with a client that is distributing 33 different brands all related to a certain sport. It's basically brand awareness, products and features presentation. We redirecting visitors to the resellers, we do not sell online.
We have great experience with other clients consolidating multiple websites under one, so I think about doing it again.
Do you think having all the brands under a unique domain (domain.com/brand1, domain.com/brand2, etc..) could be a good idea or we should keep separate websites?
Thank you
I'm thinking of moving and redirecting my entire blog to the main domain now... :p
Hi Rand,
Great video exactly what I was looking for and of great assistance to me as the company I have just joined are merging 2 domains from acquired businesses into the main brand website.
Quick question, currently the business do not have the web development resource to migrate the 2 sites in one go, however, they want to begin the migration as soon as possible. From a page migration perspective would you suggest migrating the most authoritative/best performing pages to the main brand first or migrate some of the lesser performing pages first as in theory it will have a lesser initial impact on the businesses online performance. Or does it matter what pages go first?
I would be extremely grateful if you/or anyone with experience could provide some guidance on this matter.
Thanks
Joe
I think with 2017 almost here.. a rebrand is in order for a domain I own but doesn't work as well as it did 10 years ago. A lot has changed and happened. A rebrand is a great chance to change how we see the world but also how the world sees us.
Very thorough and fantastic examples Rand! While we're on the topic of rebranding, your transition from seomoz to moz was a great case study for this post.
Hi Rand, Another excellent Whiteboard Friday. We are in the Hospitality Industry in the tropical island of Mauritius, Indian Ocean. We have recently made a re-branding and we have regrouped our luxury properties (that had individual website) under an umbrella brand "Heritage Resorts" but our audience/market is mainly UK/France/Germany/South Africa ... + Multilingual For the moment, we are using the domain name :heritageresorts.mu.
Unfortunately the heritageresorts.com is taken and we have the possibility to get the heritage-resorts.com (with the "-") and this Friday whiteboard is the perfect occasion to ask you guys whether we should stick to "heritageresorts.mu" or "heritage-resorts.com" in terms of International SEO, Brand coherence and others terms you mentioned! Considering also we are moving to HTTPS.
I would love to have your views on the matter.
Love MOZ :)
Hi Shailen - if it were me, I'd stick to HeritageResorts.mu if you're finding that domain can rank well in the countries/languages you're targeting. However, if you're not seeing the site perform in those regions (maybe due to geolocation biasing in Google's algo and where they think you're based/where links come from/etc), then I'd consider Heritage-Resorts.com. Although, I might actually look for a non-hyphenated version like HeritageResortsMU.com (or get creative), as I'm not a big fan of hyphenated domain names.
Thank you Rand for your reply ;)
From purely SEO/BRANDING the point of view, as you mentioned about the geolocation biasing in Google's algorithm and the recent article from SearchEngineLand (https://searchengineland.com/google-explains-how-th...), where our current domain name in .MU is not performing well in the UK and France should we consider going something like that :
"<" link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.HeritageResortsMU.com/"/>
"<" link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.HeritageResortsMU.co.uk/"/>
"<" link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://www.HeritageResortsMU.de/"/>
"<" link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://HeritageResortsMU.fr/"/>
where servers will be serving from UK/France. Also we do have local office in those countries (UK, France, Germany,Italy ...).
Hi Rand
Topic is perfect for me as I'm moving a 20 character double hypen domain to a letter brand in the coming weeks.
I read a guide before and can't seem to place it but it was a guide to redirecting a site to a new domain where both have content. It's topic was growth by acquisition and it dealt with rel=canonical and the two broad approaches that you can take when redirecting/re-branding/consolidating a site.
Would you happen to have any similar guides or resources for this process?
Thanks
You have a good point about the new domain suffixes; people won't recognise them. I wondered if the value of the .coms domain names might drop with so many new domains being issued but it could take some time for people to get used to them.
I know that "Sci-Fi" or "SciFi" is problematic for some because of the hyphen and the Syfy change, but I would actually pick it for a domain: 1. A LOT of people hated (still hate) the Syfy change. True fans of "sci-fi" will be very keen about a website that has the correct spelling. They will also be more likely to remember the URL because of it.
2. You can fix the problematic hyphen issue by making the second word stand out. For example, I might decide on "SCIFI-TOYS.com." The URL is easy to remember, and it only has one hyphen.
3. Another option would be to use "SCIFI" as the second part of the URL. For example, I might decide on "Discover-SCIFI.com." I admit that I don't have "toys" in the URL, but the lack of "toys" could actually be an advantage: Some science fiction fans might ignore the site if the URL has "toys" in it because they might think children's toys instead of toys for both children and adults.
A few weeks ago we did a rebranding and launched a new website (forwardpush.com). We did 301 redirects, having a page with links on the new domain before we launched, and doing our best to get old backlinks changed to the new URL.
Every day a few more pages are indexed and we are starting to see an increase in organic traffic, although slowly.
I look at the highs and lows as just part of the process.
Helo, I want to ask, if is important how old the new domain is. We have a 10 years old domain with good authority, is it a goot move to change it with new one?
Great WBF! It reminds me of the CSN network consolidating into Wayfair back around ~2011. I'm sure if business owners knew they would have the same success that Wayfair did, there would be zero hesitation to re-brand/re-direct!
How about establishing a brand name in different country?
For instance, our parent company has a strong brand name in other countries and we have zero brand presence. What would be the best approach if we want to expand into such a country?
For instance, if Moz.com was owned by Microsoft (sorry, but go with me). Would it be better to move into a country like Germany with the Microsoft brand, Moz.com or a combo like Microsoft's Moz (again, sorry)?
Secondly, you mention international domains. If Moz expanded into Germany, would you stay Moz.com or become Moz.de with a completely different language, sales, support,...?
Hi Brian - I think it depends on how deep you're going with localization. Personally, I like being able to serve a new country/language with a dedicated team and a dedicated domain IF you're going to have a physical, local presence in that country. E.g. Microsoft has a team in Germany and they do own Microsoft.de (though it redirects to a subfolder on Microsoft.com, which seems to work well for them). Amazon runs Amazon.de separately and the site is very different than what you'd get at Amazon.com.
If Moz were doing it, I'd probably go the Microsoft route and use subfolders, but I think compelling cases can be made both ways.
I'm not certain that I'm write, but I have tried it both ways. If someone came to my firm with the question today, I would say, "lets keep the old up and maintain the brand identity which took so long to establish, then simultaneously build the new brand, image, reputation, site, etc. Once it is running smooth begin to change all marketing efforts to drive traffic to the new site. Once the analytic from the clicks show that the new site is effective at maintaining people's attention and driving them to purchase I would begin to transition the old brand and site.
The old brand and site would be gradual to introduce it to clients over a period of months, first subtly then in a big PR event.
For me the slow transition allows business to maintain sales during the new brand launch. I've seen too many companies and sites nose dive after doing a flick a switch transition. Just because you are excited about the new brand does not mean your clients will be.
We did something somewhat similar with Moz - I started using the domain for my personal blog, which gained some links, shares, attention, interest, etc. Then, after the domain was somewhat established, we moved all the SEOmoz.org content over. I think testing and seeding a new domain can be a smart way to go.
Good timing, I just started a re-branding project early this week. My goal is to brand myself rather than "keyword" the domain which is what my soon to be old site is doing.
My plans is to slowly stop creating content on my old site, and start creating content on the new. And once I start receiving about 20K monthly visitors to the new site than redirect the old URL to the new and cut out the old site.
Would this be a good best practice?
Or should I just say screw it put up the new redirect and start from fresh?
Good Timing Rand
I just had a conversation with Cyrus a couple weeks ago when I was in Seattle along these lines.
Hi Rand/Anyone who might help,
I have a reasonably well ranking seo consultant website. At domain1.co.uk, I also have 2 other "seo company" websites that have quite good rankings (page 2 for most semi-competitive terms) and well designed too and then I have an seo blog with a small "hire me" section. Is there a best way to integrate all these, or should I keep them separate or what? It's confusing to know what's best. Also integrating them all together somehow seems risky in my mind as if Google decides they don't like me one day that's a huge hit then... Hope that made sense.
Hey Tom - if your'e doing things that you think might put you at risk with Google (sketchy links, questionable on-site practices, etc), then using multiple domains is probably wise. Spammers call this the "churn and burn" strategy - if one site gets burned, they can simply move on to focus on others. However... I think this strategy is going to be very hard in the long run, as Google's updates continue to favor brands that build strong audience affinities and recognition. It's hard to build a brand with churn-and-burn (maybe even impossible), and thus if you're seeking my recommendation, I'd say to focus on a single name and domain for your SEO business.
hey Rand, great post I have been looking forward to reading it this Friday, one question I have for you is that you mention you are not keen on one of the domain names with the word "and" in it
Is it feasible for other domains though, we run a successful travel comparison brand compareandchoose for both Australia, New Zealand, the UK and are soon to be doing the US, obviously they also have the specific country codes com.au and .nz extensions.
Now you have got me worried about the word "and" lol, I know its a kind of a stop word but we find the domain name seems to be a good brandable name which seems to fit what we are about. Would you agree?
Anyway it very late here in Australia so bed time for me, have a great weekend Rand (with the "and" in it :) )
Alan
Hi Alan - I think there's always exceptions (e.g. https://stopandshop.com/). If you think the brand works and your audience is responding positively, then go for it.
Thanks Rand and yes stop and shop is great example you have put forward. They have a DA of 74 and PA of 77 pretty impressive
Rand,
Once again a very good topic though it falls in FAQ section of SEO but your answered it in a great manner.
Rand, what's you take on the recent re-branding of "Odesk/Elance" to "UpWork"? In the context of your talk, they consolidated the both brands and launched a new site. Is it a good approach? The other thing that I observed is, they added some extra features in UpWork like real-time collaboration, mobile apps and instamatch (allows users to set their status to available “right away,” “looking” or “not looking”).
Do you think adding some extra features in re-branding can boost-up your recovery period?
Thanks,
My personal opinion is that it could be a good thing long term, but we'll have to see. It really depends on the marketing and branding they do from here. Certainly, when it comes to rebranding/changing domains, whatever you can do to earn more attention/press/awareness is a good thing, because it will get the new brand into people's minds and into the search engines' indices faster.
Hey Rand,
I would like to understand a little more what are the most difficult issues related to consolidating large web properties. Specially with many affiliate links. I think in practice this will depend a lot on the current system. Did Moz have a issue with tracking the url's used by affiliates? (I'm not sure if you guys had the affiliate channel or not).
We ended our affiliate program a few years ago (before the switch), and thus didn't have to worry about that. I believe if you're using one of the click-referral tracking systems, they are set up to support redirection.
In my experience, it is a difficult question. We had to do it for our firm, a good experience for the future ;-) sure... good post, thanks.
hi rand,
Could you please help to my website : Aticoexport.com. it's not ranking well. please give you better suggestion which can make effect on my website.
Great WBF as always, Rand.
The one item I'd challenge people to consider is how your business's name impacts a Local SEO campaign. In my experience, businesses perform significantly better in the local search results when they include specific references to the services they provide today, as opposed to including generic terms that represent where their business will be in the future.
For example, a business that provides roof repair services today but intends to provide complete construction services in the future is better served, in my opinion, to name their business "Calin's Roofing" as opposed to "Calin's Construction". The inclusion of the keyword in a business's Google My Business account and in the domain name has a pointed impact on a business's local rankings. It's always possible to rebrand in the future when the business has grown beyond its initial service category.
Thanks again, Rand. Awesome stuff.
That's a very fair point Calin. It's tough for local businesses, because while I agree that being focused can help you perform better in local results, it's also limiting your potential long term. I suppose every business owner must decide what matters more to them.
I'm glad someone raised local considerations. One has to bear in mind a domain consolidation and rebranding will impact your local citations and rankings. Plans definitely need to address that. Moz (and other) local citation tools can help update top, and even 2nd tier citations, but outside of that, there's a lot of work to be done in order to salvage existing name, address and/or phone number (NAP) mentions. I don't believe redirects help with that.
Would love to hear Rand or a Moz associate chime in on that.
good point highlighted yet again. Friday Board is always pick up the right topic to discussed.
my website is not ranking well, please suggest . website : aticoexport.com
Hi there! I'd suggest asking this question in our Q&A forum. You're much more likely to get a useful response there. :)
Hi Rand,
as a merge&acquisition guy this video really blowed my mind. I would love to hear your opinion on that:
Let's say you have 2 content websites, both monetized by Adsense, both not branded on a person, the same niche. Your content doesn't have synergy effects. Would is be a good idea to put them both together for getting more domain authority just to get better Google rankings? The idea behind would be that you leverage the trust/domain authority and achieve higher Google rankings. It will be easier to get a premium Adsense account or to negotiate with brands for advertising space. Do you see additional synergy effects? Do you see problems like an overlap in evergreen content targeting the same keywords? Or is that more an advantage by linking from one piece of content to the other one internally.
I see that bigger websites perform better and better in the SERPs. keywords like "how to make money online" are already dominated by broad magazines.
Some of the biggest companies were scaled up by acquiring other companies, consolidating the market and building synergy effects (IBM, Apple, Siemens,...). In these cases, there were synergy effects by shared know-how, better conditions from suppliers, better brand recognition, shared logistics, shared supplier contacts,...
Rand Fishkin This was again a nice one. I would like you to help us learn some more about Branding Online. Please help us out. I know well that SEO, SEM, Social Media and other Paid forms of online marketing helps. But don't have any road map for it at all.
The advice about .coms is solid, in theory, but it's getting tough to think up compact, brandable, .coms these days. Even the ones without an attached brand and site have someone sitting on them, hoping for a payday. I considered Compass.com for a new blog project. Guess what it's selling for? One million dollars. I mean, good luck with that, but, still, that's the situation out there.
So these non-dot-coms will have their place in time. Not all of them, but some of them. I've decided to use a .guide site for the latest project--of course, this is a special case because the domain is the brand name; even then, I'm not sure if it'll work. Still others have managed it, and it beat buying a .co, which is a really stupid suffix; I'm pretty it was released purely in an attempt to make cash money from existing sites needing to buy the .co to redirect typos back to their .coms.
It's an interesting challenge, you bring up here. Are the new TLDs an alternative to the gold standard .com, if you have your eyes on a very specific name, and you can't get the exact .com?
Just saw yesterday that a UK top 100 PR agency made this decision, since their .com objective wasn't available - rebranded from Rostrumpr.com to Rostrum.agency. The big incognito is whether these new extensions take off, however surely as a first mover they signal with this new address that they can think outside the box.
I'm taking a gamble that rolling the dot-guide into the brand name will carry the day. We'll see.
What would businesses that a target a more local audience and have a website for each location do? Would it be recommended it consolidate these sites together?
Not necessarily - for local businesses or a local operator who runs multiple SMB sites, I might suggest considering whether those sites really make sense together or whether they're better off as niches serving their respective locales/audiences. If, for example, you owned a local florist business and a local restaurant, I'd probably suggest maintaining those as separate domains.
Hhahah i wish you had done this whiteboard like 4 months ago i spend 1 month thinking this issue and i say month ligthly heheh maybe almost two months now i got two webs up and running doing diferent test on both, in the end ill redirect de old one , but both are converting pretty well im and im nostalgic about the old web though the first one is much better and optimise in all senes, but i think im still afraid to loose a bit of % with 301 red .....in the end i dont know what ill do ;) but i think , the old one would have to dissapear at somepoint.
Thanks a lot for the info love it and will watch it again ;)
Really interesting and timely post for a project I've got coming up. Thanks for sharing! :)
I rebranded my website theusefulblog.com which has not been active for long time to a new domain called thesiliconhub.com so that I can get rid of the word blog for better social media marketing and to get rid of the word useful. I have set up 301 redirect from the old domain to a new one. Right now I am just worried about Google PageRank. I heard people saying that google is no longer updating page rank while some advertisers that I have or I encounter require your site to have page rank. Any thoughts about rebranding and Google Page Rank?
Hi Andrew - those folks are correct, PageRank will likely never update again. It's a fixed snapshot in time from December 2013. That said, advertisers should care about your audience size, not your PageRank score (unless they're thinking they're buying for PR-passing purposes, but that's against Google's guidelines and highly risky - I'd suggest not working with advertisers like that).
Completely in agreement with the domain suffixes point. Here in the UK there was a lot of bravado over the domain ".london" and others like it with the new launch. I just imagine someone saying "visit my site - it's domain.london" and I'm there thinking "domain.london.what?"
The worst are the latest spate of ".co" (I heard someone in a Youtube video say - visit my website - domain.co, not domain.co.uk, domain.co") that sound so clunky.
If you want credibility, it needs to be .com or your country version of it.