SEO professionals should be cautious about changing the domain of a site. Most SEO professionals won’t recommend that you change the domain of your site unless absolutely necessary. Your rankings could be affected if you change your domain. If you change your domain, all of the hard work that you put into ranking your page organically will be lost.
Major search engines will link your domain to page level authority. Your rankings can drop quickly if you add or delete a lot of pages.
Website owners often change their domain names for a variety of reasons. Domain changes can be necessary for a merger, re brand, or if someone is interested in getting a better domain. To ensure that SEO is not affected by the migration of your page, the best SEO practices include changing the domain.
How To Handle The right way
Many webmasters will create a plan once you’ve decided to change your domain. Many people get confused when it comes to redesigning a website. It is important to maintain the site’s organic health with your relaunch plan. It is important to have a plan for optimizing your tags, using keywords and other tasks.
You may need to switch your content management system depending on what type of website you are making. You will need to ensure that your website is optimized after you change a CMS or your domain. You can use the framework you have from the previous site to help you change your domain and the CMS. The core requirements of the new site should include a list listing of key factors that helped rank your page. Take into account the most important SEO factors that were used on your previous page. These strategies will help minimize the risks associated with domain transfers.
The Building Of A Road map For A Transfer
The road map for domain transfer should outline the changes you will make, starting at your new address. Although it may seem absurd to keep a list of all historical subdomains and an idea for each subdomain, this will help you plan your site and track your progress.
Launch Date
A new launch date should be included in your road map. This will ensure that you have a clear path to the redesign. Consider all the tasks you will need to complete during the transfer. Think about when wire frames should be approved, who will approve final page copy, and when the code will be completed by the team. You can quickly determine how long it will take to complete the redesign and the date of your launch by collaborating with your team.
Do You Need To Launch a Beta Site?
You might want to send some traffic towards a beta website before you send large amounts of traffic. While the majority of traffic will be directed to your older domain, you can still direct traffic towards the beta site in order to ensure that everything works. This will allow you to test the site, and ensure that there are no errors with navigation, hosting, and other aspects. This option should be considered before you rank your page. It will ensure that your page doesn’t have dead links or navigation errors.
Redirects
Redirects are an important SEO technique during domain changes. It is crucial that users can find your new content. There may be many old links that link to old pages and sub-pages. You can ensure that visitors are able to find the most recent content on your website by creating redirects to each sub page or main page. When changing domains, it is best to use a permanent 301 directive. This type of routing is not noticeable by most users. Search engine crawlers will decide that the redirect is permanent for your page.
Make Sure To Keep Our Analytics Up-to-date
It is also important to update your analytics on your new website. Analytics on all redirected traffic will allow you to track your marketing efforts for your rebranding or domain move. It is important to ensure that your marketing efforts were successful by moving your domain. Analytics tracking can help you track these results.
These are some top tips to consider when you’re considering a domain name change. These ideas can improve your SEO once the page has been made active. For a free consultation, contact us today!
This post was written by Kristian D’An. Kristian is the owner and SEO Specialist at Lux Digital Marketing, a SEO St Petersburg company. Kristian has been optimizing websites successfully for over 7 years. He has helped his clients achieve the #1 position on Google in several different industries.