Hello, this is John Locke. Today I want to talk with you about something personal.
This is the anecdotal story of what happened when we changed our domain name.
And if you're thinking about changing your domain name, maybe you'll learn from
my own experiences here. So, to set the stage, when I first launched the business
in 2012, I was just using LockedownDesign.com as the [domain] name.
Basically, I was building sites for other people. So, local clients, other agencies,
things of that nature. In summer 2017, I basically wanted to
switch the focus of what I was doing from doing straight website builds
into doing more SEO. And yeah, I still build web sites. It's not the main focus
of what we're doing now -- it's more focused on SEO, and the web design and
development is part of that. There's a lot of reasons behind that [switch]. That could be
a whole other video. Basically, it was a decision that I had made. So I had
written a lot of stuff about SEO on my blog before, but starting in late summer
of 2017, I really wanted to start pushing it. I really started focusing just on
writing about SEO, not so much web development anymore. I still get a lot of
traffic from code tutorials and things of that nature, but I wanted to try and get
more traffic from SEO. I was ranking okay in my local market for SEO, but really, I
was still ranking super high for web design. So there's a lot of things that I
did to try and experiment with that [ranking]. So, you have to understand at the time, I was
ranking number one for "Sacramento WordPress design" and "Sacramento
WordPress web design". I had ranked number one for about two years [for those search terms]. It was a thing
where I wanted to change. I wanted to move into SEO. Back to the story. A couple
of things that I had tried at the time were: changing the title tag of the
homepage, (I think it was focusing on web design here in Sacramento) and
then I changed it to be more about SEO. I also changed the meta description [of the home page].
I changed a lot of the things on the homepage. I've changed a lot of the
wording on the page. I actually did a redesign of the site. Right around that
time too, I wanted to focus on a particular niche, and that was SEO for
manufacturing firms. Now, I actually was pretty successful with that
part of it, right out of the gate. But for some of these older [SEO] articles that I had
written on the blog, I still wasn't really ranking where I wanted to rank. So
I wanted to do a little experiment. If you watch the video we did right before
this one, about exact match domains and partial match domains, [you'll see] the words in
the actual domain name -- the words in the actual web address, the URL -- those
actually play a part in how Google perceives your website. So I wanted to put
this to the test. I changed the business name to
Lockedown Design & SEO. I changed the actual domain name to "LockedownSEO.com" to see if that
would have an effect on how some of these things were ranking. And the way to
really measure this was by the amount of traffic that we were getting. If you go into
Google Analytics, and you look at your monthly active users, it'll give you a
monthly number. And I think that's the average last four weeks of your actual
traffic. So I think where we were at was -- for the first five months of 2018, we
were right around l27,000 active users per month. About 26, 27, 28 [thousand] -- right in that
range each month. And when we changed the domain name, which was right around May 23rd
of 2018, at that point we had 27 thousand active users for the that month. So I
changed the [business] name, and changed the domain name on the 23rd, to "LockedownSEO.com". Before, it
was "LockedownDesign.com". So Google was ranking us really well for web design,
but I was trying to see if we could rank better for SEO. And here's a very
important part -- I didn't do this until about May 28th -- don't do this what I did [in delaying].
But there's a tool in Google Search Console, where you do a change of address --
[with the] Change of Web Address [form]. Basically it tells Google, "Hey, we're changing the
domain name from this to that". So I did that about five days after I
actually changed the domain name. So I set up in in my hosting -- I host on WP Engine for my
main site right now -- I set up domain redirects in there -- to where any of the
old links that I had from LockedownDesign.com, they would go to the
corresponding web addresses at LockedownSEO.com.
I did that, did the change of web address in Google Search Console, and so
traffic did go down for a little while. Also, any place where I still had control [of the domain links] like on Yelp,
Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube -- anything like that -- I changed it to the new web
address. Of course, a lot of the old back links, they're still from Lockedown Design,
but those 301 redirect to the new web address. So traffic did go down
overall for a little while. There is a time where Google is adjusting and
crawling all the old links, crawling all the URLs, saying, "this [old URL] is over here now".
And it might still be going through the process for a couple of the
not-as-popular pages. As I'm recording this, it's July 21st, 2018. So it's been about two
months, maybe a hair under two months, and we've got about 90% of our
traffic back. I just looked at Google Analytics right now, and for this month,
it said it was 26 and a half thousand active users for this month. And right
when we made the switch, it was like 27,000 [active users]. Here's the part that I was hoping
to get. [Regarding] the things that we were ranking number one for before -- like we ranked number
one for a couple things -- like we have a social media color chart we were ranking
number one for, and also right now there's a lot of the code tutorials that we were
ranking number one or number two for [before the switch] -- we're right back up there again.
But what's interesting to me is, some of the articles that I had written before [are ranking higher].
In particular, there's one about "why your Yelp reviews get filtered out", there's
another one about "doing SEO for a single page website", and some other ones that
previously were not really ranking at all before -- those particular ones have
boosted up. So I can say that there's probably something to that [domain switch having an effect]. So the domain
name change probably did have an effect. It looks like we're ranking higher here
in our local market in Sacramento for SEO, and we're actually ranking pretty
well for industrial SEO and manufacturing SEO [nationally]. These are pages that
are maybe about a year old at this point. I would say that this changing of the
domain name has been successful. I think we've also had some
reviews where people mentioned the SEO work that we've done for them, so that
could also play a part into that [ranking boost]. Keep in mind, the things that you have to do when
you're changing a domain name: make sure that you have the 301 redirects in place --
to where you're not losing any of that link equity from links that you've built
out on other sites before. Change your domain name anywhere where you have
the ability to do that: like in Google My Business, Yelp, LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever. And then also
measure if changing that domain name is having a positive effect. So it took us a
a little under two months to get 90 or 95% of our traffic back, and
we're actually ranking better for the things that we wanted to rank better for
as far as SEO. I think all these little changes are helping Google see
that we're not primarily in this web design bucket, we're more in this SEO
bucket at this point. So that's my experience. I hope that helps some of you
that are considering -- if you're considering changing your domain name --
just kind of what to expect. I hope that you get some value from this. If you have
a SEO question that you'd like to ask us, go ahead and leave it in the comments
below, and we'll answer it out in a video for you. My name is John Locke.
My business is Lockedown Design and SEO. We help manufacturing and industrial firms
get more organic inbound traffic through Google, and we help them get more RFQs.
Don't forget to subscribe. Peace.
[Outtakes: So the positioning around that was really something critical. Again, we build
websites. That's just part of the deal.]