Changing Domain Name & SEO Impacts: Expert Tips + Checklist

Have you ever typed a brand name into Google, found their website, and clicked the link only to land on … a 404 page?

This frustrating experience can be the result of a poorly executed domain name change.

Changing your site’s domain name isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, sometimes it’s necessary due to rebranding, mergers, and even legal disputes over a domain name.

But when it comes to SEO, domain name changes can be risky and need to be approached with caution and care.

In this post, we'll explore the process of changing your domain name and how to do it without jeopardizing your organic traffic.

How Changing Your Domain Name Impacts SEO

The first question people often ask about changing domain names is: Will it affect my SEO?

The short answer from most experts is yes, it will.

The longer answer is that if the change is executed correctly, your traffic and rankings should recover within three to six months.

An Example of a Domain Name Change and Recovery

Slavko Kovacevic, Head of Search at Health Link SEO, transitioned epiphanywellness.com to epiphanywellnesscenters.org.

The right way.

Here’s what that looked like in terms of traffic levels, according to Semrush.

First, traffic drops to zero around the first day of August 2023. That’s the old domain, epiphanywellness.com, being shut down.

That’s pretty scary for a site owner! But here’s how things were looking over at the new domain, epiphanywellnesscenters.org.

As the old domain gradually disappears from search results, the new one starts to appear. This transition takes several months, but a properly migrated site can recover all of its organic traffic. In this case, it ended up with a bit more!

An Example of a Domain Name Change Fail

Way back in 2011, Overstock.com spent millions of dollars in an attempt to change their branding and domain to O.co. The change was quickly rolled back due to consumer confusion. Many customers were visiting O.com (a domain that, at the time, was unused).

As it turns out, the company suffered another domain name oopsie in 2023 when it was purchased by Bed, Bath & Beyond. The company shut down the Overstock.com site and, at least according to some sources, redirected it to Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Here’s how that looked for Overstock.

And here’s how it looked on the Bed, Bath & Beyond website.

This went so badly the company decided to resurrect Overstock.com, both as a brand and a domain. It appears that Overstock.com still hasn’t recovered its lost organic traffic, though.

Clearly, changing domain names can be a complex decision and process on many fronts.

SEO Risks of Changing Your Domain Name

Changing domains is complicated, which means that if your site is currently enjoying significant organic traffic, it can affect rankings in a number of ways.

Here are some of the risks to be aware of:

Loss or Decline in Google Rankings

Changing your domain name means changing the URL of every page on your website. If you are getting organic traffic, your current domain will have indexed pages, backlinks from other websites, and an established track record in terms of domain authority.

Changing all that can confuse search engines, which means that even when done properly, a dip in traffic is inevitable.

Loss or Decline in Revenue from Organic Traffic

If organic traffic is a revenue channel for you, this will also be impacted when traffic declines. Again, when migrations are done correctly, this is likely to be temporary. Even so, considering its impact on the business will have to be part of the migration plan.

Increased SEO/Marketing Costs for the New Website

A new domain often involves rebranding, which requires time and money. If your company and domain have loyal customers, you can't just redirect them to a new website and brand without expecting them to notice.

Mitigating this will mean doing plenty of legwork. You’ll need to:

• Inform people of the change in advance
• Remind them of it once it’s happened
• Build brand awareness for the new brand/domain you have built

This can mean backlink building/rebuilding, brand campaigns, and more.

Should You Change Your Domain Name?

The answer is: It depends.

A domain name change is a significant undertaking. Consider it only if you have clear marketing objectives and believe it will drive long-term growth for your company. But keep in mind it requires considerable effort and SEO expertise to execute it successfully.

How to Change Your Domain Name While Preserving SEO

Alright, you've decided to change your domain name. What does the process look like, and what steps are involved?

Here’s a detailed step-by-step guide on how to execute a successful domain name change.

Steps to Take Before You Migrate Your Domain

Choose Your New Domain Name

The first thing you need to do is choose your new domain name.

Remember, this is an important decision - one you likely want to avoid making more than once. Choose carefully. Your new domain name should play a crucial role in your broader business strategy and align with your branding.

Also, keep in mind that a domain name is actually made up of two parts:

1. Second-level domain: This is your brand. For example, our second-level domain is “softailed” in “softailed.com”
2. Top-level domain (TLD): This is what comes after the “.” in your domain name.

Note that there’s no difference between a .com, .net, .info, or any other top-level domain, although there's some evidence that people tend to trust and remember .com domains more than other TLDs. When it comes to Google, its documentation states that it treats all TLDs the same for ranking purposes.

Once you figure out your domain name, it’s time to buy the domain. The easiest way to do this is directly through your web host. This provides a single place to manage your domain(s).

The other option is to purchase your domain through a domain registrar and then set up hosting afterwards. Most web hosts have customer support that can help you do this. You should compare web hosts based on their offerings to see which might best meet your needs.

If you’re still looking to choose (or switch) your web host, make sure to get your personalized recommendation from our Finder Tool to match with the perfect web hosting service.

Be sure to keep your old domain too. It’s not uncommon for people to forget to renew the redirected domain.

Export Your Backlinks

Links pointing to your site from other sites are important for SEO. This is especially true if these links come from sites with higher domain authority (typically sites with more search traffic and brand recognition).

Think of backlinks as votes for the quality of your site. If someone links to you as a reference, it’s probably because they found the content helpful and want to share it. Over time, these “votes” can help your site rank higher in search results.

You don’t want to lose these votes when you change all your URLs to the new domain. You can mitigate this by implementing 301 redirects.

Better still, you can ask the sites that link to you to update their links to point to your new domain, but we’ll get to that later. For now, just document your backlinks so that you know where they’re all coming from.

You also want to take a look at those backlinks to make sure you have a list of all places where you are linking to yourself. This might include your Google Business profile, social media accounts, and any directories where you may be listed. You’ll want this list at the ready so you can update these links as soon as your new domain goes live.

Many SEO software platforms have backlink analytics that make exporting a list of linking domains quick and easy.

Map Old URLs to New URLs

When you move your domain to a new domain, you want to make sure that pages don’t get left behind as 404s, at least not intentionally. You can do this by exporting a list of all your site’s pages, which can be done using most SEO software.

Once you have this file, it’s time to redirect your old pages to your new pages. It’ll look something like this:

If your URLs remain the same except for the domain change, the mapping process will be straightforward. However, if some or all URLs are changing, you'll need to map them carefully to avoid creating 404 errors during the migration.

If you're making changes to the content of your pages on the new domain, you’ll need to do a little more work to ensure you’re either preserving the SEO on those pages or making a deliberate choice to lose that traffic.

You can do this by pulling a list of your top-performing URLs for organic traffic in Google Analytics. Then, have a look at what keywords these pages are ranking for in Google Search Console. Essentially, any new copy you create for priority pages should be optimized for these keywords. (Unless, of course, they’re no longer important from a business perspective. Then you just need to write off the traffic and focus your attention on the business’s new objectives.)

Finally, if some old or irrelevant pages are disappearing from your new domain, you can map them to the newer, most relevant page. If there isn’t another relevant page to map them to, you can set them to a 410 response code. This tells Google these pages are gone for good.

Don’t redirect content to your homepage. Google treats irrelevant redirects as soft 404s. After all, they’re not helpful!

Set up Benchmarks for Ranking and Organic Traffic

When you migrate your domain, traffic and rankings will take a hit. If you do things right, you can recover. The best way to know whether that’s happened is by setting up benchmarks.

Export rank tracking for all your keywords prior to your migration and be sure that you have reporting for organic traffic set up in Google Analytics. This way you’ll be able to compare and track organic traffic and keyword rankings for your new domain against your old one.

Run an SEO Audit

Before launching your new domain, conduct a technical audit of your current domain using SEO software. Save this audit to compare with a crawl of your new domain, which will help you identify any new issues that may arise.

This audit should also include checking elements like schema markup and metadata to ensure they are correctly transferred to the new site.

Finally, this is also a good time to clean up as many site issues as possible. Ideally, you’re migrating a website that’s relatively healthy, rather than bringing old problems with you to your new domain.

Notify People About the Switch

Branding and domain changes can be confusing to people who visit your site or buy your products. You can help mitigate this by informing people about the switch. Here are a few ideas on how:

• Make a page about the switch on your new domain. This should be a bit like a press release and include both the new and old brands in the title. This way, when someone searches for your brand, they’ll get this new page and understand what’s happened.
• Announce the change on your social media channels both before and after the switch to ensure everyone gets the message.
• Include a sticky notification on your new site. If people land on the new page and are confused, they’ll have the info they need to re-orient them about your branding.

Steps to Take to Launch Your New Domain

It’s launch day! Here’s what you need to do to get your new site up and running:

Migrate Your Domain

This gets a little more technical depending on your setup and we won’t go in-depth here. Suffice it to say that if you don’t know how to do this yourself, you can hire a developer.

Many web hosting providers will at least provide assistance in migrating a domain name, but the exact level of support they provide varies widely. If yours doesn’t and you’ve been meaning to change your hosting provider, now might be the time to find a better hosting provider for your needs. You can compare web hosting providers using our web hosting software comparison tool. If you’re a small business, we’ve pulled together the best web hosts for small business as well.

Start Tracking Rankings for Your New Domain

You should already be tracking rankings for your existing domain. Set up the same tracking for your new domain so you can monitor keywords as soon as they start gaining traction. This will help you identify key pages that aren't recovering as well so that you can figure out how to fix them.

Implement Your 301 Redirects

Remember all that URL mapping you did? This is where you redirect ALL the links from the old domain to the new one. This should happen immediately upon launch to minimize downtime.

If you're working with a developer, they can help you with this. You’ll definitely need to get technical if you have many pages on your site. In this case, you’re not going to want to do this manually. (A developer can edit your site’s .htaccess file and rewrite all the URLs in bulk with regular expressions.)

If you use WordPress as your website builder, you can use a plugin like Yoast, RankMath, or Redirection to help. You just want to make sure you are redirecting the full address, not just the relative URL (the part that comes after your domain.) After all, it’s your domain you’re changing!

Steps to Take after Your New Domain Is Live

Once your new domain is live, the real work begins! Here's what to do next:

Verify Your New Website with Google Search Console

Did you know that you can give Google a heads-up that your web address has changed? You can do this through Google Search Console.

Here is how:

Step 1: Create a property for your new domain. If you already have a Google Search Console account for your existing domain, you can just choose “Add Property.” Then, follow the steps provided to set up your account for the new property.

Step 2: Go back to the property for your old domain. From here, click “Settings” and then “Change of address.”

Step 3: Update the address of your new website by clicking “Select new site” and choosing the new domain property.

Step 4: Click “Validate & Update.” Now Google will start looking at your new site and validating your move by following the redirects you’ve implemented.

Step 5: Click “Confirm Move.” Now you should see a notification on both Google Search Console properties (old and new).

It will take some time for Google to start populating the new account, but this is a great way to see any related issues or errors.

Update Internal Links

Even with redirects in place, it's best practice to update all your internal links to point to your new domain. So, while www.old-domain.com/page-1 is redirecting to www.new-domain.com/page-2, once your site is launched, you update all internal links to point directly to the new domain.

Use your SEO software to audit and identify internal link redirects to fix this. Too many redirects can slow down your site and confound search engines.

Invest in Organic Outreach to Update Old Backlinks and Build New Ones

Links in guest posts, press mentions, and all kinds of other places are links you can’t update yourself. But reclaiming as many as you can is a good idea.

You can use your SEO software or Google Search Console to find all the websites that have links that point to you. Prioritize the highest-value links and start reaching out. You can do this by:

• Making a list of each contact for the websites that are linking to you. This is the person you believe will have the power to update this link.
• Creating an email template for reaching out to these contacts. This should explain that you changed domains and would like your links updated as well.
• Sending a specific email to each contact showing them which links you would like changed and the pages on their site where those links are located.

This is also a good time to do some link-building for your new domain. After all, not all of your link reclamation will be successful, and your new domain may need a little more link love to regain its previous rankings.

Update Your XML Sitemap

A new domain means a new sitemap. If you’re working with a WordPress SEO plugin like Yoast or RankMath, it’ll generate a sitemap for you on your new domain. You can submit this to the account for your new domain in Google Search Console.

To add your sitemap to Google Search Console, go to “Sitemaps” under the “Indexing” menu.

Then just add the link to your new sitemap:

You can remove the old sitemap by clicking on it, then navigating to the three dots in the top right corner of the screen. But it isn’t a huge rush. Some SEO experts even say it can help Google crawl and follow your redirects more easily.

Update Your Google Analytics

Google Analytics is still tracking links on your old domain, but now you need to update it to track your new domain. Here's how to do it:

Step 1: Log in to Google Analytics and go to Admin.

Step 2: Update all mentions of the old URL, specifically under Data Streams, which is found in the Admin section.

Make sure that you have Google Analytics tags implemented on your new domain as well.

Run Another SEO Audit

Remember how you ran an audit of your old site? Now it's time to do the same for your new domain. Compare the two audits to identify any differences and investigate the reasons behind them. This will help you pinpoint issues that may not have transitioned properly and need to be fixed ASAP. It'll also help you quickly find broken pages and redirect issues.

Assess Your Results

In an earlier step, you set up keyword tracking and configured Google Analytics for your new domain. As your new domain gains traction, it's important to monitor your progress closely.

Most SEO experts agree that your traffic should rebound within three to six months, assuming you've retained most of your content and set up your redirects correctly. The key is to monitor your progress closely. If your traffic isn't trending back toward pre-migration levels, you'll need to investigate the cause and take corrective action.

Additionally, it can be beneficial to work on acquiring backlinks and press mentions for your new brand to help establish it both with customers and with Google.

Migrating Your Domain Successfully

Migrating a domain is no small feat, as you can see! Even if it’s the right choice for your brand, it requires careful planning, attention to detail, and well-executed strategies. For larger sites, enlisting the help of a developer and an SEO professional is often necessary.

Many web hosts offer free migration services, which alleviates some of the technical burdens. Check out our list of top web hosting providers for features, where we include details about which ones provide migration.

Good luck!