How to Preserve Your SEO When Changing Your Domain Name

There are plenty of situations when it makes sense to change your domain name. However, this is often a concern for business owners since you don’t want to lose out on organic traffic or forfeit your hard-earned rankings in major search engines.

Fortunately, it’s possible to change your domain without having to start over with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For example, you can audit the new domain and export your backlinks. Then, after the switch, you can set up 301 redirects and update Google Search Console.

In this post, we’ll take a look at some scenarios when it makes sense to change your domain name. Then, we’ll share five tips to help you preserve SEO during the process. Let’s get started!

Why You Might Want to Change Your Domain

Every website needs a domain name so that visitors know where to find it online. Plus, domains are useful for branding purposes, and if they’re optimized, they can help you claim the top spots in search engine results.

However, there are times when changing domains may make sense for your website. Here are some of the most common scenarios:

• You’re rebranding and the old domain doesn’t accurately represent your business.
• You’re expanding and require a more general domain to appeal to a wider audience.
• You’re moving locations, so you need a top-level domain (TLD) to reflect this change. In this instance, you might like to switch to a country-specific domain like .uk or .co.
• You might need a domain change to avoid legal issues like copyright (although this is uncommon if you researched properly before selecting your current domain name).
• Your preferred domain has become available.
• You want to merge several domains into one.

If you haven’t yet settled on a domain name, it’s a good idea to use SirsteveHQ’s free domain search tool to view and evaluate possible options:

Here, you can browse domain names by industry. Plus, you can even identify taken domains if you want to negotiate a domain transfer with the current owner.

Then, it’s super easy to register and pay for your domain at SirsteveHQ. Even better, you can streamline your website management by purchasing high-performance web hosting with SirsteveHQ too.

How to Preserve Your SEO When Changing Your Domain Name (5 Tips)

Now that you know a bit more about changing domains, let’s take a look at five tips to help you retain your search engine rankings.

1. Audit Your New Domain

The first way to preserve SEO when changing domain name is to audit your new domain properly. This way, you can make sure you choose a high-quality domain and avoid the need for another name change further down the line.

First off, you should make sure the domain is short, memorable, and easy to type. You’ll also want to pick a web address with a quality TLD like .com or .org. Plus, you can use Google Keyword Planner to help you target keywords that are relevant to your industry.

To ensure a clean domain history, it’s also a good idea to run an audit of all the places that the domain appears online. You can do this using the Internet Archive:

This also enables you to find out whether the domain is linked to low-quality content or spam. Additionally, you can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to evaluate inbound links or backlinks directed to your new domain name.

In the event that you find a live website (or content) at your new domain name, you can add it to your Google Search Console (GSC) account to see how it’s been indexed by Google. Then, make sure that no manual penalty actions have been taken against the domain.

Typically, this is caused by spam content or it occurs when the owner has used SEO techniques to manipulate search results. If you want to proceed with a penalized domain, you’ll need to address the issues and submit a reconsideration request to Google.

2. Export Backlinks

One of the factors that increases your SEO value is links from other websites. This demonstrates your authority on certain topics, so that search engines consider your site a trusted source.

But, if you’re moving domains, you can end up losing organic traffic without keeping hold of your existing backlinks. Instead, you can set up redirects that point to your new domain (we’ll show you how to do this later).

First though, you’ll need to find the links pointing to your old pages. There are many SEO tools that provide this functionality but the SEMRush Backlink Analytics tool is free and easy to use:

Simply enter your old domain and click on Analyze.Then, navigate to the Backlinkstab where you’ll see a list of referring domains.

Select Exportand save the list as a spreadsheet or CSV file:

This way, you can better organize your outreach efforts when you ask websites to update their links to reflect your new domain.

3. Set Up 301 Redirects

The next step to preserve SEO when changing domains is to set up proper redirects. This will only come into play once the domain migration is complete and your new domain is set up with your content.

301 redirects inform search engines that your old URLs have been replaced with new URLs. So, the links pointing to your old domain will update to reflect your new domain. Meanwhile, the redirect automatically sends website visitors to your new domain to prevent you from losing organic traffic.

Otherwise, you’ll serve a 404 error page when users or search engines access a URL at your old domain. This damages the user experience (UX) and indirectly hinders SEO performance since you can lose the backlinks that point to these pages.

The good news is that it’s relatively easy to set up 301 redirects. If you’re a WordPress site owner, you can install plugins like Redirection, RankMath, or Yoast.

With Redirection, you’ll need to head to Tools > Redirectionin the WordPress sidebar. Then, complete the setup process.

After that, select the Redirecttab and add your old domain in the Source URLbox. In the Target URLbox, make sure to include the link to your new domain name:

Then, click on Add Redirect.You should see the redirection listed above or below with a 301 code. So now, when anyone attempts to access your old website, they’ll be redirected to your new domain name.

4. Verify Your Domain on Google Search Console

One of the most important steps in retaining search engine rankings when you switch domains is to inform Google. To do this, you’ll first need to create a property for your new domain using Google Search Console (GSC).

So, log in to your GSC account and click on the dropdown menu to choose the Add property option:

At this point, you’ll be guided through the process to set up GSC for your new domain (as you did when you set up GSC for your current domain).

When this is done, head back to the property for your old domain and go to Settings > Change of address:

In the Update Googlesection, use the Select new sitedropdown menu to choose the new property that you just set up for your new domain. Then, click on Validate & Update.

You’ll need to confirm the move once again. If successful, you’ll see a notification appear in GSC for the old and new property.

5. Update Internal Links

The final step of switching domains without losing SEO is updating your internal links. Like you did with your backlinks, it’s important to find and replace internal links with your new domain.

Although you set up 301 redirects earlier, this is still good practice since you don’t want to be too reliant on redirects (and you want to prevent redirect chains). This occurs when multiple redirects take place between the URL requested and the URL destination.

While you can update internal links manually, it’s easiest to use an automatic tool like the SEMRush Backlinks Analytics tool that we used earlier. Instead of checking backlinks though, navigate to the Outbound Domainstab after entering your new website URL.

Here, you’ll see a list of domains that your new site links to:

All you have to do is find your old domain in the list and click on the arrow beside the number of outbound links:

This will identify each page on your new domain that’s linking to your old domain. Therefore, you can now go and edit these links through the WordPress dashboard and change the links to point to your new address.

Conclusion

If you’re rebranding your business or going through other major changes, you might want to change your domain name. In this case, it’s important to take steps to preserve your SEO so that you don’t fall in the search rankings.

To recap, here are five tips to retain your SEO when changing to an entirely different domain:

1. Audit your new domain.
2. Export backlinks.
3. Set up 301 redirects.
4. Verify your domain on Google Search Console (GSC).
5. Update internal links.

Do you have any questions about how to change your domain name? Let us know in the comments section below!