We are a relatively old technology (established) business in its 20th year. We have migrated domains at least 3 times in this period to keep up with technology. We have recently migrated from an old domain (X) which was live on the internet for at least 10 years and included subdomains for stores, support, training etc. We have now moved to a new domain (Y) and told Google about our migration but have seen a huge loss in SEO traffic.
It has been a bit messy, our support domain is still hosted at domain (X) but the rest of the site has been moved to new, consolidated pages on domain Y. Where possible, we have created 301s but we simply do not appear in results anymore vs being visible on page 1 or 2 for some short tail and longtail searches.
My hunch is that Google has become confused because of the slow migration from X to Y and that the content on our new domain has very little use of keywords (we wanted to use language that humans understand vs search engine optimised keywords).
**
– I want to do the following on domain (Y):**
Our root domain is to act like a brochure, selling the technology, and doesn’t use seo optimised keywords
our store (powered by shopify) I’m OK to pepper it with SEO keywords to drive traffic directly there.
The problem is that without a diagnosis I don’t know how to remedy our almost complete loss of search engine presence, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Your traffic loss stems from two main issues: a “split” migration that failed to transfer your authority, and the removal of keywords that explained your business to Google. By keeping the support site on the old domain and not redirecting every old URL, you have prevented your 20-year history from passing to the new site. To Google, your new domain looks like a startup with no reputation.
Furthermore, stripping keywords from your main “brochure” pages to sound more “human” was a strategic mistake, at least from my point of view.
The technical terms that we used to rank for are only used by professionals in our industry. We were attempting to appeal to a broader audience with simplified language. It’s hard to gauge is this was successful or not as we’re still generating leads - just not as many as before.
Our migration was slow because we have limited resources with this time of skill, is our SEO rank lost, even if we told google that domain X became the new domain Y. I would have thought that this is enough to transfer at least some authority over.
If it was you, what would you suggest?
add keywords back to our brochure part of the site
add keywords to store pages on shopify
do a like-for-like migration of all URLs with 301s for our support pages from X to Y?
I fear that we would undertake this work and it still won’t do anything. So it’s whether we start to rebuild our SEO or if those steps will salvage it. We started migration about 6-7 months ago!
I would recommend using a “hybrid” approach: keep your headlines simple for readability, but ensure the body copy contains the detailed specifications.
I would also recommend adding keywords back to your store but strictly for informational and technical keywords
Regarding the migration, do not waste resources redirecting every single page after seven months. Instead, perform a “surgical” recovery. Use a tool like Google Search Console to identify which specific old URLs actually have external websites linking to them, and creating 301 redirects for only those pages.