Mobile Apps After three weeks of hand-wringing and several anxiety attacks, Market Me Tennessee has successfully regain #1 position for web design Nashville following our rebrand to Ten Fast Feet.
A significant portion of our website design work comes directly from search queries, so it was a tad bit worrisome as the weeks slowly ticked by. As the person in charge of sales, not having those warm leads coming in invoked memories of days before being #1 on Google and having to cold call for every new project.
For those of you who may be considering a name change, wanting to change your domain name for SEO purposes, or just to have a shorter URL, these are the steps we took to reclaim our ranking. New site. 301 redirect. Wait. Stress. Wait. Stress.
First off, if you are changing to a new website in addition to changing domains, make sure the new site is an improvement from a coding standpoint in addition to content arrangement. The first index cycle the new site goes through is an opportunity to get “bonus” points for these factors before your 301 redirect takes full effect. A prime example of this is a boost in TFF rankings for several keywords from previous MMT SERPS. We carefully added content relevant to strings we wanted to capitalize on e.g. web designers Nashville and website design Nashville. Previously we were on page two, and have jumped to middle of page one.
Our new website design and code is significantly more streamlined than the old site and the “one page” aspect offers the ability to have significantly more content on the homepage without having a cluttered feel. Something you can do to check how Google "sees" your website is to go to one of the many text browsers online. This will give you a very good idea of how your site is viewed by the Google-bot. If your site is dynamic like ours, you have the ability to pull in snippets of other pages, such as blog posts like this one. You may have noticed I put “web design Nashville” in the first sentence. One of the reasons for this is our blog section is set to pull a set number of characters from the post. If we title our posts correctly and have specific strings in that first paragraph, even after this post is archived, Google will give credit for that content on both our homepage and the interior page.
Next step is performing a 301 redirect. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, a 301 redirect is telling Google “hey, we were here, now we are over here permanently. This allows the SEO credit we had built for marketmetennessee.com to be transferred to tenfastfeet.com. It takes a few index cycles to rebound, but if done properly saves from having to start over with Google. Make sure to set the 301 in Google webmaster tools, and in the config file in your FTP. If all goes well, you will magically show up again with your new domain in a matter of weeks.
This can be a very gut-wrenching process, but when it’s over there will be many cheers and high-fives all around, especially if a significant portion of your business comes from search. If you are considering this process feel free to give us a call and pick our brains.
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We would love to learn more about your needs and how we can help you grow. TFF is big enough to handle your project and small enough that you can talk directly to the owners. We're probably more affordable than you may think and we're really good at making you look really good. Give partner John Maddox a call at the number above. That's his direct line and he's just itching to make you money.