Change of the main domain from MotoEkip.com to LinsonMoto.bg

We started by building a plan in which the 3 digital marketing agencies participated – SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, as well as the owner’s team.

In this plan we have set main goals:

• Save maximum traffic to your website
• Strengthen Facebook Ads and Google Ads during the domain adaptation period after migrating to Organic Search
• Look for help channels, such as radio and television, to increase traffic and improve visibility after rebranding

Then, within 3 months, we prepared all the advertising panels and strategies so that they could be ready for January 7, 2019 (the day of the domain change).

We had to create a to-do list before and after the domain change. This is not a complete online store migration, but the expected losses in such situations are about -50% loss of organic traffic for the first month and stabilization to -10% for the first 6 months. Here is a short list:

• See if changing the domain causes errors like: 404, 403, and 500;
• To check for redirect chain 301;
• Check that the images are loaded from the correct directories;
• The new domain must be on the same hosting account and use the same IP as the old domain;
• Generate new XML Sitemap addresses and schedule them for submission to the GSC;
• To plan all emails from the old domain, redirect to the new one and add the new emails in the relevant sections of the website, because this is part of the so-called NAP (name address and phone number strategy for GMB (Google My Business));
• Replace Moto Ekip brand references in the database with Linson Moto, but leave pages that inform about the company’s history;
• To check if there are 302, 307 and 308 somewhere;

At Google Analytics, we’ve created a short list of tasks:

• Change the domain to an existing account so that we can save the information and make it easier to compare
• Make “notes” for each important event and each channel
• Monitor organic traffic every day for the first 3 months
• Monitor organic traffic every week for the rest of the time

This contributed a lot, because in the tracking process we found several additional SEO tasks related to TTFB and FCL, which required a change of server at some point.

In the Google Search Console, we had relatively few tasks that can be tracked here:

• Create a new GSC account;
• Verify the new account;
• Submit the new robots.txt, which we had previously planned not to include the old “Host” address;
• Submit the new XML Sitemap;

This monitoring is extremely important, because in case of certain omissions, if a change of the addresses from “motoekip.com” to “linsonmoto.bg” is missed in the database, 301 internal connections will be formed, and this is not desirable, because an internal redirect chain will be formed, which will drain Page Rank. After doing this basic and key check, we also did a standard SEO Technical Audit of:

• URL hierarchy of categories
• Render analysis
• Crawl budget analysis
• Server Log Files Analysis
• GSC analysis
• GA analysis / SEO related
• 4XX status pages
• Pages with status 5XX
• On-page SEO * / Robots.txt *
• XML Sitemap
• HTML Sitemap
• RSS / FEED
• Non www / and with www
• HTTP / HTTPS Alerts
  HTTP to HTTPS Migration Guide
• Pages with rel = ”canonical”
• Pages with multiple canonical URLs
• Dofollow outbound links
• HTML / CSS validators
• Frames pages
• Check for very large pages
• Check for SEO Friendly URLs

•  
• Dynamic URLs
• Very long URLs
• Product-level redirects 301
• Product-level redirects 302
• Category 301 redirects
• Category 302 redirects
• Information page level redirects 301
• Information page level redirects 302
• Broken links
• Broken photos
• Missing alt text on photos
• Missing Title Tag
• Duplicate titles
• Very long titles
• Missing meta descriptions
• Duplicate meta descriptions
• H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, A, B tags
• AMP
• Structure Data Markup
  Structure Data Markup Guide
• Load Speed ​​
  Website Load Speed ​​Optimization Guide

After the domain change and a little over 9 (nine) months of data collection, we achieved the following results:

• 5.00% decrease in Users, from expected -20% to -10%
• 5.06% drop in New Users, from expected -20% to -10%
• Stabilization of Bounce Rate for online store – about 35%

Of course, there were some critical moments with the project, which we recorded in our internal CRM, but also in Google Analytics for better traceability:

• Domain change on January 7, 2019
• First rendering and speed issue that increased TTFB and FCL time on 02/01/2019
• Second problem with rendering and speed, which increased the time of TTFB and FCL on 08.02.2019 after corrections from the previous one established on 01.02.2019
• Third critical problem with rendering and speed, which increased the time of TTFB and FCL on 05.03.2019 after corrections from the previous one established on 01.02.2019 and 08.02.2019
• Launch of radio advertising in order to increase the demand for the “new brand” and to compensate for the organic decline with a budget of BGN 700 per month for 3 months – we started on April 1, 2019.
• On May 25, 2019, we stabilized the speed, TTFB and FCL, and generally eliminated the problem with page rendering;

The main purpose of any online store is Revenue. However, for this purpose, it is related to Visibility, organic traffic and finally sales come, but as you will see it is not always so, because even with a minimal drop in visits (-5.00%), we manage to reach a full 22.31% growth on Revenue:

• Ecommerce Conversion Rate – 10.09% growth
• Transactions – down 3.63%
• Revenue – growth by 23.31%

As you can see for yourself, not always the big numbers in organic traffic have a positive effect on Revenue (the most important indicator for customers of online stores). However, this is a rather atypical case study, in which we change just one domain, but as you can see this is not a “simple” task and if there is no strategy, it can even cause online store bankruptcy.

We basically compare several parameters in the two GSC accounts, showing first the motoekip.com data for “impressions” and “clicks”:

• An average of about 400 clicks per day
• Just over 2,000 impressions per day

Here is the data for linsonmoto.bg from GSC for “impressions” and “clicks”:

• Just over 500 clicks a day, about 100 before the domain change
• On average, more than 5,000 impressions per day, about 3,000 more before the domain change

We mainly compare brand requests after the domain change. We take data from GSC on “linsonmoto.bg”, for the old brand “motoekip” and for “linsonmoto.bg”:

• We see that we have been able to spread the brand very quickly through help channels such as Facebook, Google Ads and radio advertising;
• This is exactly the most important sentence of the whole case study, because it is clear that with minimal advertising costs for domain change, we manage to achieve our goals, namely to become a brand that will be remembered by the audience. All this is due to a very simple truth that anyone can be a “Moto Ekip”, but one remains the brand “Linson Moto”!

Remember the new setting in the GSC for Change Address Tool , which appeared exactly at the beginning of October, namely to submit from the old domain, which is the new one and that you redirected it, here’s how:

• You are logged in to the GSC account for the old domain, in our case: Motoekip.com;
• Then go to “Settings” (bottom left of the menu);
• Then go to “Change of Address”;
• Then you choose that this domain (the domain in the GSC account you’re in) has a new “home”, namely your new domain;
• Then wait. It will take time for Google to merge all the data from the two accounts into the new one, but it will, and when that happens, you will be able to work with more data!

Here we show you the comparison of the domain “motoekip.com” with “linsonmoto.bg”:

• We have organic traffic retention;
• There is a period against a period compared to a year, that the month of April is the peak of demand, respectively organic traffic, because this is the beginning of the season for motorcycle enthusiasts;

Here we show you the comparison of the whole niche as of October 25, 2019, as the data are extracted from Serpstat:

• We hold around 27.70 Visibility, being a leader in the niche;
• The second competitor after us has more than 2.5 times less Visibility than us or 9.09;

For this project we want to especially thank the whole team of Linsonmoto.bg for enduring hundreds of tasks and requirements.
We would also like to thank our colleagues from SEM.BG for being able to do an excellent job with Google Ads campaigns.
And we leave it to you to see the video review, which is from the owner of Linsonmoto.bg – Georgi Lichkov, but is focused on our previous work (which continues to this day), but soon we will ask him to record another video review about this great case study.