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Considering Switching Domain from .ca to .com for Service Area Business - What is the Risk / Reward?
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Hello,
Thank you to anyone who takes the time to share their thoughts on this. I will preface this by saying that I am very new to the community and have lots to learn, so please forgive any obvious errors on my part. That having been said am very happy to receive positive criticism and feedback
Quick Background:
- We are a high end mobile wellness business based in Toronto Canada offering in home/office servicing including: yoga, pilates, nutrition, meditation, chiropractors, etc...
- As we are expanding  we are transitioning form new leads coming from business partners and word of mouth to driving new business online
- As such we have an new Squarespace site (which is the first site I ever built, so any feedback is welcome) and are venturing into social media, SEO, local citations etc... for the first time
- We have a significant content catalogue originally  for client and instructor education that we are now repurposing for this new digital adventure but have not yet deployed
- While currently focused in Torotno, we have plans to expand to several other countries in the next two years.
- As the site is quite new and we have little content or incoming links I was thinking now is the time to switch to .com from .ca before we roll out
Website: www.anahana.ca
Risk Reward? & Other Issues?
- Both domains are currently verified with Squarespace, and it seems easy enough to switch. What could blow up by making this switch which I might not be aware of?
- Our emails and business card use the .ca, but I don't think this would matter too much 6-12 months out... is there something else I might be missing on this?
- .com and using subfolders or subdomains as opposed to country specific TLDs ? This is something I am still working on understanding, but from what I have learned thus far, if we are going to progressively roll out a large content library, is it not better from an SEO standpoint to have this all in one domain?
- Local SEO and legal considerations for TLDs when operating local Service Area Businesses.
I am sure there are many other angles here that I am missing and am not really looking for any hard answer on much of this, but any general advice, suggested resources, and experienced insights would be extremely helpful.
Thanks so much,
cj
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This is very helpful. Thank you very much for the answer.
There is lots to learn!!
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Usually when you move pages from one URL to another, you can notice a minor dip in performance initially. This is because backlinks which hit your site through 301 redirects will give you less SEO equity than those which hit your website directly
That's just at the page level, but when the URL of every single page on a site changes, you get the same thing (it just encapsulates your total SEO performance rather than a small fraction of it). As long as the redirect migration project is handled properly by an expert at a high level of granularity, usually any performance dip (even for a whole website) is minimal
Even if your architecture doesn't change and there's no redesign, if all of your pages move from one domain to another that still counts as a 'migration' in SEO terms and you still need to take extensive measures to prevent traffic tail-off
An SEO expert should be crawling all of your current site's pages **AND **adding in historic URL (which may no longer be live) from Analytics / Omniture / Search Console. In that way, even legacy pages which may previously have been ignored can be properly redirected (rather than 'just' your live URLs before the move) which can add a little extra padding and security
You need to retain hosting on the old domain so that it can continue to host either a .htaccess or web.config file (Apache (Linux) vs IIS (Windows). This file will coordinate your granular and rule-based redirects
Having a list of your currently live (old domain) and legacy (no longer live) URLs is great but it's not enough. It's even better to scan all of those URLs using something like URL Profiler (which relies upon API keys and subscriptions to multiple other data sources, including Moz) to determine for yourself - which of these URLs are worth using your granular redirects on?
Typically you end up with a big spreadsheet that looks like this:
Because you're aggregating data from multiple sources, leave it to a data analyst. Don't allow such a project to be handled by an amateur. Invest in insuring your SEO performance by working with pros...
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Hi there, if anything it'll help with local SEO as a type of trust signal
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