Migration & re-brand rankings rescue for local movers who had moved to a new domain & business name.

Opportunity

• Business: reclaim Google visibility for moving services in their target South Carolina markets, and ensure people familiar with the old brand would still find them
• Local/offsite SEO: identify the local searches critical to their business, optimize their WP site without over-targeting, ensure new branding on local directories/profiles without losing the visibility of their old business name
• Migration SEO: finish the migration effort from old>new domain on the SEO side. Ensure Google recognized connection between sites

Helping Move Movers: The Way Forward

January-February 2020: I really should call out this project as the ultimate case in point for how much you can get done with an independent SEO professional in a contained scope of work – in this case, I had found a moving company client on Upwork.com who was in need of a migration SEO expert fast.

The student movers needed to ensure they didn’t completely lose all their rankings & traffic after moving both to a new domain and a new brand name, and so I recognized that my initial effort needed to include not just on implementing the 301 redirects myself in WordPress, but also educating on why SEO was so important given both of those variables.

Success! This was audit- and implementation-only work, so I was able to keep everything in a single spreadsheet and even included WP plugin solutions for adding Schema markup and improving site speed. I should also mention that as part of the local SEO effort, not only did we maintain page-1 position for the target “mover” searches for their primary Clemson, SC, location, but also boosted position & organic clicks exponentially for the other two cities in their service area.

{
“@context” : “http://schema.org”,
“@type” : “ProfessionalService”,
“@id” : “https://pathdigitalservices.com/#organization”,
“name”: “Path Digital Services & Consulting”,
“url”: “https://pathdigitalservices.com/project/local-search-competitive-market/”,
“image”: “https://pathdigitalservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/path-digital-logo-new-2-1.png”,
“priceRange”: “$$$-$$$$”,
“address”: {
“@type”: “PostalAddress”,
“streetAddress”: “1248 W. Addison 3C”,
“addressLocality”: “Chicago”,
“addressRegion”: “IL”,
“postalCode”: “60613”
},
“telephone”:”+1-872-256-1610″,
“makesOffer”:{
“@type”:”Offer”,
“price”:”$800.00″
},
“review”: {
“@type”: “Review”,
“reviewRating”: {
“@type”: “Rating”,
“ratingValue”: “5”
},
“author”: {
“@type”: “Person”,
“name”: “Chris D.”
},
“datePublished”: “2020-07-01”,
“reviewBody”: “Nate is a pleasure to work with and extremely flexible with his schedule. He understands the complexity of SEO and is able relay that back so effortlessly to business owners. We vetted about 15 different SEO professionals, some with tons of reviews and industry experience, and we found that Nate was the best bang for your buck and he didn’t disappoint. If you are looking for someone to do SEO, Nate is your guy. It wouldn’t be worth the risk using anyone else!”,
“name”: “Migration & local SEO: preserve rankings after a rebrand”
},
“aggregateRating”: {
“@type”: “AggregateRating”,
“ratingValue”: “5”,
“ratingCount”: “1”
}
}