So we're at that stage where most of our clients are from the US and we have decided to move to .com emails for security reasons, don't ask, it's ISO27001. Now we want to zhuzh up our domain to look a little bit more grown up.
So you might be wondering, why are we posting about this, what possible information could be scraped from the bottom of the barrel to warrant a new blog post. Well it's actually down to my personal interest more than anything, and an SEO case study that I have no idea how it's going to go...
But think of the SEO
So we have, we've thought long and hard and frankly, I actually do believe in the mainstream appeal of a .com domain. For far too long, we've broken validations on emails with a .studio and had endless folks asking what they should put after that domain, so we're going to redirect it at the .com.
Now here's the interesting thing. Since the beginning of Roboto Studio, we've always had the robotostudio.com domain, pointing at roboto.studio, but just using it as a cname (where it just redirects). So to us, it makes sense, because in-theory, we should retain all that precious SEO juice and just pass it directly onto the .com.
What scares us
So if you are like us and have had a look around, you've probably seen the Woocommerce to Woo domain migration. I'll give you the cliffnotes
"it made titanic seem like a cakewalk"
I'm not going to bore you with the details but essentially, they asked some SEO boffins for what will probably happen, getting the thumbs up, swapped over to woo.com, went full send, and basically their analytics went 💩
Below is their Google Analytics and what to expect for the future of the Roboto Studio website. Brace yourself.
For reference, I drew the stickman, that wasn't included on the original blogpost
A professional opinion
So far, you might think that this is a little irresponsible, but that's because it is.
However, we did actually get in touch with two people we very much respect in the field of SEO and analytics, and I want to include them.
Shoutout to our friends at both Freshsec and Candour, for giving us great feedback about whether or not this will effect our search rankings.
When asking Joe from Freshsec we heard a resounding
"I probably wouldn't do that"
And when chatting to Mark from Candour we heard a slightly less dissuasive
"should probably be ok"
Here's to nothing
Here's some fun little stats before we swap over to .com - we actually registered roboto.studio 1205 days ago to Vercel (17th August 2021). It was technically our second domain on Vercel, our first being a little portfolio we tested before jumping ship
From here on out, we'll be brutally transparent about how good/bad the migration has been for SEO, any issues we found as part of the process and the main takeaways we had. Await to see more blogs soon!
