Since salonspy was launched in 2012, we have always lived on the .co.uk domain.
This was tactical at first, to give us a good start with local SEO in the UK market.
When we launched Australia, we followed suit with this logic and launched .com.au - it took a while but managed to gain enough ground with Google in that market to rank like we do in the UK.
However, the launch of our Irish site didn't gain as much momentum with Google as we'd hoped. This caused us to relook at it.
Our strategy partners at StrategiQ wrote this article about regaining position within google (be warned, its techy!)
...and our summary is below ??
What is domain authority?
Like a credit score, but for websites.
Domain authority is how trustworthy, reliable and informative your website is. Domain authority is earned over time.
We transferred all of our domain authority from 3 different websites - salonspy.co.uk, salonspy.com.au & salonspy.ie all to our salonspy.com domain.
Why?
Having all domain authority on one site means we can rank the reviews better and quicker for our salons.
It also means that when we’re ready to launch a French or German salonspy, we already have the domain authority in place.
What did we lose and for how long?
“Rich Snippets” is tool provided by google to review platforms to help ensure their content is identified as reviews
“Reviews from the Web” is a subsection of Google reviews that ranks other reviews from third party web sites
How long did it take?
Exactly 79 days. We were so nervous because there is no guarantee & no way to chase someone down at Google, we had to just take the best advice we could and we went for it.
We were advised 3 months (90 days) and the guys at StrategiQ nailed the prediction.
Was it worth it?
100%.
Our rankings came back with a bang… and now all of our customers, UK, Irish or Australian now get the same benefits.
