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Here is a deal. Change offer name back to LogoJoy, keep Looka as a company. Then build it from that. Once it is established and substantial, one can always do

Here is a deal. Change offer name back to LogoJoy, keep Looka as a company. Then build it from that. Once it is established and substantial, one can always do a smooth logojoy.com -> looka.com/logojoy tansition. For example, the transition to looka.com/logojoy can only be applied when a customer is logged in. Once they have registered customers, they can pitch them other offerings from looka.com domain like looka.com/brandjoy etc. Such incremental approach would open a smoother path to success. P.S. As a quick remedy, they should change looka.com/logo-maker/ to looka.com/logojoy right now. Then, they should pitch the visitors with the right message: "Make a logo with Looka" should be changed to "Make a logo with LogoJoy" or "Make a logo with Looka LogoJoy". Karma is real, once one has it they should not deny it.

whoisjuan 7y ago
The name is not the issue at all (or the domain name for that matter). They were highly dependent on organic traffic. They probably had a semi-large range of content marketing articles on logo design, branding design, design for new businesses, etc. Those articles were driving traffic, creating soft conversions (people who create logos but don't necessarily pay for the export version)... Then they probably had a funnel to slowly move those passive customers into active paying customers. Probably a lot of those doing one time purchases. They also have a subscription model but I suspect their recurring revenue coming from these is poor. They were probably making their money from one-time purchases the same way an e-commerce website earns money. Enter the rename. That by itself is not a complex issue. Domain changes happen every day and Google correctly re-indexes your content under the new domain as long as your 301 redirect is set correctly. But when you do that AND also broaden your content to include new areas, you're at the mercy of how Google's algorithm is going to reclassify your content. Since they created a broader offering, they lost specificity and Google hates that. So all their content marketing went to hell and their main revenue funnel started declining. If you do this to an e-commerce website you will see the same results. It's like if you are a store that sells bed sheets only and one day you decide that you also want to sell kitchen items (slightly related but not the same category). If you do that, you lose all the relevance in bed-sheets SERPs that you dominated and it's kind of hard to come back from that. If your business depends on Google, this can happen to you even if you don't rebrand. A simple algorithm change can damage your rankings. TL/DR: Their fundamental error was renaming AND making their offering broader(vaguer) at the same time.
- gingerlime 7y ago
  So how do you expand your site to other areas without getting a SEO hit? (Your kitchen and bedsheet example)
  - whoisjuan 7y ago
    You expand horizontally, by adding new pages and slowly creating content that ties back to your new offerings. You keep the keyword density of your main SERPs unaffected and try to do a minimal integration of new links targeting the pages you want to rank for new search queries. Their mistake was destroying their relevance with a big bang change. If your website ranks generally well for a term like "logo creation tool" it's because you did some work to build the authority against that keyword. But if you decide tomorrow to change terminology around your business and redesign the without understanding the key content of your pages, you're going to affect relevance. Google crawls your website today under logojoy.com and sees a lot of logo creation related keywords. Then it crawls a week later and sees a 301 redirection a shit-ton of changes and new terms, and potentially completely different markup with those changes. Of course, you're going to get a massive SEO hit. This was a poorly timed and uncoordinated strategy that resulted in this outcome. If you change your domain name AND change the terms that you're targeting and add more vagueness to your content Google will re-index you differently. It's as simple as that.
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  probably their CTR also went wayyy down. I'd click on a logojoy listing but think twice about Looka

whoisjuan 7y ago

The name is not the issue at all (or the domain name for that matter). They were highly dependent on organic traffic. They probably had a semi-large range of content marketing articles on logo design, branding design, design for new businesses, etc. Those articles were driving traffic, creating soft conversions (people who create logos but don't necessarily pay for the export version)... Then they probably had a funnel to slowly move those passive customers into active paying customers. Probably a lot of those doing one time purchases. They also have a subscription model but I suspect their recurring revenue coming from these is poor. They were probably making their money from one-time purchases the same way an e-commerce website earns money. Enter the rename. That by itself is not a complex issue. Domain changes happen every day and Google correctly re-indexes your content under the new domain as long as your 301 redirect is set correctly. But when you do that AND also broaden your content to include new areas, you're at the mercy of how Google's algorithm is going to reclassify your content. Since they created a broader offering, they lost specificity and Google hates that. So all their content marketing went to hell and their main revenue funnel started declining. If you do this to an e-commerce website you will see the same results. It's like if you are a store that sells bed sheets only and one day you decide that you also want to sell kitchen items (slightly related but not the same category). If you do that, you lose all the relevance in bed-sheets SERPs that you dominated and it's kind of hard to come back from that. If your business depends on Google, this can happen to you even if you don't rebrand. A simple algorithm change can damage your rankings. TL/DR: Their fundamental error was renaming AND making their offering broader(vaguer) at the same time.

gingerlime 7y ago
So how do you expand your site to other areas without getting a SEO hit? (Your kitchen and bedsheet example)
- whoisjuan 7y ago
  You expand horizontally, by adding new pages and slowly creating content that ties back to your new offerings. You keep the keyword density of your main SERPs unaffected and try to do a minimal integration of new links targeting the pages you want to rank for new search queries. Their mistake was destroying their relevance with a big bang change. If your website ranks generally well for a term like "logo creation tool" it's because you did some work to build the authority against that keyword. But if you decide tomorrow to change terminology around your business and redesign the without understanding the key content of your pages, you're going to affect relevance. Google crawls your website today under logojoy.com and sees a lot of logo creation related keywords. Then it crawls a week later and sees a 301 redirection a shit-ton of changes and new terms, and potentially completely different markup with those changes. Of course, you're going to get a massive SEO hit. This was a poorly timed and uncoordinated strategy that resulted in this outcome. If you change your domain name AND change the terms that you're targeting and add more vagueness to your content Google will re-index you differently. It's as simple as that.
onetimemanytime 7y ago
probably their CTR also went wayyy down. I'd click on a logojoy listing but think twice about Looka