Looking wholly at your web presence
When it’s time to change your brand, there a few considerations before you transition a known web presence so you can protect valuable organic SEO, keep followers, tell and sell the story of your change, and provide continuity for long time fans.
And to minimize tech downtime and loss, it is helpful to know a few web property conventions and where the value lies in your unique web configuration.
Below is a generic value prioritization of businesses web properties, including the technical ways each part may connect with other services, so you can troubleshoot issues and think through next logical steps if a disconnect happens.
APPROACH: because the online realm is also full of platforms selling lots of stuff you may not actually need1 to market yourself effectively, I’ll also try to support you to choose only what’s needed and where using free services may make sense for you.
Order of importance of your web-based services
DOMAINS
If you are spending over $20/year for a domain, you are overpaying. Nameservers, dns and WHOIS info for ICANN are all important and reside on your registrar. You may have domain forwards or subdomains or email accounts set up on your registrar too. Domains are web properties with central value to your brand – especially if the domain has an authority score and gets organic search results. Rule of thumb: only domains that are connected to content or desirable words have real monetary value. See hosting ↓
HOSTING OF KEY DOMAIN/s
Hosting may be provided by your registrar. Keeping hosting separate is a best practice. Your hosting is home of your content. And still, content is King.
Your hosting may also provide cPanel-based email or forwards,* social media connectivity* and/or lots of third-party plugins or extensions* that enable you to do more things with your website like run a blog, run ecommerce, print shipping labels, take reservations, send auto-responders, gather data, etc. Where your hosted files are, is what is indexed for organic (free) SEO. If you set this your site up well on a decent host, and include well- worded content, alt tagged images and appealing, authentic visuals, you can save money on paid web marketing from ongoing traffic and sales.
EMAIL FOR YOUR BUSINESS*
Email may run through your website host cPanel settings, completely separate through something free like a basic gmail, or set up for full domain matching through a juggernaut like Google Workspace Services. This is more costly to set up and maintain than the first two. If you are in a data-sensitive field, email can also be run securely through on-site servers, and if you work in health care or law, you need an extra level of security.
If you are like the rest of us, these layers of premium email services may be overkill2. Tip: does your email address absolutely need to match your store’s domain? No. Not for successful operations and auto-replies, etc. You only need perfect match IF you are concerned your customers won’t recognize your brand, or you want to add more email addresses users into your business and you want control or monitoring around those users’ access.
GOOGLE ACCOUNT ASSOCIATED WITH EMAIL OR BRAND*
See above. If you have Google-services email, you need this properly connected by a pro. Lately, there have been loads of issues with good emails not making it to recipients as the big players tighten up security. So truly minding this means having correct SPF DNS records and occasional testing.
META BUSINESS ACCOUNT ASSOCIATED WITH BRAND*
META is really all about ads (because that’s where their money is), so be aware, they’ll give advertisers greater love than you may wish using it for free – I could tell you stories of “ad partners” getting enmeshed by accident for the sake of tracking. META will also suggest connecting META with DNS of your domain and Google Account for “brand protection.” This seems a way for them to get hold of more connectivity to your domain for something they don’t actually need, so you’ll keep using them. For now, Facebook and Instagram appear popular and useful. Google isn’t going anywhere wither. If you want to connect these huge companies together around your stuff – that’s your call.*
OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS
I’m referring here to all your other social media accounts not currently under META. If your business and/or brand is valuable, it may be a good idea to pay to verify one or two of your most active, high follower accounts. Because anyone can register a handle that looks like you, if you pay monthly to verify your official account, it will help the proper account rise in visibility, and gain trust with visitors.
EMAIL SENDER PROGRAM
These are vendors like mailchimp, constant contact, or my favorite MailPoet. These are external to your domain name, but may have integrations into your hosted website. They also may send via your email address via masking or your own using domain verification. Often you need to update DNS to be sure the emails will actually be deliverable, because of Google servers aggressively filtering these days.
And if you value continuity on the web (people always being able to find you and your brand) with minimal technical hiccups, you can avoid excessive web downtime if steps are handled one at a time, reverting as needed to regroup if an integration doesn’t work correctly. Sometimes a true technical transition takes weeks, a sense of order of importance, context around the web industry, and now also an ability to break through chat bot customer service if you have a non-standard issue. Yeah, that’s a new art!
It’s also helpful to know how to converse with real people at tech support for these companies too. Basically to tell them you already did all the basic troubleshooting yourself. On chats, remember, ask for “a human representative” if you need one.
So, I’m letting you know something: integrations between companies (like GoDaddy and Shopify) or Mailchimp and Gmail, or GoDaddy or META or even Google and META don’t always work perfectly. The web is not a monolith, and each company is different with different configurations, partnerships, and reach. And the most powerful companies compete a bit with one another too… while ALSO banding together to protect their industry in general.
But your industry? It’s determined by you, by how you stay in touch with your customers, get their messages and orders, and stay in touch with the industry standards around your tech connections.
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT ;)
*Just because you can “integrate” or “automatically connect” one company’s code-product to another does not mean it will work forever. It also does not mean an auto-connection will cover any legacy work-arounds you have in place.
- Ever call GoDaddy for instance? If you do, they’ll try sell you a gazillion things, like every possible domain variant, loads of email accounts and SSL certificates for days… but to run a successful business, you likely only need a portion of what they are selling and some good humans to help you make sense of your web presence as a whole. ↩︎
- DISCLAIMER I am not an expert on all things internet, nor a specialist in any given area. So, take this essay as my best understanding from making, branding and configuring loads of brands on the web for 25 years–doing a touch of everything and keeping costs low for my people. ↩︎