Hello there, I'm Meg Casebolt, the CEO of Love at First Search. I'm also a MemberVault user and consultant. And this video is all about whether or not you can make the choice to move your entire website and shift your entire domain over to MemberVault or if you want to keep two separate websites. This is the specific question, I'm going to read two questions that we received directly from MemberVault users. And then also explain what the process of moving would look like. So somebody asked, Will it hurt my domain ranking, to move from my current site to MemberVault, and then potentially back again in the future? And another MemberVault user said is it going to harm my SEO at all to move from my WordPress website to just having it on MemberVault. So if you miss my video about what our domain is, and what domain authority is, here's my like, quick TLDR your authority lives at your domain level, not on your website. So whatever your you know, blankety blank.com That's what matters if you move that your domain authority goes with you. So if you decide to migrate from something like WordPress, to MemberVault, and then point your full domain at MemberVault, then your domain authority goes with it. But caveat, if you break all of your links in the process of moving things, if you change all of your content while you're making this change, then it can feel like you're really starting from scratch. Because instead of having like, here are all of these pages that already exist, you'll have a bunch of 404 errors, or here's where the key word was on this page, and then I rewrote it, and it doesn't exist there anymore, you're not going to rank for that term anymore. So with that in mind, I'm gonna link in the comments below. Google has a really incredible guide to talk about site migrations, whether that's just your domain or your entire website that you're moving. Google has created a really robust guide to the process. So if you're thinking about moving, here are the five steps that it recommends. The first is you plan, you know, figure out if this makes sense for your site, figure out when a quieter time of day or year is to make this adjustment, and then maybe even splitting the move into smaller steps where you move a bit at a time and monitor and track what's happening. So that's step one, step two, set up your new site. This would be you know, right now, if you're thinking about moving to MemberVault, this would be having a MemberVault account, and then also setting up tracking on things like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, whatever your tracking tool of choice is, I really like Fathom, you know, installing that so that way, as you're moving things, you can see the errors as you move. Number three, Google says the third step is to map your URLs. So you want to go in and determine maybe do like a full content audit, if you want to talk to me, I can do this to determine the most important pages and URLs on your existing site, and then figure out where they're going to live on the new site. And if you can, depending on your permalink structure, and yada, yada, yada. Either, you can make sure that the permalink structure is the same. Or you can come up with a redirect strategy. So that way, everything will make it clear that you can say to Google, I used to live here. And now this page lives here. Step four is when you actually move things. So we have so much work to do before we start moving a single thing. And then once you have the plan, you know where everything's going, you can migrate the content, you can turn on the redirects, please keep your redirects on for at least a year, you can go into your Google Search Console and submit a change of address form. Just like going to the post office, I have links down below about change of address. You want to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console, let them know that it exists, and then update any links on your website. And then the fifth step, Google says is to monitor the move to make sure nothing breaks to find out if there are any errors, all of that information is in your Google Search Console. Now, another question that we had, which I think is an amazing question, does it matter to the new and duplicate content in MemberVauly that as I move content does it matter that there will be two versions of the same content? Do we need to delete it from the old site as I go through Google doesn't think it's copying me? And then not show the newer version? Right? Like, what? What does it look like to make these changes? Go watch the video about duplicate content if you have this question, but I do want to say like, yes, it matters. You can start to move things over slowly if you want to. And every time you move things over, you could set up a redirect on a page by page basis that way things are slowly moving. I talked about in that duplicate content video, you can set up a canonical link so you can still keep it on your old site. But then Google will start to direct to the new site instead. And it'll understand the difference between these two sites and kind of see you moving or if you want, you can just kind of copy and paste it all at once and then move the domain Once, right, like, there are a lot of different ways to do this. But if you start just like, I'm gonna move this from here to here, and then you delete it without telling Google where it's going, then you could be tanking your old SEO, tanking your existing traffic to the website without moving it to the new place, because it looks like a new website. So you need to be very strategic about how you're making these moves. And then once you're ready, then you can go set up that change of address tool, which will send everything from the old URL to the new space. Let me make sure, you might also realize that you don't want to move every post of your site, when you go through, when you do that content audit, you might be like, Oh, I wrote that in like 2006, doesn't really need to move with me. Maybe it's like super outdated. This is where that content audit comes into place, go into your Google Analytics, see if there's any traffic to that post. If the traffic is coming from Google, if the traffic is coming from social, if the traffic's coming from somewhere else, you can either take one of those posts, that doesn't matter anymore, and then maybe take the information that's relevant, consolidated into another post, and then set up a redirect. So people who used to look at this post are now gonna go to this post. If your traffic is coming from Google, it will most likely figure this out within three to six months, shouldn't be a problem. But keep those redirects up for a year. We also had somebody who said that they're thinking of moving things over. And they want to set up the redirects. And I'm thrilled that you're thinking about this, but they use a WordPress plugin called pretty links to say, I'm moving my redirects from here to here. And if they're getting rid of their WordPress site, then they get rid of all those redirect links. Thank you first thinking about this, I love this question. Instead of setting up those redirects in WordPress, you can actually set them up on your domain settings, I cannot show you how to do this, because it is different in every single place that you buy your domain. So if you bought your domain on Google domains, it's gonna be different than if you bought it on Bluehost than if you bought it on Hostgator. And then if you bought it on GoDaddy, right, but figure out where you bought your domain, go into your domain settings, probably there's going to be some sort of cPanel setup. And you can go into the domains and set up your redirects there. So you don't have to have the WordPress plugin in place to get yourself moved over. I will include, or if all of this is like, this is making my brain hurt. That's when it's time to hire a developer. I'm not a developer, they can go in and do all this stuff. Like at html access level. I don't want to do that for you. I can help you strategize. You know, what's on your content, audio audit, where things go, how do we move them, I can do all that with you. But if you don't want to think about this at all, go hire a developer who will do all of this for you. That's way above my paygrade. I will make sure that there are links below this in case you want to dive deeper into this. Definitely if you have other questions, you can check out the corresponding videos in this playlist all around duplicate content domains, domain authority and tools. Thank you so much. If you have more questions, definitely let Erin know and I can do another round of these videos. So thanks