Hi there everyone, I am Meg Casebolt I am the CEO of Love at First Search, which is an SEO strategy organization. And I have been asked by Erin and the MemberVault team to record a series of short videos about kind of the SEO of MemberVault. So this is going to be the first video in a four part series. In this video, I'm going to be talking about domains and domain authority. And if you decide to move your domain from your WordPress, let's say website over to your MemberVault site, what that looks like. And if you have a subdomain, or you're using a custom domain, or you're still on the vip.membervault domain, like what does that all mean? So that's today's video. That's number one, this one. Number two, I'm going to talk about the best website tools for SEO and the things that you need to think about. Because it's not as simple as like, oh, just build on this tool, and everything will be perfect. I'm also going to talk about duplicate content, especially if you're thinking about migrating some of your content from an existing website over to your MemberVault. And the last video will be about that process of migrating, I should state for the record that I am not just a consultant to MemberVault, I am also a user makes me sound sort of like Hair Club for Men, you know, like "not just the President, I'm also a client." So I'll be sharing sort of my MemberVault experience going through this process. I've been a MemberVault user for six years now. And I know that SEO is something that's very important to them. I know that not only because I've seen the platform evolve, but also because I've been involved in the conversations around how to make sure that the platform works really well, for SEO. So without further ado, let's talk about domains. So we have a lot of questions that come in from people about domains. You know, if I move from one place to another, if I build a subdomain, what does this all mean? If I do the customer name servers from Mr. Robot? Will that impact my SEO? Like, we get a lot of questions about it. So I want to start with what exactly is your domain, some of you may know this and be rolling your eyes, that's okay, bear with me, I promise, I'll get there. Your domain is basically like your address. It is the part of your website that ends in like .co, .com, .net, .org. For some of us, that thing that you type into the search bar is your domain, your domain can point anywhere. It's just your address, it's not your house, right? Your house is your website, your domain is just the mailbox on the street that tells people where to drop off the information. So when we talk about domain, that is actually what Google knows your website as Google doesn't look at your website and think like that website is built on Squarespace, and that websites built on WordPress. I mean, it knows but like when it's judging whether or not to send traffic to your website, your domain is what it's looking at. It's looking at everything happening on your domain. This SEO company called Moz, many years ago, tried to figure out everything that Google was looking at on a domain to decide whether or not to send traffic to it. And it's like, there are so many factors at play. There's the quality of the content on your website, there's whether it loads quickly, whether it's secure, whether it has a lot of traffic coming into it. And Moz created this score, called your domain authority. It's not directly from Google, it's from this third party tool. But we've found that it's pretty accurate. So your domain, let me give the official definition from Moz, your domain authority, which sometimes people will call DA, because SEO people love to shorten everything is a search engine ranking score developed by MOZ that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine results page. DA scores range from 1 to 100. With higher scores, indicating a greater likelihood of ranking. I'll include a whole blog resource right below this in the notes about exactly everything that's included in your domain authority score. But here's what you need to know, every domain starts at zero, or maybe one starts at almost nothing. Right? The day you buy a domain, every website starts at 0, right? And over time, the more you create on your website, the more you build on that page, that site, the higher domain will go. It also helps to have other people talking about it and sending links to your website, great quality content to have things working really well. There's so many things that that Google looks at for your domain authority. And so if you're like, I kind of want to know what my domain authority is, hold on a sec. You can use a tool and you can check your own domain authority. I like this one. It comes from Moz who are the people who created the domain authority score. Are because it's free, you don't even have to sign up with an email address, you get up to three reports a day. So that way you can check this out. So you can come in here, you can type in the domain of your website, here is my report for Love at First Search, it says, okay, my domain authority score is 20, and says my linking root domains I had. So that means other people talking about me or 217, I have 276 keywords, and I have a very low spam score. It also gives you a ton of information in case you're curious about, like, what are the pages of my website that people are linking to? And who's talking about me? And how many links do I have, and that kind of thing. So you can do this for yourself. You can do this for your competitors, you can do this up to three times a day, and sort of get an idea of the things that Google cares about. We got a really great question about if I were to buy a new domain, or my MemberVault old site and have my existing domain, already, at my appointment at my website, would that mean I would be starting from zero? Yes, every time you buy a new domain, you start from zero. It's like, brand new from scratch. That's how you're restarting. Even if you're like, I'm gonna take my existing website and put it on a new domain, that domain starts from zero. Now, you do have the existing website there. So it should pick up speed pretty quickly. But it's the domain that Google is looking at. We got a lot of questions about subdomains if you want to use like blog.abc.com. Right. So let's like a portion of the domain, but you have something else in there. Does that count to your domain authority? Yes, all subdomains count towards your domain authority. So everything that lives under that domain counts, right. So for example, let me show you my other screen again. Here's my MemberVault, which lives at. Okay, you can't see it, darn it, which lives at there we go learn.loveatfirstsearch.com. So it still lives on my domain of loveatfirstsearch. But it's just got that learn piece in front of it. So I use the MemberVault custom name servers, I set up my subdomain. And now this lives there. Before I set up those custom name servers, it was like loveatfirstsearch.com or loveatfirstsearch.vipmembervault.com. And that fed into the domain authority for vipmembervault.com. So when I look at what my website looked like, at that domain, when it when before I moved it over, I typed in that address of actually it was megabytedigital.vipmembervault.com. You can see the domain authority is higher, but it's because it's part of vipmembervault.com. So before I moved my website from living at my sub domain learned a lot of research before I moved it over, and I just had it living on vipmembervault.com. It was contributing to the domain authority of member vault.