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Gold Coast Caravan Sales

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The guys at Gold Coast Caravan Sales needed to port their dealership website over to a new domain. Changing domains, from one with a long history and traffic of abour 10,000 a month, to an unknown domain with no history and no traffic is never going to be easy. To make it worse, they needed to separate the old domain from the new. No 301 redirects with this one.

Enter, gccaravansales.com.au

Paul Dawes at Gold Coast Caravan Sales had numerous good domains already in his account. We chose gccaravans.com.au as being a nice simple domain that best represented company. 

The challenge now is to build up the domain and restore its traffic. We had a very dominant position for a number of keywords, including number one position for caravan consignment searches, and number two for many of the caravan sales related searches (eg used caravan sales, caravans for sale, etc). 

We have mostly kept the consignement caravan results on the old domain. We lost some ground while it was argued whether we should be talking about selling caravans on consignment on a website where we want people to do precisely the opposite. As an SEO guy my answer was simple, yes we should. As a writer it was easy to see the angles, how we could craft the copy to make it work for us. We lost a couple of months and sunk to very lowly 30th position before this new search tactic got greenlighted. We’re now back at 5th for “consignment caravan” and 1st for “selling caravan on consignment”.  It was a shame to give up ground on one of our main strengths but I’m glad we’ve mostly recovered the ground we lost. 

Building the domain

According to Moz DA checker, gccaravansales.com.au has a DA of 11 out of 100. That’s low.

For those who don’t know, DA (Domain Authority) is a guestimate Moz make about the importance of your domain. Ahref have their own guestimator. I’ve seen the two disagree by a margin of about 30, which just goes to show how inaccurate these things are. They’re both trying to guess how Google ranks the importance of websites. Ahref says gccaravansales.com.au has a DR (Domain Rating) of 4.5. While the two systems vary by over 100% they both agree that the domain rating is very low.

Our task now, is to build that domain so that it has a bit moe presence in Google searches. Thankfully there is a lot more to search results than just domain rankings. We have many tools at our disposal and we’re already doing quite well for Gold Coast based searches. 

domain rating of gold coast caravan sales

Building content

Some of the really popular content we’d built for the previous domain was ported over to that domain. We were very prominent for searches on smoke alarms for caravans for instance. We’re not developing new content. At this stage we’re looking at capturing keyword opportunities, like “caravan sales Tweed Heads” but I imagine we’ll branch out to more interesting articles in the future. 

The road ahead

The great thing about SEO is there are always a million things you can do. Whether you’re building a Pinterest profile, adding content, building domain authority, adding to Google Business or building a Facebook audience, every little bit helps. The process at the moment is deciding what is most important. We don’t have an unlimited amount of time available to us or an unlimited budget. Working with these constraints means prioritising certain elements while also diversifying our activities. Balancing these forces is part of the fun of doing SEO. We’re sure gccaravansales.com.au will continue to grow and are grateful to be part of that process.Â