Case Study What would you do with this business?

Last week, our case study looked at a decision faced by the Newark Nut Company, a family-owned nut retailer based in Cranford, N.J. Run by Jeffrey Braverman, the company employs more than 80 workers and has annual revenue of more than $20 million, 95 percent of it online.

Despite the company’s growing Web sales, Mr. Braverman never liked its domain name, Nutsonline.com, which he’d bought in 1999. Last fall, he decided to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a new name, Nuts.com, from a squatter. And on January 6, after the holiday season, he filed a change-of-address form and reopened on the new site. But despite high hopes and careful planning, the site’s traffic took a dive, especially in terms of organic search traffic. The site, which had been averaging more than 30,000 visits each week from non-paid Google searches, saw its non-paid traffic fall 70 percent two weeks after the switch. Almost three months later, it was still down more than 50 percent. That cost the company 100 to 150 orders a day, Mr. Braverman said.

Matt Cutts, chief of Google’s Webspam team, said in an interview that, because Google’s algorithms have to adjust to a new address, sites should expect a temporary drop in traffic immediately after a move, maybe 5 percent. According to Mr. Cutts, Mr. Braverman missed three opportunities to minimize his traffic loss. First, Nuts.com had been a parked or content-free site before the sale — meaning, Mr. Cutts said, that “NutsOnline basically moved into what was an abandoned building for the last 10 years.” To prepare users — and Google — for the site’s new purpose, Mr. Cutts said, Mr. Braverman should have put up a banner or a simplified site on Nuts.com to announce its new identity several months before moving (a YouTube video explains in greater depth).

Second, NutsOnline should have moved a small part of the site — a subdirectory or subdomain — to the new address for a month or so before the move to test for problems (here’s another video). “It’s best to dip your toe in the water before you jump in,” Mr. Cutts said. (Mr. Braverman said he did move the blog for about a week, but doing so caused problems with broken advertising links and the like.)

And, third, because Nuts.com had previously gotten much of its traffic from Britain (because of the similarity of its name to that of a British men’s magazine), Mr. Braverman’s team should have done more to set the geographic location of the site (here are more Google suggestions). Failing to do that Mr. Cutts said, meant that Google was less likely to send American queries for pistachios and the like to the site. (Mr. Braverman said he set Google’s geotargeting to the United States in February, after a Google employee suggested doing so.)

Today, almost four months after the switch, Nuts.com has recovered much of its traffic. We talked with Mr. Braverman about the switch and about some of the suggestions made last week by readers:

Q.

Besides a drop in traffic, did you have other problems after the move?

A.

Google “Nuts.com” in the search bar. See how it says 2,691 seller reviews? That just started popping up nearly two months after the move. We lost all those connections. Google didn’t understand that linkage even though I did everything right. Those reviews were associated with NutsOnline.com, and we’re Nuts.com even though we’re the same business. You can imagine that if someone has that many reviews and the one next to them has zero, I would be more likely to click on the one with more reviews. But the big issue has been with search, unpaid listings. The bottom fell out of that. Our traffic just plunged. On Bing, the other search engine, everything was fine.

Q.

Do you regret buying the address and moving your site?

A.

No, because we’re going to do everything in our power to build this brand. But if I had known it would be like this I would have been a lot more squeamish. Long term, I think the rankings will come back. And they’ll come back with a fury. I have a long horizon, so I’m not looking at the next quarter. Yes, I look at it every single day, and I track it and the profit we’re losing ever day. But looking out years, this will come back and then some. It’s all going to pay off; the question is just when.

Q.

One search specialist we quoted, Jay Bean of OrangeSoda suggested that it would have been smarter — and a lot less painful — to just redirect traffic from Nuts.com to NutsOnline.com without moving the site. Why didn’t you?

A.

The bottom line is that not that many people were just typing in Nuts.com. And 85 percent of that traffic was from the U.K., so not relevant. We could never have justified what we spent. We would have gotten no return, or a lot less return. I had thought, ‘Why don’t I buy it and start another business, a competing business, and try to monopolize the space?’ But, one, Google won’t let you do that, especially with ads. They won’t let you double-serve ads if you’re the same company. And, two, we’re really purists. To me that’s disingenuous.

Q.

Couldn’t you have re-branded the old site as Nuts.com but redirected from Nuts.com to NutsOnline.com?

A.

You can’t do that. You’ve got to imagine, think if your grandma goes to it. She’s going to be confused as hell if she sees Nuts.com on the top of the page and the URL is NutsOnline.

Q.

What about the suggestion, made by some readers, that instead of a generic name like Nuts.com you should instead have a more unique name, such as NewarkNuts.com, that would have a physical tie-in and some kind of nostalgic connection to the business’ history?

A.

I think it’s a terrible idea. To me it was a complete no-brainer: a) Nuts.com is shorter; b) it’s more memorable; c) it gives a lot more credibility than NutsOnline. And that it’s generic? I don’t think it’s analogous to Books.com. “Nuts” is an adjective too. It has character to it. “Books” can never have character to it.

Q.

So you don’t think people would get a warm, nostalgic feeling from “NewarkNuts”?

A.

No, first, when people think of Newark … for a lot of the country, it doesn’t evoke a great connotation. And does NewarkNuts sound like a great brand? I think NutsOnline is a lot better than NewarkNuts.