Our Own SEO Case Study: Transition to Subdomain Results in  +123% SEO Pageviews & +106.2% Search Impressions

#SEO #FAQ: Subdomain or new website? 🤔 #casestudy

Back in 2017, we created stealthsearchandanalytics.com to market our white-label reseller services to a specific target audience (marketing agencies). 

At the time, we had planned to spend a lot of time generating a high quantity of high-quality content for this site on a regular basis, which, as you always hear us preach about, is necessary for SEO success. However, in reality, we spend more time on our clients’ SEO efforts than our own (shoemaker’s kid has no shoes!), and we never found the time to create enough content for two separate sites (it’s hard enough for one!)

In the Spring of 2022, we decided to test the subdomain approach on our Stealth site. It turned out to be the right choice, as we were not only able to simplify our content management and website maintenance workload, but the SEO authority of the https://pamannmarketing.com/ domain (which was launched in 2011) significantly improved the Stealth site’s success within the first year after the transition to the subdomain.

+106.2% Year-Over-Year Organic Impressions Growth

Chart showing a +123% increase in SEO pageviews after the transition from stealthsearchandanalytics.com to stealth.pamannmarketing.com.
+123% increase in SEO pageviews: stealthsearchandanalytics.com vs stealth.pamannmarketing.com.

The charts above represent growth in search visibility and page traffic of the Stealth website after it was moved from the stealthsearchandanalytics.com domain to a subdomain on pamannmarketing.com

The keywords that we were most interested in (that the Stealth site had been optimized for) FINALLY started to move up. Within one year, we were on pages 1 and 2 for keywords that the Steath site struggled with for FIVE years prior!

As a result, stealth.pamannmarketing.com started to gain more recognition and got more Google Search rankings for “white label” and “reseller” keywords:

Chart showing May 2022 keyword rankings, with less URLs and less keywords than the next screenshot
Chart showing October 2023 keyword rankings, with more URLs and more keywords than the previous screenshot

Check out our “New Domain or Subdomain?” blog article to dive deeper into the reasons why we experienced such results and why you may want to consider a subdomain for your new site.

President & Chief Web Traffic Controller at Pam Ann Marketing at Pam Ann Marketing
Recently named one of the “Top 10 Best Women in SEO,” Pam Aungst Cronin, M.B.A. is widely recognized as an expert in SEO, PPC, Google Analytics, and WordPress. A self-proclaimed “geek”, Pam began studying computer programming at 6 years old, started creating websites in 1997 and has been working professionally in the field of e-commerce since 2005. Referred to by Sprout Social as a “Twitter Success Story,” she harnessed the power of social media to launch her own agency in 2011. Pam travels all over the country speaking at conferences and guest lecturing at universities. Click here to read her full bio.
Pam Aungst Cronin