Steinecke
steinecke.info↓steinecke.de
+45% top-3 rankingsfour months after the move, compared with the old domain’s level (Semrush, 2026)
Office
Bernard Zitzer
Erich-Weinert-Str. 19
10439, Berlin, DE
The better domain. Without losing rankings.
Changing your domain is one of the riskiest SEO decisions, and one of the most rewarding. I guide the move from choosing the new name to the very last redirect, so your visibility comes with you.
At a glance
A domain upgrade is relaunch support for a domain change: a one-off project, your team implements the redirects, I plan and check. All services compared
Domain upgrades I have guided
Three companies, one pattern: away from the keyword add-on, towards a clear brand name.
Bar-Tek
bar-tek-tuning.de↓bar-tek.com
approx. 20x visibilityover eight years of SEO support from 2016 to 2024, including the domain upgrade for international markets
Nutcracker
nutcracker-concepts.de↓nutcracker.de
Moved without lossvisibility held steady through the 2018 relaunch and domain change
Own project
ato.maDomain hack: name and extension read as one word, “Atoma”. Five letters, instantly memorable.
Own project
onorbit.coPreposition plus term: when the name you want is taken, a short prefix turns it into a strong brand you can say out loud.
What a domain upgrade gets you
Your domain is the first contact with your brand: in search results, in AI answers and in your customers’ heads.
Memorability
Short brand names get searched, typed and recommended more often. Branded searches are the most stable traffic source there is.
Trust and clicks
A clear domain looks more credible than a hyphenated keyword construct, which lifts click-through in Google and the chance of being named in AI answers.
Room to grow
New markets, new products, new languages: a brand name without a keyword add-on grows with you instead of boxing you in.
How the move works
Four phases, one goal: every page, every link and every ranking arrives on the new domain.
Name and domain
We test candidates for memorability, availability, trademark and search potential, using the method from my naming course.
Redirect map
Every old URL gets its exact target. No blanket redirects to the home page, no chains.
Go-live
Redirects live, change of address in Search Console, sitemaps, internal links and profiles updated.
Monitoring
Rankings, crawl errors and backlinks are watched for months, and anything off gets fixed right away.
From experience: domains rarely lose rankings because of the new name. They lose them because of missing redirects and because too much changes at once.
Common questions about changing domains
Will I lose my rankings when I change domains?
Not necessarily. Rankings are usually lost when redirects are missing, point to the wrong targets, or when content is rebuilt at the same time as the move. With a complete one-to-one redirect map and close monitoring, losses can be contained, as with the move from nutcracker-concepts.de to nutcracker.de.
How long until the new domain takes over the old rankings?
Google says that for a medium-sized site, most pages move within a few weeks, and rankings can fluctuate during that phase. For steinecke.de, visibility was above the old domain’s level about four months after the move.
Country domain or .com: which is better?
It depends on your market. If you only sell in one country, a country domain such as .de is often the right choice; if you want to grow internationally, a .com helps. Bar-Tek took exactly that step with bar-tek.com. A short, memorable brand name matters more than the extension.
When is a domain upgrade worth it?
When your current domain is long, hard to remember or tied to a keyword (such as “-tuning” or “-concepts”), when you are expanding internationally, or when a relaunch is planned anyway. Combining the move with a relaunch saves effort but raises the risk, so both need careful planning.
What does it cost to have a domain move supported?
It depends on the project, mainly on the size of the site and whether a relaunch happens at the same time. In a 30-minute intro call I scope the work and then give you a fixed price.
Planning a domain change?
In 30 minutes we work out whether the upgrade is worth it and how to move safely.