Updating Google Business Profile and Local Listings After a Domain Change

You moved your website to a better domain name. Good. But your old address is still sitting in a lot of places you may have forgotten about — and the biggest one is your Google Business Profile. That's the box that shows up on the right side of the search results with your phone number, hours, and a link to your site. If that link still points to the old domain, you've done half the job.

Here's the short version: when you update your Google Business Profile after a domain change, you're telling Google — and every customer who taps that link — where you actually live now. Skip it and you'll send people to a page that redirects, breaks, or worse, looks abandoned. Let's fix it in order.

Do this first: point your Business Profile at the new domain

Before you touch anything else, make sure the new domain is actually live and the redirects from your old one are working. If you haven't set those up yet, start there. A redirect quietly forwards anyone typing the old address to the new one, so nobody hits a dead end. Our checklist on 301 redirects for a domain migration walks through exactly how.

Once redirects are in place, update the profile:

1. Sign in to your Google Business Profile. The easiest way is to search your business name on Google while signed in to the account that manages it.
2. Find the Website field and replace the old URL with the new one.
3. Save. Google may take a day or two to show the change publicly.

If you use a specific landing page for a location or service, update that too — not just your homepage. Google's own Business Profile help center has step-by-step screens if your dashboard looks different from the one described here.

Then hunt down the other listings

Your website address lives in more places than you think. Every one of them is a small vote of confidence to Google that your business is real and consistent. When half of them say oldname.com and half say newname.com, that confidence drops — and so can your spot in local results.

Walk through this list. Most take two minutes each:

• Facebook and Instagram — the website field in your business page settings and your bio link.
• Yelp — claim the page if you haven't, then edit the website.
• Apple Maps — through Apple Business Connect.
• Bing Places — the smaller cousin of Google, but people do use it.
• Your industry directories — the ones specific to your trade. A plumber has different ones than a dentist. Think about where you're already listed.
• The Better Business Bureau, your local chamber of commerce, and any association pages.

A quick trick: search Google for your old domain in quotes — like "oldname.com" — and see what pages still mention it. That's your to-do list, handed to you for free.

Don't forget the stuff customers see every day

Listings are the online part. But your old domain is probably printed on things people hold in their hands:

• Business cards and flyers
• Truck and van lettering
• Email signatures
• Invoices and receipts
• Signage at your shop or office
• Voicemail greetings, if you read your website out loud

You don't have to reprint everything the day you switch. The redirect covers you. But update these as they come up for renewal, and fix the digital ones — email signatures especially — this week.

Why the order matters

People rush the listings and forget the redirect. That's the mistake that hurts. If someone finds your old link on Yelp and clicks it, a working redirect saves the visit. Without it, they get an error page and call your competitor instead.

So the sequence is always: redirect first, profile second, everything else third. That way no click is ever wasted, even before you've finished the cleanup.

A domain change isn't one switch. It's a redirect, a Business Profile edit, and a dozen small listings. Miss the redirect and the rest can't save you.

Give it a few weeks, then check your work

After you've made the changes, watch two things over the next month. First, your Google Business Profile insights — do people still find and click through? A short dip is normal; a long one means something's still pointing to the wrong place. Second, search your business name and your new domain to confirm Google is showing the new address.

If your rankings wobble at first, don't panic and don't undo anything. That settles as Google recrawls your pages and follows the redirects. The bigger picture — keeping your customers with you through the switch — is covered in our guide on announcing a domain change without losing customers. And if you're still weighing whether the new name was worth the move at all, our full walkthrough on changing your domain without losing search traffic lays out what to expect.

Thinking about a name change but haven't picked the new one yet? Browse names by your city or trade, or ask us about one specific domain you have in mind — it takes about a minute and there's no pressure either way.