Navigating a $14 Million Domain Migration Featuring Andrew Prince

Garrett: Welcome back to The Next Chapter of Search, hosted by SEO Week, and iPullRank, I am so excited. We are coming up on it. If you haven’t already gotten your tickets, I’m talking the end of April, the 28th to May 1st, four days of just ridiculously talented, smart people, 35+ across AI, SEO, data, content, you name it. And speaking of really smart and cool people, I’m joined today by Andrew Prince. Andrew is the senior SEO manager at Rocket. Thanks for joining me today, Andrew. How you doing, man?

Andrew: Hey, thanks for having me, Garrett. It’s great. It’s a sunny day here today in Michigan in March, so can’t complain.

Garrett: Dude, your role is wild. I know always with in-house, there’s like things you can say, things you can’t say. Recently in the news when this was recorded, you guys bought Redfin, but just generally speaking, you’re at this massive enterprise company. You’ve been in SEO for a long time now. What is your perspective? The last 24 months have been wild. What’s your perspective on the current state of search?

Andrew: Yeah, a lot going on. I could take this any number of directions, but what I’d say, especially as an in-house SEO is you only need to know what you’re working on, the sites you’re on, the industries you’re in. Like, I don’t necessarily need to know local SEO anymore. I love it and I like staying up on it, but as an SEO, so many times it can be overwhelming when there’s so many things going on of where do I focus my time and energy and where do I learn. Especially as an in-house SEO, for me, it’s the mortgage side, it’s technical at scale, it’s some of the content at scale.

As far as the current state of search, I think the hot topic is AI search and what does that look like. In SparkToro’s recent data study, as far as 330X plus more searches on Google than ChatGPT, after I saw that, I put my family group chat, “Hey, who’s used AI and who’s used ChatGPT?” And only one person out of the six people in the group chat have. So, I think sometimes in our space, it’s such a tech siloed space where we’re like, “The world is ending,” but is the average consumer actually adopting it and changing? So, my recommendation, the current state of SEO is keep your pulse on things, but focus on what’s actually going to matter to your company. And the adoption of AI search is still going to take a little bit longer time than what I think we are expecting. I know that probably pains you because you’re one of the people at the forefront of AI. That’s the great thing about SEO is we never have to agree on everything.

Garrett: I think it’s a really great point. It is so easy. And it’s funny, one of my obsessions with psychology of search is we get caught up in these bubbles, to your point, of thinking everything’s a certain point, data tells you otherwise. You have to remember to talk to real people who are your actual audience or who are the real world. And speaking to the kind of niche or the focus, you guys had a massive migration. Can you kind of give a preview? I’m really excited to hear what you’re going to talk about in SEO Week. Why should people come check you out?

Andrew: Yeah, I’m pumped. So, what I’ll be talking about is Rocket.com was acquired for $14 million by Rocket, one of the top five public domain acquisitions all time. So, it was crazy. A couple of years ago, our SEO team said, “We have Rocket Mortgage, Rocket Homes, Rocket Loans, Rocket Solar, right?” We had so many Rocket brands. We just dreamed of, “What if we combined all of them into one site? What would that look like?” But that stayed as a dream until we brought in a new CMO, Jonathan Mildenhall, who previously was at Airbnb and Coca-Cola. And he said, “We need to unite under one brand and a core creative idea of own the dream.” We did the Super Bowl ad. But with the Super Bowl, they said, “Let’s buy this Rocket.com site and have it ready to go in time by Super Bowl,” which is only a few months after the fact. And you know, as an SEO, when you’re dealing with a multi-million page website, what in the world do you prioritize? How do you go to executives and say, “Maybe let’s slow our roll? What’s feasible on this timeline? What do we set aside for the future?”

So, I’m going to be talking through some of those decisions, how we approached it, how we mitigated as much risk as possible. And then the big thing in 2025 with entities and branding and things of that nature, Rocket.com was an aerospace engineering website. So how did we actually think about separating the old entity of what the site was with what our goal of what Rocket is?

Garrett: It is so fascinating. It’s like to your point, it’s like one of the most epic case studies for a website migration, just like, in the history of the internet. It is because there’s so many, but like we can’t even come to terms with the moving parts, not only of the sheer scale of the actual website, but the complexity of working at such a large business with so many different lines of business.

Andrew: It’s very exciting.

Garrett: So specifically, what is one like tactical thing that someone who’s watching this right now can do, whether they’re preparing for a website migration or something more general?

Andrew: Yeah, I would say have as detailed of a plan as you can. So shockingly, we were within one week of what our initial plan was several months out. And it wasn’t just, oh, when this happens, when that happens, we had, we’re going to crawl our dev site these three days, we are going to put a splash page up and it needs to have this amount of lead time. It was so detailed in what we did that when you go to present that type of plan to an executive, it’s hard to poke holes and argue with when it was so well thought out. You also can’t just have one plan. So, you have a recommendation as to what to do. But in SEO, of course, things always change. So having some backups, but being really, really, really detailed in the initial one so that you have a good idea as to what marks need to be hit and when things need to escalate. So if something doesn’t hit a deadline, when do we go to executives and say, “Here’s the risks involved with it?” So very, very, very detailed migration plans. You can’t think through it enough.

Garrett: Dude, I mean, it’s yeah, you can’t overestimate the amount of planning and even still. So that’s wild that you came within one week. That is such a I can’t wait to see this, this presentation. So beyond just Rocket, what’s next from your perspective in terms of the world of search? You’ve been paying attention, you know, whether you think that, you know, people are going to use AI or it’s just a lot of hype and it’ll just kind of go away and we’ll all be like, you know, laughing about it years from now. Where do you think we’re going in terms of the industry and search in general?

Andrew: Yeah, I love how the SEO Week lineup as it currently stands has myself and then Nick Eubanks of SEMrush after me talking about acquisitions, because as you said at the beginning, we’ve come to an agreement at Rocket to purchase Redfin that hasn’t necessarily closed yet. There’s still a lot of details to be worked out. But when you think through the big players in home search and how much time it would take Rocket to be able to become one of those, or you can just acquire all of that home search top of funnel, like that’s a decision at a company of this size that can be made. SEMrush did something very similarly.

SEO is going big time the way of brands and big brands. And you think of LLMs and getting brand mentions on other sites. I think we’ll see much more acquisitions and mergers. What does that mean for SEO teams? Do you merge things? Is it separate? Who owns what? What does that look like? Who knows? I’m going to throw one interesting thought-provoking thing at you, Garrett. You know how Google has always kind of failed on the social side, like Google Plus?

Garrett: What? Google, they shut down Google Plus? When did that happen? (laughter)

Andrew: Yes. But TikTok, right? Of, oh, is it going to be disbanded? What does that look like? What people haven’t necessarily thought of is if TikTok were to sell off in the US, imagine if Google bought them. Imagine if Google all of a sudden ran TikTok and what they would do from a user data perspective. So sometimes it’s the devil you don’t know side. And that’s an acquisition I’m sure Google could make, and it would certainly be interesting. So, acquisitions, bigger players, bigger brands, scaling, I think is more of the direction we’re going to see as winners in search long term.

Garrett: I’m with you on that. I don’t know how I feel. One thing I was talking about the other day is the idea of where we’ll land with the DOJ antitrust trial. Because I’m thinking about that in the sense of TikTok and there’s already people have such an issue with the preferential treatment that Google gives to YouTube. Do you think Google at this point is too big to fail? Or do you think that we might see an intervention and divestiture of Chrome? Or you have no idea? What’s your instinct?

Andrew: I don’t think it matters, honestly.

Garrett: Explain.

Andrew: Truly, I think Google has enough data that sure, you break this up and we’ll approach things from a different viewpoint. The level of data that they have is completely unmatched. If you take away Chrome, if you take away in the mortgage space, if you search for a while mortgage calculator, mortgage rates, they had their own thing. You see it with flights and hotels and what have you. You take that away and Google can start ranking their own site number one, they can still do various things. They run ads in certain ways.

Google’s always going to win in this space. The fact as a community, we keep thinking AI tools are going to take over and Google’s market share is still as high as it is. Maybe they fail long term. The crazy thing is Google’s been around fewer than 30 years. What do I know? I think Google’s too big to fail. You should hedge your bets slightly, spend some time, keep your pulse on things. Google’s where the priority is now and at least in the short-term future.

Garrett: This conversation gets me so excited. I can’t wait to talk to you in person. For folks, if you’ve never heard Andrew speak or you just really work in enterprise, you want to learn more about some of these best practices, he knows that he’s in the weeds. Make sure you get your tickets for the end of April, the 28th to the 1^st, in New York City. We have single day tickets. Andrew is on day four on Thursday, which is The Future, which is a really exciting day. I think both Lily Ray and Rand Fishkin are on that day. You mentioned that Eubanks is right after you. It’s impossible, all these days are pretty amazing.

Andrew: And I’ll make the pitch too. I’ll be there all four days. So find me. I promise to wear different colored glasses every single day. So you’ll have to follow on LinkedIn or Twitter to see what color to hunt me down and find me. But certainly say hello. I am so excited to be there. New York City is a great city. The venue is awesome. Great speaker lineup. So excited.

Garrett: There you go. SEO Week, SEOweek.org. Check us out. Thanks for joining me, Andrew. This has been great.

Andrew: Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me, Garrett.

Garrett: I’m Garrett, and we’ll see you in New York in April. Sound good? Okay. Peace out.