If done carefully, rebranding allows you to leverage your previous branding experience with up-to-date SEO knowledge. It is SEO.
It becomes a solid new business position with a prominent web presence.
Unless it’s a simple logo redesign, rebranding involves changes to the brand name, domain, content, positioning, and everything else.
Without a strategic rebranding plan, you can even lose all the SEO value your brand has gained.
So, how do you plan your rebranding strategy while maintaining SEO value, or in simple terms, how do we change our brand name without losing SEO?
1. Use 301 Redirect to redirect to the new brand
Rebranding has many benefits, but you don’t want to lose your SEO value.
Therefore, a 301 redirect can help you retain significant SEO value. These redirects move your links from the old website pages to the new rebranded pages.
You should analyze all the pages that bring significant SEO value to your website. Create a list of these pages on their respective web pages on the new site.
The next step is to redirect all these pages via 301 redirects. You need the redirect code in the htaccess file to set this redirect. Add an old site.
Three hundred one redirects transfer your hard-earned site authority to your new (rebranded) site.
Additionally, crawlers follow this path to find and index your new site faster.
When you build the new site, make sure you use redirects.
2. Get value from your old content
As an ideal practice, you may want to rebrand your site’s content. You might introduce a new brand ideology and revise your mission and vision statements.
But what if this new content can’t maintain the SEO authority you’ve already earned?
So, while doing content makeup, you shouldn’t lose sight of its original SEO value.
Crawlers index and use your content for relevant searches. And that builds credibility about your content over tiptop-performing. It would help if you analyzed the top-performing content pages and their keyword combinations.
You must use or duplicate part of this content on your new site. This approach will help you transfer tplaceower of your content to your new place, and you can keep your ranking in the SERPs intact.
3. Try to maintain consistency between the new and old site structure
The second is about changing the brand name without losing SEO and maintaining consistency between the old and new design.
An essential part of rebranding is redesigning your site, which may be about building a completely new site structure from scratch.
As long as it speaks to your brand value, you can bet on it.
But, a completely new site structure may cause negative unfamiliarity for your loyal customers. It can even increase your bounce rate.
Additionally, there can be significant contrasts between the old and new site structures. This weakens the effectiveness of 301 redirects and makes them irrelevant.
Therefore, a distinctive site structure may cost your SEO value and rankings.
Here are some tips:
- Follow an ideal URL structure as per SEO best practices. (e.g., yoursite.com/web-service)
- Follow consistency in site structure to make this transition easy for regular visitors.
- Create pages similar to the new site against top-performing pages on the old site. This makes redirection relevant and valuable.
4. Do not rush to close the old site
Let’s consider that you rebrand and launch your rebranded site, and you also mention redirecting 301s from your old site to your new location.
But, before the web servers can understand the redirects to the new IP address, you delete the old site.
You have just crossed the Rubicon and need to start your SEO from the ground up.
Therefore, you should let the old site hold down the fort until the web servers understand the redirects.
Ideally, web servers need 72 hours to understand that the old domain is pointing to the new IP address.
However, the best way is to monitor the analytics of the new website. You can delete the old site once you see traffic being redirected to the new site.
To take all the chances, you should keep the old sites on the old IP for more extended. You can postpone the shutdown schedule of the senior site by at least two weeks.
This timeline deals with any potential delays in the process.
5. Plan social media profiles for the new brand
Your social media presence plays a role in your brand presence and online visibility, and you should consider getting your brand-centric usernames across various social media platforms.
But you may not get the exact username combination because most names are already obtained.
Therefore, it is better to acquire usernames before actually launching the brand.
You may also need to negotiate and convince a user who has already acquired the name, or you may have to try the closest combinations.
Additionally, Facebook allows you to change your brand name only once, along with your reserved URL. So, if you have a lot of followers on Facebook for your previous brand, you can keep them.
LinkedIn is more generous, allowing you to change your brand name easily. You can make an easy change without losing your followers and social presence.
Alternatively, Twitter and Facebook may require you to set up a new business account from scratch.
Having a prominent social presence adds value to your SEO.
6. Make a backup copy of your old site
While we all have high hopes for rebranding decisions, we must prepare for uncertainties.
What if the main pages of your new site fail to rank in the SERPs? Or what if the new content can’t guarantee the rankings? Or worse, your decision to rebrand looks terrible, and you lose customers.
Either way, you must keep your backup ready to hold the fort. So, before you shut down your old site, make a backup copy of the URLs and content of this site.
This exercise brings many opportunities, such as:
- If the new content isn’t performing well, you can A/B test your old content across multiple pages.
- You may want to return to a previous brand or consider essential things.
- You may want to run both sites as separate brands from the same entity.
- For SEO knowledge, you can refer to old data.
7. Keep track of your traffic numbers and keyword performance
Regardless of the purpose of rebranding, your goal may be to outperform your old site. But what are your comparison parameters, or how do you measure your success?
Before you close the old site, you should record its analytics and KPIs.
Some of the critical KPIs are:
Traffic metrics: You should record Google Analytics data showing the old site’s traffic. This should include your organic, referral, and direct traffic. You can compare these traffic metrics with the traffic of your new location. It also helps you in optimizing and setting appropriate traffic goals.
Performance Keywords: Note down high-performing keywords and their ranking in SERPs. Check the average traffic of these keywords to your site. See the performance of these keywords on your new location. Check if there is a drop in rankings for these keywords. Youay want to optimize for these keywords.
if you see a decline in rankings
Backlinks: Record the number of backlinks and referring domains. You may have redirected most of these backlinks to your new site. The next step is to check how many new backlinks you have acquired for your new location.
8. Manage your incoming links very carefully
There may be a list of sites that link to your site. These inbound links add credibility to your area; you don’t want to lose them.
Therefore, all the pages on your old site that receive quality backlinks have the most SEO value for you, and you should redirect these pages to the corresponding pages on your rebranded site.
What if a page is no longer relevant, but you want to backlink it?
In this case, you can also communicate with the referring domain web admins to give backlinks to your new site. Of course, you must have a relevant resource to maintain them.
In addition, you should analyze whether some webmasters are removing their backlinks due to rebranding. You should monitor these referring domains and convince them of valuable new resources.
Also, try to get valid inbound links for your new site. Ensure you follow the correct internal linking structure to share link juice on essential pages.
9. Add sitemap and Robots.txt file
As you plan to launch your new site, you need crawlers to index it quickly. Therefore, you need to create an XML sitemap for your site.
A sitemap explains to crawlers the navigation path they should follow for seamless indexing. This increases the crawl ability of your site, which is appreciated by search engine bots.
A developer doesn’t have to put much effort into creating an XML sitemap; you can submit it through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Owners of sites built with the WordPress content management system prefer using the Yoast plugin to generate or update an XML sitemap.
Next, you should ask your developer to handle the Robots.txt file. This affects the indexing of your site the most, and you don’t want to ignore it unless you’re betting on a good SERP ranking.
If you see indexing or crawling issues, check the Robots.txt file. Just open your Google Search Console and go to the Crawl tab. Here you can narrow your file using the “robots.txt Tester” option.
You can also use sites like Sitechecker to check your robots.txt.
10. Make the new site understandable with structured markup
When you rename your site, you are most likely expecting an increase in SEO value. But are you ready to take it further and make your content understandable for Google?
You can let Google better understand the purpose or context of your site’s content through structured markup.
For example, you can add a table structure to mention the specifications of a product. Now, your design markup makes it understandable to Google bots.
They can understand this product’s dimensions, color, type, etc. Therefore, they will rank your page for relevant searches. Consequently, you should add structured markup to several forms of content on your site.
According to structured markup categories on your site, Google draws rich snippets, increasing the visibility of your listings in the SERPs. Therefore, it will significantly increase the click-through rate of your listing.
11. Plan your brand promotion strategy
As you launch your site, you must plan how to get the word out.
Some businesses plan a rebranding strategy to see their popularity increase.
They create a great advertising strategy to generate a lot of buzz about their new brand, which translates into a significant increase in brand reach, traffic, and new leads.
Additionally, this increased traffic adds to the SEO value of your new brand. Prudent marketers view their branding strategy as an opportunity rather than a liability. You need to get the word out on social media, the web, existing customers, etc.
For example, in 2019, Dunkin Donuts changed its name to Dunkin.
It would help if you announced the name change on all your social media profiles with an attractive image.
For example, Please look at this Pantene ad on their Twitter profile.
Here are some essential branding activities that will help you do just that:
- Email Announcements: Plan and schedule emails about your rebranding news and send them to your subscriber list. Send these emails to current customers, affiliates, company contacts, etc.
- Media/Press Release: Get news on the web by connecting to popular media channels. List the most relevant media channels that appeal to your target audience.
- Social media promotion: Stimulate curiosity about the new brand through your social media channels. Connect with your influencers and followers to spark that curiosity.
- Guest Posts: Plan creative blog posts around your rebranding experience and get them featured on popular blog sites. Create and post your offer on areas that attract relevant audiences to your business.
12. Audit and monitor your new brand site
The last thing about changing the brand name without losing SEO is the 3-week monitoring of the new site.
When managing a rebranding operation, it’s easy to miss something. You may have hundreds of redirects, new site structures, technical SEO, etc. Therefore, you should check and re-inspect your new site for any inconsistencies.
Before rebranding, look at your old site’s analytics, traffic, rankings, backlinks, etc., and measure these metrics against your new site’s post-launch KPIs.
It may take some time for the transfer of SEO value to be reflected, so monitor your new site regularly for up to three weeks.
Check the 301 redirects before deleting the old site if you see any irregularities. These irregularities can include a drop in rankings, traffic, a decrease in number, From backlinks, etc.
Regularly measuring site audits and SEO audit reports may seem like overkill, but it’s worth your effort.