How to Rebrand Your Business Without Losing SEO?

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One of the most crucial decisions for any business is REBRANDING. You might have to rebrand your company because of an acquisition, merger, or simply because you want to give your business a new look and feel.
There are three main types of business rebrands.
A) Full rebrand
In full rebrand, You will change all aspects of the brand. It will entail creating a new name, logo, and tone of voice for the company. It will be like building a new identity for your business.
B) Visual rebrand
If you are changing the logo, color palette, and visual identity for your business, it will be a visual rebrand.
C) Brand refresh
Keeping the fundamental elements of a business the same and just imparting a fresh face to your business are included in the brand refresh.
Regardless of the reason, rebranding poses some threat to your website’s organic search performance.
In stark contrast to what people believe, rebranding does not imply abandonment of your brand’s legacy and shutting it down. It will enhance the existing brand positioning and reputation.
Another advantage of rebranding is that it will help you expand the market you are catering to. It will open up new opportunities to attract new customers with the revamped name, logo, and product offerings.
You do not need to introduce a massive change that would make your brand unfamiliar to your customers.
You can modify it slightly to make it appealing enough for your existing customers and a new audience.
You might have to rebrand if you want to stay abreast with the changing trends and technological advancements.
While rebranding, you should consider content, design, website layout, seamless migration, and of course, marketing.
Besides all this, there is something else you must take care of, and that is your Search Engine Optimization services. It is easier to convince your audience about the rebranding, but it takes quite some time to establish your authority on search engines as a rebranded company.
Unless you take care of SEO during the rebranding efforts, you will have to bear the brunt of lost rankings and traffic. It will also hamper the rankings of non-branded queries that are targeted through the pages under question.
With that said, let’s discuss how you can rebrand your business without losing the SEO efforts you have made for the previous brand.

1. Take Care of Some Prerequisites

At the outset, you have to prepare yourself for the rebranding and retaining your SEO efforts. Your customers must be able to reach you even with the new name and website.

• First things first, go to Google Search Console and add your new website. It is advisable to use the same Google account. Subsequently, you will have to verify it.
  Next, navigate to Google’s ‘Change of Address’ feature so that you can redirect the traffic.
• Secondly, we have Google Analytics. You must have administrator access to your new as well as old site in Google Analytics. Without permission, you will not be able to edit any information or manage the rebranding.
• Keep the Host and Registrar Access intact for the new and old websites. If you are not changing your domain name, it would not be much of a problem.
  However, if you are getting a new domain name, retain the old domain name’s registration as long as possible. Do not kill your old website.
• If needed, use robots.txt to hide the new website for some time. It will help you avoid any plagiarism issues with the old website.
  
• Last but not least, you must have a record of all the SEO metrics for the old website, like several backlinks, keyword ranking, traffic, citations, and mentions. These KPIs will serve as a benchmark and help you monitor any improvement noticed in the new website.

2. Keep the Domain Name Unchanged

Imagine revamping the branding of your company after you have established yourself in the marketplace.
Doesn’t it sound scary? Well, as scary as it sounds, it is equally challenging.
If you want to avoid complex rebranding processes, it is good to have the original domain name. If not, don’t worry.
There are quite a few workarounds that you can implement if your domain name needs to be changed. We shall discuss them in detail in the subsequent sections.

3. Create Signals Well in Advance

Before migrating your website to the new domain, you must generate signals well in advance.
You can do this primarily in two ways:

• Internally with the help of changes in the content and metadata.
• Externally by introducing press releases and traditional marketing.
  

It is advisable to have old branding elements in the new SEO title, meta description, and slug.

4. Create a Page That Establishes a Link Between the Old & New Brand

If it is unavoidable to change the brand name, you must let the search engines know about the rebranding.
Create a page in the new domain that is dedicated to your old brand. You must inform the search engines and visitors about the changes, updates, and new features.
Link this page to your new homepage. You can even have a sticky banner at the top that says something like, “Our brand ABC has been rebranded as PQR. We would love to continue serving you.”
Of course, this does not directly affect SEO, but it will leave a profound influence on your brand reputation.
Two Indian Telecom brands Vodafone and Idea, merged in the year 2019 and rebranded themselves as Vi. They had several press releases and aggressive promotions to inform the people about the rebranding and merger.

5. Leave the Existing Content as It Is

Most of the business looking forward to rebranding themselves will revamp their entire website design.
However, it is prudent to preserve your original content as far as possible. Try to repurpose the existing content if you think you will have to publish new content for the website.
Revamping the existing resources will help you maintain your thought leadership and SEO rankings.
Note that keeping the font faces and headers unchanged will help to keep your SEO intact while rebranding.

6. Keep Your Old Site Functional till Your New Site Gets Attention

Many brands who have rebranded themselves keep their old site live for a couple of months after launching their new website. It is important because search engines will take quite some time to identify the new IP address.
As soon as the new site is introduced, deleting the old site will put in vain all the effort you have done to boost your SEO rankings.
We strongly recommend keeping your old site live on a temporary web address not accessed by an SEO crawler.

7. Add Proper Redirects

Redirect all the pages from your old site to the new one with the help of 301 redirections. It will redirect the visitors to the new URL when they request or land on the old URL. As a result, you will maintain your website’s SEO rankings and Domain Authority (DA).
Do not forget to redirect any page from your old website to the new website’s respective page. For example: If the old website is www.abc.com/about-us, 301 redirect the page to www.pqr.com/about-us.
Just remember that when you redirect the pages with 301 redirections, it will take some time for the search engines to find the 301, identify it, and restore the rankings and trust established by the previous URL.
If you have backlinks on your website, do not forget to redirect them to the new pages.

8. Get the Anchor Text Updated on the Third-Party Websites

It is quite likely that the anchor text on third-party websites consists of branded keywords with your previous company name. You will have to get all these keywords updated to match the rebranding.
If you fail to do so, it will hamper your SEO efforts. You will need to go to a powerful SEO tool like Ahrefs to retrieve a list of backlinks.
Reach out to them to get the links and old keywords changed. It will take time and effort, but it is worth the hard work.

9. Keep the URL Structure Intact

Your customers will appreciate familiarity. Therefore, you must preserve the URL structure of your previous website. The right approach for this is mapping out the existing website with the help of a crawler.
Subsequently, map all the previous URLs to the new links. The 301 redirects will take care of creating the authority of your new website.
After you are done redesigning the website, compare the new site’s structure with the old one by getting it crawled.

10. Include Structured Markup to All Forms of Content on Your Website

Structured markup or schema markup is one of the most effective ways to edge over your competitors and make your SEO strategy more powerful. It works as a rich snippet and lets the search engines understand your data’s meaning and context.
If you do not use it, search engines will figure out what you wish to convey through the data, but not why you have used it.
Structured data contributes to better SEO and improves the click-through rate by offering detailed information to the readers.

11. Advertise Your New Brand

Spreading the word is of the utmost importance when you rebrand your business. You must revise all the social media links and directory listings.
Make sure you let all your existing customers know beforehand that you are rebranding yourself. Send out email newsletters to update them about the changes they can expect.

12. Implement a Link-building Strategy

To retain the link juice on your website and the SEO rankings, you must have a link building strategy. You must get informative posts published on guest blogging platforms.
Aim for websites with high DA to get quicker SEO results.
For example: If you are in the graphic design industry, you can get your article published on Designmodo with a DA of 81.
Include a do-follow link to your new website to boost your SEO rankings. Some companies who rebrand themselves aim to target more than ten guest blogging platforms per month.
Such aggressive planning will help you build authority and restore your SEO rankings without taking too much time.

Relevant : Redesign Your Website & Retain the Search Engine Rankings

13. Keep Track of Your Changes

You must keep an eye on the changes you have made to get traffic and maintain the SEO ranking. It will allow you to identify any gaps and optimize the website. You should do this for around 12 to 15 weeks.

14. Address the Searches for the Previous Brand

Let me explain this with an example:
If Vodafone and Idea are launching a new brand, “Vi, “people will still search for the previous entities.
You must make sure that you address these search queries too. You can do this with the help of support sections, blogs, and FAQ pages.

Here is another example:

15. Always Have a Full Backup

Whenever you think of rebranding, you must have a backup not to lose any information accidentally.
Plan properly with backup strategies and contingency management. You must be prepared with a recovery plan if things get out of hand and do not go as per your plan.

16. Have a Mobile Responsive and Fast-Loading New Website

According to the latest SEO updates by Google, you ought to have a mobile responsive and fast-loading website. It must render well across all devices, irrespective of the screen sizes.
Use tools like GTmetrix to monitor your website’s speed and make necessary changes as per the results.

Wrapping Up

Rebranding your company name is a huge responsibility to undertake. Following these tips will make things less hassle-free and help you maintain the SEO rankings even after the rebranding.
Get a free consultation from our SEO specialist before proceeding with the rebranding.