Rebranding a website is a significant undertaking that goes beyond just changing the name or look of your site. It involves careful planning and execution to maintain the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) value and organic traffic you’ve worked hard to build. The transition must be smooth to prevent losing your existing audience and rankings. This guide will explore key considerations and best practices to ensure your rebranding project enhances your online presence rather than diminishing it.
It’s definitely one of the biggest SEO challenges, as most business owners are worried about the following:
- Is our website’s traffic going to tank?
- Is our SEO ranking going to drop as well?
- Do we need to rebuild our brand’s voice from scratch totally?
- Is it all worth the time and effort?
The good news is that there are ways to efficiently and effectively manage a website rebranding or a multi-site consolidation project. These projects involve changing the domain name while preserving and leveraging previous SEO and Paid Search investments. A comprehensive audit of your SEO efforts, including traffic numbers and analytics tools like Google Analytics, is essential.
Interesting Facts and Statistics About Website Rebranding and SEO
| Fact/Statistic | Detail |
|---|---|
| Impact of Changing Domains on SEO | 40% of companies report a significant drop in SEO rankings after changing domains. |
| Importance of Redirects | 301 redirects can help retain up to 90% of link equity when moving to a new domain. |
| Local SEO and Rebranding | Updating local citations and Google Business Profiles can prevent a 20-30% drop in local search traffic. |
| Mobile-Friendly Websites | Websites that are mobile-friendly can increase user engagement by 50% and reduce bounce rates. |
| SSL Certificates and Trust | Websites with SSL certificates are favored by 70% of users and can improve search rankings. |
| Content Quality Impact | High-quality content is cited as a key factor in recovering lost SEO rankings post-rebrand. |
| Monitoring SEO Post-Rebrand | Companies using comprehensive SEO monitoring tools report a 30% faster recovery in traffic and rankings. |
| Legal Compliance | 60% of businesses face legal issues post-rebrand due to outdated or non-compliant privacy policies. |
| Accessibility Compliance | Websites meeting WCAG standards see a 20% increase in user engagement from accessibility improvements. |
| User Experience (UX) Enhancements | Improving UX can increase conversions by up to 200%, highlighting the importance of intuitive design in rebranding. |
However, a website rebrand should never be a one-man show. This needs the help of everyone in the marketing team to ensure that the rebrand survives and flourishes.
Why Change Domains?
Before we talk about how to avoid wasting organic traffic when rebranding your site, let’s first know the possible reasons website owners have for making this move.
- A more user-friendly domain name has become available: If you were stuck with a .biz or .net domain and a .com domain suddenly becomes available, you may think about grabbing it and moving to this more user-friendly domain. It’s not really a necessity, but we all know that a .com domain is easier for the audience to remember and sounds more credible.
- Your business name has changed, and you want your domain to reflect this: If your business name has changed, you should really change your domain name as well to maintain consistency. Probably, it’s because of a merger of companies or the acquisition of a new brand. Whatever the reason, a new, matching domain name is a must.
- You plan on consolidating multiple similar domains into a single platform: If you have multiple sites that deliver the same kinds of content to the same audience, you may consider consolidating everything into one platform.
- You’re just tired of your domain: This might sound casual, but some website owners feel this way.
Before diving in, you have to finalize everything and check if it’s worth the work, as you’re putting your SEO ranking at stake.
A few elements to consider:
SEO Best Practices During Migration:
In order to limit your loss and still take advantage of the previous investments you have made in your previous SEO and Paid Search efforts, carefully consider the following:
- Your old website Analytics
- Your old website Page Ranking
- Your old web pages’ Quality Score
- All Organic Keywords your old web pages are ranking for
- All Organic Keywords your competitor websites are ranking for
- Your old website backlinks
- Your old website Domain and Trust Score
Technical SEO Considerations:
Alongside preserving these elements, pay attention to technical SEO aspects such as:
- Ensuring your new site is mobile-friendly and responsive.
- Updating sitemaps and submitting them to search engines.
- Implementing SSL certificates for security.
Impact on Local SEO:
If your business has a physical presence, a change in domain can significantly impact your Local SEO. Updating your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) and other local citations with the new domain and business information is crucial. This ensures consistency across all online listings and prevents any loss in local search visibility. Remember to notify local directories and review sites of the change to maintain your local SEO rankings and customer reviews.
PLANNING:
Most websites that went for rebranding got so focused on the “during” that they forgot to pay attention to the things they should do before and after. Planning is crucial, as you might waste resources and drag the project if the right approach is not laid out properly. Planning also ensures that your goals are set and the whole journey is well navigated.
Here are some of the things you should know beforehand:
- Know the facts and statistics of your website (conversion, engagement, loyalty, attribution), understand the overall workings of SEO, and never forget the difference between Quality and Quantity.
- Decide which content is worth migrating from your old website to your new one.
- Set the placement of the migrated contents, lay out the architecture, and map the incoming traffic page by page.
- Local SEO considerations: If your site serves multiple geographies or has multiple locations, ensure that each location’s information is accurately represented in the new site. Update local citations, local business directories, and your Google Business Profile to reflect any changes. This helps maintain your local search rankings and visibility. Keeping the NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information consistent across all platforms is also essential.
- If your site serves multiple geographies in multiple languages, ensure that the search engines will understand them, too.
- Optimize your website’s speed and plan how to achieve a new website that’s blazing fast.
- Choose how you want to set up your Analytics (Views, Filters, Goals, Attribution)
- Plan how to seamlessly and permanently migrate the web traffic from your old website to the new one
- Decide when and how to test the re-mapping of traffic.
- Decide when and how to communicate clearly with search engines about the migration/consolidation of websites.
- Legal and Compliance Considerations: Ensure that all legal documents, such as privacy policies, terms of service, and disclaimers, are updated to reflect the new domain and brand. Compliance with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and other relevant laws must also be considered. This step is crucial to protecting your business from legal issues and maintaining user trust.
- Decide when to pause and update your paid campaigns.
- Choose which backlinks to keep and which ones you should drop.
- Plan when and how to contact the owners of backlinks and ask them to update the URLs and anchor texts associated with them.
- Prepare for Potential Negative SEO Impacts: While planning for the rebrand, consider potential negative SEO impacts. Develop a contingency plan to address possible drops in rankings or traffic, and prepare strategies to identify and mitigate these issues quickly.
User Experience (UX) Considerations:
While planning, focusing on user experience (UX) is crucial. Ensure the new site has:
- Intuitive navigation to improve user engagement.
- A consistent visual identity that aligns with your brand.
EXECUTING:
After you have laid out your plan and all the considerations, let’s now proceed to the actual execution:
1. Do your prep work:
Once your new name, logo, and other brand elements are settled, take care of the following:
- Domain: The process will be simpler if you decide to keep your old domain. However, a new domain name that matches it should be secured if you are changing your name as part of your rebranding. Register the new one, but keep the old one intact as well.
- Hosting: Set up the hosting details of the new site, but the URL should be blocked from the search engines while you are still building the website. This disables issues in terms of duplicated content if some or all of the pages you have are just the same as your old website.
- Backup: You may need to revisit the content from your old website, so it makes sense to back things up before you make the move.
- KPIs: As you make your switch, never lose access to the analytics you used for your old site. Record benchmarks for key KPIs, like bounce rates, traffic, conversion rates, SERP rankings, citations, backlinks, and more. These benchmarks can help you gauge the success of your rebrand and know how well you’re doing in maintaining your SEO position.
- Website Accessibility Considerations: Ensure that your new website meets accessibility standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This includes providing alt text for images, ensuring text is readable and contrasting well with the background, and making navigation accessible for all users, including those with disabilities. Website accessibility improves user experience, complies with legal requirements, and can positively impact SEO.
2. Clean Up Your New Domain
If your new domain is previously registered, ensure it does not carry some old penalties. Check for any unsettled issues and claim your new domain in Google Search Console (aka Google Webmaster Tools) and Bing Webmasters. Also, check the Manual Actions page. If there’s a manual action, make the required changes and submit a reconsideration request. After getting your request’s approval, you can safely move forward with your new domain.
3. Preserve as much content as you can.
If your old website had been up and running for years, you most likely have managed to rake in some pretty decent search authority. Transfer at least a good chunk of that content to your new website to help in retaining your visibility. Of course, you should still consider putting a fresh spin on the content, but preserve as much original content as you can to keep hold of your rankings. When moving a portion of your site, you can use Duplicator and other similar plugins to make the process faster and more efficient.
4. Set up 301 redirects.
If you miss setting up 301 redirects, you may lose the entirety of your search engine status straight away—that includes your traffic from backlinks, organic search traffic, domain authority, and everything else.
Securing 301 redirects enables you to preserve your search authority and organic traffic by creating a clear path for the crawlers to index your new website and by preserving the traffic when people click on dead-end links to your old site.
5. Map out URL structure.
Rebranding offers the opportunity to reorganize your URL structure. This is your best chance to consolidate, downsize, and declutter.
It’s best to keep the basic URL structure of your new site similar to the old one. Condense pages with redundant or similar content, delete those with outdated content and reduce your site to only the essentials. It’s an SEO myth to believe that the more pages, the better for search ranking. Actually, search engines are now prioritizing quality over quantity.
6. Officially Tell Google and Bing You’ve Moved
Remember to update your website address in Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Bing Webmasters. Add your new URL to your Google Search Console account and undergo the verification steps to make it official. Change the URL in your Google Analytics account to monitor traffic to the right site. Add an annotation on the Google Analytics page on the day of your move to easily differentiate your traffic before and after the switch.
7. Make the public announcement.
Spread the good news to as many people as possible in the shortest time possible. If you do this right, you can generate better brand awareness. Here are some ways you can spread the word:
- Email: Send an email blast to your contact list to announce the change and encourage them to visit your new site.
- Social Media: Post an announcement on your social media page and make this announcement your pinned post. You can even maximize paid posts to grow your reach.
- PPC Campaigns: Run Paid Ads (PPC campaigns) under the old and new names. People might keep searching for your old name, so a PPC ad can help ensure that your new website is the first thing they find.
- Press Release: You can use a PR distribution platform to cast the widest reach. It could even be picked up by other websites that further expand your brand awareness to a new audience.
Remember to update all of your social media profiles with your new logo, name, URL, and messaging.
TESTING:
The work does not stop at the execution part. You should keep on monitoring your rebranding progress by keeping track of your new website for broken internal or external links, slow pages, warnings and issues, crawling errors, and more. Keep the following in mind:
1. Use Google Analytics
This is to monitor your rankings, leads, and traffic effectively. Your performance is expected to dip after the rebrand, but if you have taken care of the prep work, you should be able to see progress in just a few weeks’ time. If not, adapt and improve your strategy till you find the right formula.
In Google Analytics, monitor the following:
- Which content has performed well? And which content has flopped?
- Which site pages are getting the most traffic? And which ones need more attention?
- Which pages are getting the most conversions?
- Which pages bear the highest bounce rate?
- Are your visitors taking the action and the path you desire them to take?
- Are there patterns in terms of user behavior?
2. Track 404s and crawl errors
You should also ensure that no issues are preventing the crawlers and users from accessing your site. If there are broken links (404s), correct them immediately. It’s essential to regularly check Google Search Console for any errors reported by the search engine while crawling your new website. This tool provides detailed insights into crawl errors, including pages that Google couldn’t access, server errors, and issues with URLs. Additionally, be vigilant about errors on any previously indexed pages that are now detected as not found (404 errors). These could result from changes in the URL structure, deleted content, or other issues during the site migration. Address these errors promptly by setting up proper 301 redirects or updating internal links, ensuring that users and search engines can easily navigate your site. This proactive approach will help maintain your site’s SEO health and prevent any loss in traffic due to inaccessible pages.
3. Follow your mentions
Check out how your audience is responding to your new name and identity. Following your mentions enables you to engage your audience and answer their questions about your major rebrand and other details.
Tracking your progress lets you know what to improve and retain in your campaign. As long as you solve the issues, better results are sure to come.
Handling Negative SEO Impacts:
Despite careful planning and execution, there may still be unforeseen negative SEO impacts following a rebrand. Here are steps to mitigate these issues:
- Regularly Monitor SEO Metrics: Keep a close eye on your SEO metrics, including organic traffic, keyword rankings, and backlink quality. Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz for comprehensive monitoring.
- Identify and Address Technical Issues: Quickly resolve any technical issues such as broken links, crawl errors, or missing meta tags. These can significantly impact your SEO performance.
- Content Quality and Relevance: Ensure that all migrated content is up-to-date, relevant, and high-quality. Outdated or irrelevant content can harm your site’s authority and rankings.
- Strengthen Link Building Efforts: Focus on building high-quality backlinks to the new domain. This can help regain lost link equity and improve your site’s authority.
- Engage in PR and Outreach: Use PR and outreach strategies to announce your rebrand and attract attention from reputable sites and influencers. This can generate valuable backlinks and mentions.
- Adjust Your SEO Strategy: If you notice significant drops in traffic or rankings, reassess and adjust your SEO strategy. This might include focusing on different keywords, optimizing new content, or increasing social media engagement.
In conclusion, rebranding is not just about building and deploying a new website. Remember to maximize the time, effort, and money you invested in your previous website. Leverage the organic traffic you have established and turn your rebranding into an opportunity to make things even better.