How To Make Your Website’s Rebranding SEO Friendly?

Humans are creatures of habits. We go to the same places as the years’ pass, use the same restaurants, eat at the same fast foods over and over again. Just changing your business location can break those habits for your long-time customers, and this is especially true when it comes to rebranding your website.

Going for a different corporate image is a wayward and cumbersome process, and you may end up destroying many nuances that made your brand “the brand”. One of those is your SEO. The message is simple – you spent years of efforts developing your search ranking, but now, your company and products have new names or your content has moved to a new website. Thus, your SEO strategy will need some reworking if you don’t want to experience a drop in rankings.

A different company name

One of the more radical rebranding moves. The problems here are far more complex than just reworking your SEO. You’ll need to build a bridge for customers, one that enables continuity between two almost unrelated businesses, if you don’t wish your consumers to drown in a river and then be saved by your competition. This will require you to use cunning marketing tactics on both the digital and the non-digital channels. By the way, convincing search engines that this bridge of “continuity” exists is even harder than convincing your customers.

First things first, you’ll need to change your domain name. This requires the right URL redirection in order not to lose all previous SEO efforts. Fail at this step and not only will your traffic be lower, but you’ll also annoy customers with 404s and destroy any authority your page got from backlinks. Not to mention the chaos that will happen with internal links.

Crawl your existing website and get a complete list of existing pages. Then map all old URLs to the new ones and use 301 for redirection of users and authority to the new website. By doing this, you’ll be able to maintain the previous rankings.

By now you’ll need to make your new website relevant for search queries including your old brand name, in order for people who try to Google your business don’t get lost. Create a new page in the new domain that will be dedicated to the old brand, and also explain on this page the changes you’ve made and new details about your company that came with the changes. Then make sure that this page links to the new homepage.

Redesigning your website

Changing the business and domain name is only the first step – the next one is the complete reinvention of your website. You’ll need to redesign your accordingly. And don’t do this just for the sake of it. It’s a procedure that requires a lot of time and effort, so unless there are some serious gains involved, don’t do it, or outsource such work to a professional web agency.

Get familiar with what designs are hot nowadays, and implement them in your redesigning.  And don’t forget that your mobile site might also require redesigning, esspecialy now when Google is using mobile first indexing. Crucial SEO factors for mobile sites are mobile-friendliness and the speed of your mobile site. As such, make sure your new mobile site is created in a way that enables the fastest performance and fits any mobile device out there. In other words, it needs to be easy to read and simple to access. Think about how much traffic your mobile site gets. If the big chunk of your audience goes there first, you might need to rebrand it first.

Promoting your Rebranding

Lastly, you’ll need to inform your audience about the rebrand that happened. By doing so, you might even end up with bigger visibility and traffic than you had before. For this, use all possible channels:

• Press release – Go for a compelling release that will include your new brand’s story and why you had to rebrand. Remember to include your old brand name and the new address.
• Email announcement – Here, tell everyone you can including your vendors, suppliers, acquittances, and customers.
• PPC – since it probably did a good job before. Buy a new PPC ad for your old company’s name and use the copy to talk about the rebranding.
• Social media – Besides advertising about your rebranding, remember to update social media pages also. Facebook allows only one URL or page name change. LinkedIn is much easier, but be careful about the company since it could be taken by someone else. In such case, change the name on a small scale. For example, you may add a tagline. For an URL change, you’ll have to contact LinkedIn directly.

In summary, rebranding your business may bring you benefits instead of being your downfall. Optimize the new website correctly for it to be SEO friendly. If people can’t search for you online, they definitely won’t do so in real life. Work and optimize as much as you can and your ranking won’t fall.