What Happens To Your SEO When You Rebrand?

So you decided to rebrand your company. With that comes a new logo, visual identity, new name, and ultimately domain name for your website. Rebranding is often a big undertaking with many things to consider, but often what gets left forgotten is the SEO work you have been building for the past few years. People focus on all the elements of the brand, but when it comes to online, you potentially leave your business open to being vanished from Google if not managed correctly.

Is it possible I lose all my hard earned SEO gains when rebranding?

The short answer is yes, a big threat. If you change the content on your website as well as your domain name and don’t carefully manage the switch to your new brand, you leave yourself vulnerable to a significant SEO hit in the short and even long-term. Ultimately this leads to less visibility, web traffic and revenue. You will always expect some hiccups when completely changing domain name and brand name due to the authority that domain name would have gathered over the years from backlinks, brand efforts and SEO work on that CMS. However, there is a series of tasks that you should do to mitigate that risk.

What should you do to ensure you bounce back quickly in search? Annotate in Google Analytics

Before making any switch, you should annotate in Google Analytics the date you are making the move. This will allow you to accurately measure the impact the switch to the new brand is having to your traffic and revenue online. In addition to this, you should go into your admin panel inside Google Analytics and change the domain name and properties that your account is associated with so that analytics and your website are sending and receiving the correct signals.

Manage 301 redirects

This one is common sense. Don’t throw away your old domain name, but instead redirect the URL to your new domain name. Your old domain name is what’s currently indexed on Google, and is also what other websites on the internet will link too. Redirecting all traffic to your new domain is a must.

Reindex Search Console

Set-up search console for your new domain name and index and crawl the website as soon as possible. This will allow you to monitor any bugs that arise while also letting you view the bounce back of your visibility in search.

Update all structured data types

It’s likely that your website has structured data added to the HTML. In some cases the type of schema will be pointing to your old domain name, update all of this so it is looking at your new brand. If your website doesn’t have any structured data on it, look at adding organisation, and local business schema to your site.

Change all social profiles over

When rebranding, you need as many signals as possible pointing towards your new domain. Updating all socials, google my business properties and anything else that you have control over, will go a long way in helping mitigate any viability losses.

Work on getting backlinks to your new domain

Once your website has launched, work hard on getting as much PR as possible mentioning the new brand and linking to the new domain. This will facilitate in sending more signals to the new brand name.