Many times, companies outgrow their name, and this is perfectly normal. It is part of a business cycle to one day realize that your name, logo, or signature colors no longer represent what your company is all about.
This often calls for a rebrand through which you change your company’s name, logo, and even services to reflect the business. Rebranding is usually a fun and exciting process that gives room for creativity and doing the things you really want to do with your brand.
One of the biggest concerns with rebranding, however, is how it will affect SEO. If you had invested heavily on SEO practices to get your website ranking higher, you might be wondering if a change will undo the whole process.
What happens to your traffic? Will your customers be able to find you again if you change your name? These are all legitimate concerns when considering rebranding. The truth is, rebranding can in fact affect SEO for the worse.
The Cautionary Case
Logojoy, a top logo design website with over 5 million customers and 7 million dollars in funding, decided to rebrand in May of 2019 to Looka. During this rebrand, it expanded its services to business cards and websites.
Betakit later reported that the rebranding was a disaster. The company suffered negative impacts on revenue and SEO. After only five months, the organic SEO traffic to the website dropped by 80%. This led to a reduction in income which in turn led to layoffs from 40 employees to only 8.
The company had to pull back and headed back to the drawing board for a relaunch rather than a rebrand which is much more expensive.
How to Rebrand Without Hurting Your SEO
There are a few considerations you can make to ensure that you do not entirely mitigate your SEO efforts when you decide to rebrand. First, you can try to keep the same domain name. It is strongly recommended that you should keep your name and domain as you rebrand.
This, of course, is not very practical as a name change is the most significant part of the rebranding. If you cannot keep the name, try to keep the domain name for a few weeks to usher users into the transition.
If you change the domain immediately, ensure that you try to duplicate your old content as best as possible to maintain familiarity among users. You can also keep the structure as well as the fonts, headers, etc. to prevent confusion.
You should also start promoting your new name. Since organic search traffic comes from searching keywords of brands, it would be best if you started employing your new name on social media platforms, email marketing, and anywhere else that you can. Ensure that existing customers learn about the change first, so no trust is lost.
Finally, ensure that your contact information is up to date. Contact information is essential, especially for local business. Google bots scrutinize the web for contact information to determine your rankings.
Your contact information on every platform should match the information on your website. Furthermore, if you have changed your physical location, ensure to update it on all your directory listings and all off site profiles.
Rebranding With Precision
Rebranding can be a tough transition for you and you client base, but Precision Creative has the tools to make that transition as smooth as possible. If you need support during your rebrand, contact us today.