How To Rebrand Your Business Without Affecting SEO
Rebranding is an excellent way to create a new and attractive business persona for your target consumers. Unfortunately, rebranding often means creating a brand new website, which can cause dips in your search engine ranking. That can damage brand awareness and be discouraging when you’ve worked so hard to obtain those rankings in the first place. Luckily, there are ways to help you rebrand without affecting your SEO.
What Does It Mean to Rebrand Your Business?
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Rebranding is the act of changing fundamental touchstones of your company—like the name, logo, voice, symbol, and other identifying information—intending to develop a new brand perception in the eyes of its consumers, investors, and the public. Rebranding can occur for several reasons, including:
- Needing or wanting change: Sometimes businesses just want to do something new. A company might just want to revitalize its image to excite its client base.
- Expanding business scope: If a business is attempting to sell new products and services, it might rebrand to better fit its new company model. That way, customers won’t just associate the business with its old products and services, but think of it as something entirely different.
- Improving public image: A business might want to change its public perception if it’s gotten a poor reputation. The rebranding washes the old company away and allows it to become something new.
- Differentiating yourself in the marketplace: If a company looks or feels too much like its competitors, it might want to change its image to stand out in the market. Rebranding can help with this and make the brand more noticeable to customers.
Tips for Rebranding Without Losing Your Search Engine Ranking
Here is a list of steps to help you rebrand without affecting your SEO strategy:
1. Conduct Important Pre-Work
Before starting your rebranding efforts, it’s important to make sure you have all the data you need to monitor and prevent ranking changes. That includes finding and tracking your top-performing pages, creating an inventory of your content, and backing up all current site data and information. Having this information at the ready can help you monitor your site more easily after the rebranding is complete. This can allow you to see if your ranking falters and make adjustments to your site or search engine optimization (SEO) to fix or improve it.
2. Create 301 Redirects
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A 301 redirect is a fancy term for permanently sending someone to a new webpage whenever they try to access one of your old ones. These redirects can help you send traffic to a new website without losing your ranking or audience. Though you hope people will use your new URLs instead, it’s possible that some other websites might link to your old web pages. Create permanent 301 redirects so that all old links lead to your new website. That ensures the ranking of those web pages stays the same and your rebranding doesn’t interfere.
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3. Let Google Know
Redirecting is important for other domains that link to your own site. But what about all those URLs currently ranking on Google’s search engine? You can tell Google when you change your website address, and what the updated URLs are for your older webpages. That can let the service know not to disrupt your ranking if you suddenly stop receiving traffic to the old web address, which can really help to ensure your rebrand doesn’t affect your SEO too much.
4. Implement Changes Slowly
You might feel inclined to change every part of your brand right away. After all, the point of rebranding is to create a new image for your business. If your old image is still present in certain areas of your website, that’s bad, right? Not necessarily. Changing every aspect of your website is not the most efficient way to implement changes, especially if you’re trying to prevent loss in ranking.
It’s often better to make changes slowly and monitor your ranking in between. Start with something like the design. If you make changes and your ranking remains the same, then move on to something else, like your written content pages or URLs.
5. Continuously Monitor and Optimize
As you change your site and brand, it’s important to monitor your ranking and spot any changes or dips in the search engine results pages (SERPs). If you notice a change, it’s helpful to go back to that webpage and double-check that it’s optimized. If everything appears optimized for search engines, including the number of backlinks and metadata, look at other variables, like the URL. Is it redirecting correctly? Does Google know that this is the updated webpage?
If it’s a piece of written content, consider double-checking its readability and information. If your readers find the information helpful and well written, they might feel inclined to spend more time on the page, which can improve or maintain your ranking.
Looking to rebrand or post new content that keeps your audience’s attention? CopyPress has a team of expert writers, editors, and quality assurance specialists who know how to craft content that attracts your target audience and encourages them to interact with your company further. Schedule a free call with us today to see how we can help you maintain your search engine rankings with high-quality content marketing.
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