A few of many requirements that may prompt you considering rebranding include company acquisition, changing the company name, and a set of business decisions. No matter what the reason, rebranding can take its toll on the company’s website performance over search engines.
In this article, we are going to talk about a few things that you need to take into consideration related to SEO when rebranding or changing your website’s domain name.
Work on generating signals beforehand
You can use your old website and domain as a platform to produce signals to make the transition process less of a headache. With your old website already generating signals to make search engines and users anticipate a domain change, you will not face much difficulty in regaining the traffic.
There are two ways you can generate signals in this regard.
- Through onsite work, which involves changes in metadata and content
- Through offsite work, which includes traditional marketing and PR
Combining elements of old branding with new metadata can also help build traffic for the website with a changed domain name.
Retain URL structures
In many cases, you might need to make changes to URL structures and content placement procedures when doing a site migration. This change can lead to higher risks of losing traffic in the future.
You can mitigate those risks by keeping the URL structure the same. This way, you can keep several critical signals consolidated.
In this scenario, you need to keep a record of the old domain’s history and links. Although you may delete the crawl paths with the change of domain name, Google doesn’t forget those crawl paths. So, you need to apply redirects to those links to retain the traffic.
Put a system in place to answer queries about the old brand
You are still going to have people searching for your previous brand for the years to come after you switch to a new brand. You will end up missing out on that traffic by leaving the opportunity to answer those queries for third sites and competitors. Therefore, you will need to create content to answer those queries. Content that can help you answer those queries may belong to support sections, blogs, and FAQ pages.
Generate new signals
Looking at the KPIs of ranking and traffic is undoubtedly a critical step after a domain change, but it’s not all that you need to do. If you are not generating new signals for the new brand through link building, digital PR, or other traditional marketing methods, you are not fulfilling a significant marketing requirement.
