At a certain stage of a company’s life, executives will start to explore the idea of rebranding. Whether it’s due to a fundamental change in the company’s business, wanting to start on a clean slate, or differentiating your company from emerging competition, the question that tends to come up is: how will this affect our search traffic?

The true answer? It depends. We’ve worked with companies before that were trying to recoup their organic traffic after losing 80% with a rebrand gone wrong. If done right with the right SEO and digital marketing strategies, you’ll only see a temporary fall in traffic at worst. So what key factors affect search traffic and ranking of your site important to a rebrand? Communication strategy, your domain name, and your old site’s existing content.

Depending on how effectively you go about managing these three factors, you’ll see a stronger increase in search traffic and ranking for your new site.

Publicize your rebranding through all communication channels

Before making brand changes to your site, take the opportunity to communicate the changes with your stakeholders and existing customers. Announcing these changes will inspire an interest for your stakeholders and existing customers, smoothening the rebound time for your new site.

When communicating the upcoming changes, give reasons to why rebranding will offer them greater value and when they can expect these changes to be made to all of your digital properties. Keep in mind that rebranding will also affect your social media profiles, emails, newsletters and subscription headers. Making changes to these social profiles and headers can help solidify your rebranding communications.

Settling a domain change

Rebranding doesn’t always mean a domain change. However, if your company is considering a domain change, then it’s essential to settle why this change is happening in the first place. To start, changing a site’s domain should be a business decision, not a search engine optimization (SEO) one. In fact, changing domains can have adverse effects in search traffic and ranking for a number of months after its been completed.

The answer to this question can greatly influence your strategy and search results. More often than not, it comes down to one of three reasons.

• The name of your business has changed. It’s a best practice to keep a consistent brand name across your properties. In this scenario, changing the domain name is encouraged to retain your search traffic.

• There’s a more marketable domain available. Ideally, you’ll want a domain name that speaks authority and is memorable to users. For example, if your site is affiliated with a government agency, then changing the top-level domain from .com to .gov may give you more authority.

• The business is consolidating its brands. Consolidating independent brands into a single domain can be challenging. Unless the brands have a lot of overlap, it may be best to keep them separate. For example, if you’re a clothing company who makes women’s clothes and accessories, then consolidation may help boost your search traffic because they’re complimentary goods.

If a domain name change can be avoided, then it may be better to go that route. If the rebranding is as simple as a change to the trademark, company logo and colors, or product line, then you may be able to retain your old domain. However, if you’re set on changing the domain, then you’ll want to become familiar with redirects.

Redirecting existing content

The single most important factor that will help boost the search traffic and ranking to your new site are content redirects – pointing inbound links from your old pages to their new ones. Without a redirect, links from the old site will no longer serve a value, leading to a loss in opportunities for an increase in site authority and ranking for your new site.

Keep in mind that a redirect will only work if the pages with the inbound links are still running. If the content and structure of the old pages remain the same, then they should retain their search ranking and. After the company has changed its domain, you’ll want to maintain the old site a while longer until the new site has stabilized its search traffic and ranking.

Going through a rebrand can be a stressful time for webmasters and digital marketing teams. There are many outside factors to monitor when making changes to your content and domain to ensure that the new site is performing well. Although a drop in search traffic and ranking should always be expected with a rebrand, going through the appropriate steps can help accelerate the climb back to optimally meeting goals.

 

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