When your business needs to rebrand it is usually because something has either gone wrong or gone too right. Some firms have been successfully operating for a hundred years – and realized their marketing materials are therefore 90 years out of date. Others need to change their name and fast, in order to avoid scandal.
But whatever the reasons, a rebrand or a domain change can seriously impact your business in a bad way. Just as the change is supposed to be for the better, it can also swing the opposite way. A badly handled switch of the site can leave you losing customers no matter how established you thought your brand was.
In order to help you avoid all this stress, we provide an exemplary New Orleans SEO service by Infintech Designs. If you don’t want to fork out for SEO improvements, then have no fear… we also write about tips and tricks that can help you do better… just like this one.
The 5 Things to Think About During a Rebrand/Domain Switch
Let’s delve in straight away and get your move handled properly.
1 – It’s Like Moving To A New House
Moving your business from one address to another is best thought of as a house move. The same with a rebrand. You have a thousand things to think about, it is excessively stressful, and, as you start clearing out, you find things you thought you had lost years ago. Thinking of it like this helps you to take proper notice of it. It helps you appreciate the enormity of it. It is to be considered the same as if you moved bricks and mortar business to a new location… Do you see the problems? How would regulars find you?
2 – Deal in Social Signals
The amount of backlinking from your social media accounts needs to start building up before you make the actual switch. The more you link to it, the more people are going to know you are switching. It’s a simple notion that takes a lot more work than normal. It also feels silly linking to a page that’s not built yet – but it will be worth it when you retain your client base because they know where to find you.
3 – Keyword Migration
When rebranding or moving domain, it is the perfect time to migrate what worked and delete what didn’t from your old content. Obviously, this is also the perfect time to have an SEO team come in and take a look. They will be able to grab the keywords that got you up the rankings from your old site and transfer it to your new one, keeping the same traffic funnel you had before.
4 – Keep your URLs
If you can, make sure that the URL names for your different extensions are the same as they were before. Google (and other search engines) like to tread paths already trodden rather than beat new ones each time. In other words, the less you change the better it will be for you.
5 – Content Searches
How many people are likely to enter your new site through your old site? If the answer is 0 then something has gone wrong. As well as sending social signals to your client base before you move, you need to retain your old domain name for a while. Why? You need to put a banner on it telling people you have moved, or you have been renamed, then directing them to the new page after a few seconds. Easy, right? This way people will know you have moved and find you without further clicking. Better yet, by the time you drop the old brand website, you are going to have established the big search engines that your new place/brand pops up. So this one works two-fold.
