If you are thinking about rebranding and you’re a little stressed that it might hurt your SEO, don’t worry. I’m going break down why rebranding doesn’t have to tank your SEO and, actually, why it might help your SEO.
I’m a website designer, and I have helped lots of my clients rebrand. Some of them have completely changed names or domains, and we have been able to maintain and even grow their SEO. Now this does take a lot of intentionality, you have to know what you’re doing! But, it is not impossible to rebrand and maintain your SEO.
Setup Proper 301 Redirects
You want to redirect your old domain to the new domain, and you want to make sure that any of the page URLs that have changed also have a redirect. So, if you change your about page from just /about to /about-us, you need to redirect so that any of that traffic is not lost.
But, you should be able to do a site wide redirect, which is where the old domain points to the new domain and any of the links out there on Instagram, Pinterest, Google go to the new domain. That’s the most important step from an SEO perspective.
Maintain a Consistent Content Strategy
You want to make sure that you are still providing valuable content to Google (and to your audience) and showing Google you are still relevant. Now, this can sometimes be the trickiest part because if you are rebranding and it’s just changing the name of your business, but it’s still the same services and offers––that’s pretty easy.
But, if you’re changing from a web designer to an interior designer, a dietitian to a business consultant, those are major shifts, and so you will likely see a large dip in traffic. Not to say you can’t regain traffic, but that’s going to be very confusing.
Now, if you are just shifting from we offer nutrition for the entire family and we’re shifting to only women, that’s a little bit different. That’s easier to maintain.
But, that’s where the consistent content and having a good content strategy, posting those blogs, showing Google that you still have value, is going to be the most important to maintain that SEO traffic.
Good website design can actually help your SEO
Better branding helps SEO because it’s a better experience for the users. When people think about SEO, they think about keywords, and how many words on the page, etc. And those things do matter. But, you also have to think about what’s it like to be on your site
Are the words easy to read? Are the colors nice to look at? Are the pictures also nice to look at? Does the site load quickly? All of these things contribute to your SEO. Google looks at something called dwell time, and it’s literally how long people are staying on your site. They want to see that people are spending time on your site.
We, as humans, love good design. We notice good design when we walk into restaurants, salons, and grocery stores. We notice good design even on a subconscious level. So, when we go to a website that is nicely designed and organized, we encourage people to stay longer, and Google notices that.
If you have a post that is ranking and people click on it and the page speed is slow, it’s just it’s hard to read, there’s 15 pop ups. Google is going to start to notice that and know that something must be wrong here, and they want to give their users a good experience. They’re going to deprioritize your content in Google because people aren’t enjoying being on your site.
Design plays a much bigger part in SEO than people realize. It is much more than just keywords.
So, that is part of why rebranding might actually help your SEO or even just a new website. Just changing colors, getting a new website design, a new layout, better organization can also help your SEO. If you are thinking about rebranding, I would love to help you.
