Retaining old brand traffic after a rebrand
-
Hi,
How would you retain the organic search traffic for your old brand after a full rebrand? Website redesign, new company name, new domain name etc
If we change from blahservices.com to fooservices.com and do all the things you would for a regular domain migration, will Google still return pages from the new brand fooservices.com when a user searches for old brand "blah services keyword"?
We will be doing the following to try and not lose organic search traffic for our old brand:
Keep PPC running on our old brand name keywords
Mention our old brand on the new website in the footer i.e. "Copyright blah services trading as foo services"
Publish a press release about the rebrand on our blog
Say something like "blah services has rebranded as foo services" in meta descriptions for a while
Put old and new brands in meta title for a while
Keep 301 redirects from old domain in place foreverIs there anything else you would add to that?
Thanks,
K
-
Thanks Nick,
We're happy to mention the old brand on the new site and will be talking about the rebrand on the new site.
Agree leaving the old brand in the meta title for some time will help. We're also planning on mentioning old and new brands in the meta description so users can easily see we are the same company.
-
Thanks Egol,
Google forgetting our old brand over time is what we thought might happen.
The amount of brand traffic we have is indeed significant and we want to retain as much of it as poss. I know there's more to be had with the rebrand but that's an unknown quantity and not concrete enough to not worry about old brand traffic.
We're in the UK and the old brand will be the parent company. Plus we're a limited company so we're required by law to say something like "blah services ltd trading as foo services" on our site.
So we can add something along the lines of "Copyright blah services ltd trading as foo services all rights reserved" in the footer of all pages.
And we'll host a PR about the rebrand on our blog and mention the history in our About page.
But to clarify, can we assume that over time traffic for the old brand will diminish.. particularly if we don't mention the old brand on the new site? Just want to manage expectations.
-
If the previous site had a fair amount of authority and you 301 redirect it appropriately to the new site it likely will maintain its rankings for the previous brand term. This will be from the amount of anchor links with the previous branded term within it ie brad or brand.com.
Alternatively, you can do a couple other items to optimize the new site for the old branded term. For instance, optimize the title tag of the new site to read something similar to "Nicks Pizza and Sandwiches - formally Nicks Burger Spot"
Of course this is assuming you want your new sites associated with your old brand. If that's not the case then you'll want to do a lot of brand reputation management to bury mentioned of the previous brand and to dissasociate your new site.
-
So will Google still return our new domain for searches related to our old brand?
If your new site has no traces of your old brand then search engines will forget about your old brand over time. Off-site links that hold the name of your old brand as anchor text can keep this alive but not as strongly as if the old brand had an visible presence on your site.
I don't know how much branded traffic you had in the past. If it was significant you might want to include a mention of your old brand on each page of your new site, or have a history page, optimized for your old brand that can compete in the SERPs when someone searches for your old brand. For this to work well, your old brand would need to be a distinct name that does not have a lot of competition.
-
Hi Egol,
Yes the new website will be a big improvement on usability and we'll be doing lots of great PR to get the new name out there and we're excited about all the new traffic and increased engagement that will bring.
However, current branded traffic accounts for a significant chunk of revenue and we don't want to lose this traffic if possible
So will Google still return our new domain for searches related to our old brand?
Or should we right off traffic for our old brand and focus on new traffic for the new brand?
We accept there might be a temporary traffic dip but we're ok with that if traffic returns back to previous levels after google has picked up the domain change.
Can we still expect to get traffic for our old brand once things have settled though?
The PPC is more about bidding on our old brand keywords so we still retain some of that traffic. The PR is for raising awareness for our new brand and will bring lots of lovely new traffic, hopefully.
But ultimately we want to retain the traffic for our old brand while generating new traffic for our new brand
Is that too greedy?
-
Honestly, if you don’t want to lose your current traffic shift it to new domain, I am not saying it’s not possible but you will see a dip (maybe temporary) but there will be a dip until Google figure out the new website, index their pages, recognize the link juice pass from old domain to a new domain.
I believe if you are doing PR and PPC to let people know about the new brand, in that case Google will soon figure out that the old brand has been shifted to new brand and allow the new brand to appear in search results when someone search for old brand name.
Again, what activities you have mentioned are great but there will be a dip so you have to take in to consideration and act accordingly.
Hope this helps!
-
Make the new site kickass better. That's why you are doing all of this, right?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do I access the old search console?
Hello, Moz community! I need to access the old search console in order to submit a change of address. I used to be able to switch from a toggle on the main menu, but I can't seem to find that anymore. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can access it?
Technical SEO | | eddiewang250 -
Brand name as H1 on every page
Hi, Along with the title of each page, a Wordpress client has their brand name as a H1 on every single page. This is situated in the footer and just sits within the company info/address. Should these tags be removed, leaving just the page titles as H1s? Cheers, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Brand page meta tag
I have around 100 brands on my website (with 100 different pages.) Please suggest me best way to create meta tags for all brand pages.
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
When the Plural has more traffic, but the singular makes much more sense. What to do?
Hey everyone! This is actually the first time I ever posted a question here on MOZ! Guess I was (still am) embarrassed by being an SEO Noob! That being said, I really have to get some input on this matter and i was wondering if you guys might be able to help. I'm optimizing a page for a wedding venue in Portugal. Currently, according to google trends the Plural - Venues for weddings, scores considerably better than the Singular, Venue for weddings(this was researched in Portuguese written terms of course). Despite this, i'm leaning towards an optimization for the Singular term, because the plural seems to un-natural to fit in the content, or title. I managed to fit the Plural in the description but i've read that it hasn't influenced rank directly for a while. Currently my title tag reads: Venue for Weddings | Name of the Venue. I really can't find anyway that it makes sense to me in the Plural... and i feel like if i was a user, i would rather click on the singular term cause it just makes a lot more sense. But my opinion is most probably biased by the fact that i understand that using the plural term will be solemnly an SEO effort to rank higher for a term that has more average searches per month. My question is: In the current state of search algorithms, will an optimization for the singular term, still get me some rank on the plural key phrase? Let me know what you think about this please, and thank you in advance for your time. Most Respectfully, Martim Coutinho dos Santos
Technical SEO | | martim_santos0 -
How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages
We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th. It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
90% traffic loss. Pandalized?
Happened several times during this year. After launch as soon as we reach exactly 100K uniques Google kills 90% of the traffic. Then sudden recovery (pretty much without any action from us) after several weeks not connected to any algo updates/refresh. No warnings. No malware. WMT clean as a baby. Only old good whitehat SEO. Not even close to the edge of wrongdoing:) This time it happens again Aug. 22nd right after Panda 3.9.1. What is different now same exact date Bing traffic went down as well. http://bit.ly/eEu27I Need advice:)
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Penalities in a brand new site, Sandbox Time or rather a problem of the site?
Hi guys, 4 weeks ago we launched a site www.adsl-test.it. We just make some article marketing and developed a lots of functionalities to test and share the result of the speed tests runned throug the site. We have been for weeks in 9th google serp page then suddendly for a day (the 29 of february) in the second page next day the website home is disappeared even to brand search like adsl-test. The actual situalion is: it looks like we are not banned (site:www.adsl-test.it is still listed) GWT doesn't show any suggestion and everything looks good for it we are quite high on bing.it and yahoo.it (4th place in the first page) for adsl test search Anybody could help us to understand? Another think that I thought is that we create a single ID for each test that we are running and these test are indexed by google Ex: <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/w08ZMPKl3R or</cite> <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/P87t7Z7cd9</cite> Actually the content of these urls are quite different (because the speed measured is different) but, being a badge the other contents in the page are pretty the same. Could be a possible reason? I mean google just think we are creating duplicate content also if they are not effectively duplicated content but just the result of a speed test?
Technical SEO | | codicemigrazione0 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0