Changing business name from keyword to brand name, what are the effects on SEO?
-
I think it's best to give you an example to illustrate what I'm asking here.
Current Brand Name: Keyword Driven Brand Name (keyworddrivenbrandname.com)
New brand Name: KDBN (kdbn.com)
What will the effects of this change be. I'm slightly worried that we have lots of links with the anchor text "Keyword Driven Brand Name" and we rank very well for terms like "Keyword Driven" and "Brand Name".
I guess what I'm asking is, do we need to go and change all those anchors to KDBN and will this upset our search rankings. Or do we leave the existing anchors? But will Google see this as over-optimised anchor text and penalise our website?
Decisions decisions!
Also, should we leave the old brand name in our title tags, at least for the transitional period, i.e.
KDBN | Targeted Keyword | Keyword Driven Brand Name
Any help with this would be really appreciated,
Many thanks
-
That's a pickle!
Yeah, whatever you choose I might suggest making the changes gradually. Introduce elements one at a time instead of all at once. In this way, you might be able to preserve some of your established link equity and relevancy signals.
-
Thanks for your reply Cyrus,
Further to your advice, here's another problem, whilst re-branding we're also looking to build a completely new website to market the new brand. The new website will have a completely different structure and mostly different content.
Because of this, it's going to be hard to keep elements the same. Would you recommend changing the domain name over first and leaving the existing site on the new domain name for a few months and then updating the site to the new design? i.e. redirecting old pages to new
Many thanks!
-
While I can't say for sure, I'd say you're safer off keeping any existing anchors as-is. Changing existing links could have unintended consequences, and you don't know what the effect will be of keeping them the same.
As for your title tags and other site elements, if you are doing a domain migration, it's best to keep as many elements exactly the same as possible - at least during and in the first couple months after the transition. In this case, I'd ask if your visitors will recognize the new brand name, and if it makes sense to keep the old keywords.
-
If you have two separate domain names, I would continue to keep them separate and not redirecting one to another. The fundamental strategy I would choose is to gradually move company specific content to brandname.com and keep educational, promotional content on keywordname.com so use that as your thought leadership platform with very relevant links to brandname.com.
over a period you will see people searching for your brand directly going to main company website. People looking for your content will first go to keywordname.com, get educated and most likely gopto brandname.com. By creating your own brandname.com is a great idea since it will create your own traffic stream which is a great competitive advantage. A pure keywordbased domain name is vulnerable to a better SEO execution by competition so can't last forever.
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
-
Entities and SEO
How do you find the correct words (entities) to explain an entity ? The words (entities) that go together within a sentence seem to be based on the specific corpus (the keyword you want to rank ) and when they are million of results it seems impossible to find what word / entity is going to explain the entity / concept I want to explain. It seems that I got a better chance at the lottery 🙂 a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Do you have any advice or software that could parse and find the words that co-occure the most often out of millions of results !! Thank you,0 -
Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?
Hello mozers! I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users. However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic. I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot. My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo". How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"? Can anyone help? AvGGYBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz3 -
Job Board SEO
Hello community, Should I be using canonical tags on every job posted on my job board and also every job category page? I currently use no canonicals on my job board but I still rank well organically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SO_UK1 -
Title Tags in Sitecore are the same as navigation. How do I add keyword phrases without effecting my website's navigation?
I am working on overhauling the on-page SEO for ecommerce website on Sitecore. I've done all my research and I am ready to plug the Title tags and descriptions in. So, if the page on Navigation is 'SHOP' this is in the Title tag box. How do I add my 70 characters of keywords? Thanks. JOE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iJoe0 -
SSL for SEO?
To obtain an SEO benefit from an SSL is there any particular type or brand which is recommended or has a track history? It seems you can pay anything between $20 and $???? (For that matter whatever you want to pay!). Any experience gratefully accepted! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
GWT Keywords not showing my Keywords Focus, What to do?
Hello Community I will like ot know if im doing something wrong here..... I have setup keywords for my google ranking using yoasr SEO http://imgur.com/BCWTifV but in my Google Webmaster http://imgur.com/V1texto What im doing wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dawgroup0 -
What Constitutes Keyword Stuffing?
Greeting MOZ Community: I have been attempting to add certain keywords phrases to the home page text of our real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). When I check the keyword density and look at the keyword cloud, the frequency of certain terms appear substantially higher than they should be (see attached keyword cloud and keyword density chart. Certain terms like "office space" have a 5 or 6% frequency which seems high. Last thing we need is a Panda penalty. When I viewed the code for the home page (see enclosed), I noticed HREF tags, SRE tags and ALT tags repeating certain keyword phrases, driving up their density. I have attached a keyword cloud for the home page of a competitor and the use of language seems more diverse. Does Google take the text in these various tags into account? I know the ALT tag is important for SEO, but how about the others? Does the use of text in the tags for this page make the overall page look spammy? Also, there are text and tags for the carousel in the home page that appear in the code for the home page. If this code were somehow concealed, would we be better off from an SEO perspective? Thanks, Alan pkM7CZG 1DFFMZ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Mobile SEO
Hi there, My website when searching via mobile is now showing the mobile version of the site in SERPs, well for quite sometime now to be honest, anyway the ranking in mobile are no different to what they are on desktop, is there actually anything I can do to influence my mobile SERPs? 9 times out of 10 it's desktop websites that are ranking about me in mobile search. Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780