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
-
Do old website files in the public_html effect SEO?
My client has about a dozen old folders filled with old websites including index files, robots, htaccess files. They are all located in separate files with in public_html. Does this effect them negatively?
Technical SEO | | Renalynd0 -
Decline in traffic and duplicate content in different domains
Hi, 6 months ago my customer purchased their US supplier and moved the supplier's website to their e-commerce platform. When moving to the new platform they copied the descriptions of the products from their site to the supplier's site so now both sites have the same content in the product pages. Since then they have experienced decrease in traffic in about 80%. They didn't implement canonical tag or hreflang. My customer's domain format is https://www.xxx.biz and the supplier's domain is https://www.zzz.com The last one is targeting the US and when someone from outside of the US wants to purchase a product they get a message that they need to move to the first website, the www.xxx.biz. Both sites are in English. The old site version of www.zzz.com, before the shit to the new platform, contained different product descriptions, and BTW, the old website version is still live and indexed under a subdomain of www.zzz.com. My question is what's the best thing to do in this case so that the rankings will be back to higher positions and they'll get back their traffic. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digital19740 -
Drop in traffic, spike in indexed pages
Hi, We've noticed a drop in traffic compared to the previous month and the same period last year. We've also noticed a sharp spike in indexed pages (almost doubled) as reported by Search Console. The two seemed to be linked, as the drop in traffic is related to the spike in indexed pages. The only change we made to our site during this period is we reskinned out blog. One of these changes is that we've enable 'normal' (not ajax) pagination. Our blog has a lot of content on, and we have about 550 odd pages of posts. My question is, would this impact the number of pages indexed by Google, and if so could this negatively impact organic traffic? Many thanks, Jason
Technical SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Flatlined traffic starting between April 29 and May 4 2013
One of our clients, an ecommerce shop, has seen a significant drop in their organic traffic and I'm trying to determine whether this was the result of a data refresh or algo update. The site has few inbound links and unfortunately still has a lot of duplicate content on it (manufacturer provided product descriptions). There are also some remaining issues of duplicate page titles that we've been working through. The client has also been writing blogs recently, however there are a number which are relatively short in length. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can start recovering from this?
Technical SEO | | bobbygsy0 -
I physically changed my URL and now I have two...How do I get rid of the old one?
Hi, I physically changed my URL as something else and now Google thinks I have two duplicate pages (I know not to do this in the future). e.g. I had www.example.com/i-like-seo.aspx and changed it to: www.example.com/i-love-seo.aspx Google sees this as two pages now and my CMS system is only showing one page (The new page) Also, SEOMOZ is seeing two pages and further more sees them both as having two different amounts of inbound links? When I change content on the new url page, the old url page also updates. I'm really confused as to what has happened here and don't know how to get rid of the old url so that Google doesn't think that I have duplicate content. Any help to what has happened or how to fix it would be so helpful and appreciated. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | CoGri0 -
Could getting referral traffic from SEO moz damage your rankings?
Buon Giorno from OS grid reference SE404481 Having just read Googles https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487 disavow contnet something troubled me... Is it a possibility you could damage the page rank of a site if you add its url in these posts. Put another way if I added a url pointing to a specific site would googles radar detect the source as SEO and penalise the site in some way? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Internal linking with Old Content
Hello, I have a sports website in which users write their opinions about the sporting events that take place every day throughout the year. Each of these sporting events generates a new page or URL indicating the match with date. For example: www.domain.com/baseball/boston-v-yankees-04-24-2012-1234.html The teams face several times a year, and each match creates a different URL or page. I would like to link old pages to new pages and vice versa. How would you recommend these pages to be linked? Linking them to each other or linking old pages to new pages that are generated or otherwise? I would appreciate your orientation and help in this case. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | NorbertoMM1 -
Is old domain better even if it was just parked?
Debating registering new domain or spending bucks for old domain, both with equivalent keywords. Normally old is better, but is this true even if the old name was just parked? In other words, is it worth spending $ for a domain that is not indexed or not ranked, just to get the aging? Options... [Keyword]Help.com - new, cheap [Keyword]Guide.com - old, not indexed, $ [Keyword]Info.com - old, indexed but not ranked anywhere (i.e., only found with exact match search), $$
Technical SEO | | draymond0