With online competition as fierce as ever, there are ample reasons to consider rebranding your website. It’s much more common than ever before, from discreet optimizations to visual revamps, and alongside business and hosting needs. Still, doing so carelessly or hastily can hamper your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) score and hurt your business. To address this, let us outline how to rebrand your website without losing SEO value.
The most common reasons to rebrand a website
First, let’s briefly pinpoint the most common reasons for rebranding. Each of them will have rather different needs, so here we’ll strive to cover them all appropriately.
- Redesigns and visual revamp. Typically the most discreet reason for rebranding, this one mostly sees visual changes. This is usually risk-free as long as you don’t need to delve into website structure or content.
- Performance optimizations. Another relatively discreet type, this one typically also presents few SEO challenges. This will depend on the exact scope of changes, but most performance optimizations don’t usually entail significant risks.
- This one is a more challenging event and typically occurs when websites change host providers. Such relocations present opportunities for rebranding, which you might consider if your business data suggests you should. However, by default, relocations require content migrations – which introduces risks.
- Finally, another challenging rebrand type comes in mergers and acquisitions. In such cases, rebranding may be necessary to best frame your newfound identity with new assets. However, content migrations are required to do so, and they do come with SEO risks.
There may be other reasons for rebranding, but these four should hopefully cover the most frequent ones sufficiently.
The typical goals of rebranding
The above often only offers opportunities to rebrand. The specific rebranding goals are often SEO-adjacent, if not consciously SEO-focused – which is why it’s crucial to rebrand your website without losing SEO value successfully.
These goals, too, will vary somewhat but most often include:
- Generating more leads and traffic. The primary function of any SEO-friendly business website, at its core, is generating leads and traffic through excellent online visibility. A rebrand will thus often aim to increase the number of visitors to your website while also using their engagement signals to boost SEO further.
- Converting more visitors. Beyond lead generation, any such website will seek to convert more visitors into customers. This is primarily achieved through Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) but will often also overlap with the rebranding to better align with emerging SEO trends toward this purpose.
- Increasing customer retention rates. Finally, rebranding will often seek to increase customer retention rates by enhancing trust signals, enriching the customer journey, and more. Understandably so, as LinkedIn finds that retention costs substantially less than acquisition, echoing and citing various studies on the issue.
Secondary goals may include others less performance-minded, like simple visual adjustments. Still, most deep rebrands either explicitly aim to enhance performance or hope not to hamper it while achieving their goals.
Ways to rebrand your website without losing SEO value
With the above in mind, we may now delve into the potential dangers of rebranding to SEO – and how to avoid them.
As outlined above, content migrations are the primary cause of SEO losses. This is because they present such dangers as:
- Orphaned pages. Rebrands that involve changes to website structure can leave content pages orphaned. This prevents search engines from properly crawling them and contextualizing their subject, thus reducing their ranking potential.
- Loss of authority. Similarly, migrations can strip content of internal Follow links that allow pages to establish their authority for search engines. In turn, this also diminishes their SEO score.
- Loss of incoming traffic via backlinks. Lost or broken inbound links, whether Follow or NoFollow, will also diminish a page’s incoming traffic. This won’t just affect business performance but also reduce engagement – an SEO metric.
The answer to such dangers does not lie in black hat SEO, which some resort to. Instead, it would be best to rebrand your website while preserving SEO value in the first place. To do so, you may take a prudent, calculated step-by-step approach to minimize risks.
#1 Backup your website
As the first safeguard, you should begin with a full site backup. Even if you later choose to curate your content for a merger, it’s always better to be safe.
Fortunately, if you’d rather not carry this step out manually, there are ways to do so with external help. The WordPress plugin library offers such backup plugins as the following:
- VaultPress
- UpdraftPlus
- ManageWP Backups
- WP Time Capsule
- BackupBuddy
Unless your rebrand project is entirely visual, this is a step you’d best not skip. With backups in hand, you’ll have a functional website to roll back to should anything go wrong in the process.
#2 Conduct a website audit
With your backup in order, you may conduct an SEO audit on your website. This step will help you determine which content holds the most SEO value and thus deserves your attention. Especially in mergers, this will help inform any content cleanup you decide to do.
SEO audits are expansive and take expertise, so you should ideally consult professionals for this step. If you’d instead try conducting one yourself, you may consider such free and paid tools as:
- SEO Checker
- BuzzSumo
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Moz Pro
As you do, you may also consult any analytics tools you’re already using, such as Google Analytics.
#3 Migrate your content
With your insights in hand, you may proceed to content migration if you need one. This step presents the most significant challenge, so it requires due care.
You will need to export your valuable content and then import it into your new website to do so successfully. For WordPress websites, the steps to this process are relatively simple:
- Export your database. You may do so through your cPanel’s phpMyAdmin.
- Create a new database in your new server. This, too, you may do through cPanel’s MySQL Databases.
- Create a new MySQL user for your new database.
- Modify your old website’s wp-config.php file to point to your new database.
- Import your database to your new server. This, too, you may do through phpMyAdmin.
- Finally, assign your new database to the new MySQL user you created previously.
Still, while the steps are relatively simple to follow, the process itself may not be – especially if you’re unfamiliar with the field. Therefore, for this step, you may want to consult professionals and seek the help of your host providers.
#4 Set up 301 redirects and notify Google
Next, with content migration come 301 redirects; both visitors and search engines will look for your website and pages, and 301 redirects are how they will find them. So, setting them up properly is the best way to ensure you will rebrand your website without losing SEO value.
How exactly you do so will depend on your Content Management System (CMS), server, domain name provider, rebrand scale, and other factors. Still, your primary options include:
- WordPress plugins. For WordPress websites, such redirect plugins as Redirection can help guide you through the process.
- Built-in CMS redirect functionality. Other CMSs may offer redirect functionalities instead; for those, you may consult their knowledge bases.
- Apache server redirects. If your website is on an Apache server, you may also set up redirects within the .htaccess file.
- Domain name provider DNS. Some domain name providers may also offer redirect options in their advanced DNS settings.
- Meta refresh code. Alternatively, you may add meta refresh code to your page header to create an instant client-side redirect. W3C offers a thorough article on this practice.
Should you need additional help for this step, Google also offers an excellent help article on redirects.
Finally, before continuing, notify Google that you’re moving your website through its change of address tool. Letting Google know where to look for you will help prevent some SEO troubles
#5 Update internal links
With 301s in order, you may now work toward your content’s links. Both internal links and backlinks are crucial to SEO for a wealth of reasons; page authority, engagement, and so on. So, to successfully rebrand your website without losing SEO value, tending to both is imperative.
Starting with your internal links, you will effectively need to redirect your old links toward your new content. To do so, you may use such WordPress plugins as:
- Better Search Replace by Delicious Brains
- Search & Replace by Inpsyde
- CM Search & Replace
If you would rather do so manually, SEOPress offers a handy search and replace tutorial you may consult.
Thankfully, rebrands that don’t include structure changes or content migrations will often not need this step.
#6 Update backlinks
Once you’ve set up your internal links, you may cater to backlinks. Unfortunately, these are beyond your direct control, so this step might cause you to lose some SEO power. Still, backlinks are an invaluable SEO resource for both authority and engagement, so you should strive to preserve as many as possible.
The best course of action for this step is to reach out to webmasters who link back to your content, asking them to update their links for you. To do so effectively, you may first identify broken links using such tools as:
- Dead Link Checker
- Link Check
- The Atomseo Chrome extension
As you do, you may want to personalize emails for better results. This may not be easy if you have thousands of backlinks, so how you approach it will ultimately depend on you.
#7 Monitor your new website’s SEO performance
Finally, you should successfully rebrand your website without losing SEO value following these steps. Still, you should maintain an attentive eye over your new website’s performance for at least the first few weeks.
Depending on your rebrand’s scale, identify critical metrics like user engagement, referral traffic, and others, and monitor them closely. It’s natural to observe some slight, temporary performance dips, but it’s best to act on them early if you identify any deeper problems.
Conclusion
In summary, rebrands are an effective tool that can greatly benefit businesses. Sometimes they may be a necessity rather than a choice, but they present opportunities for improvement and growth.
Yet, deeper rebrands may also carry SEO risks, especially for the unprepared. Hopefully, this article helped you rebrand your website without losing SEO value.
