Branding is the most critical part of any business. The most popular and famous brands are easily recognized by all because they have done a great job at building trust with their consumers and setting themselves apart as unique or a market leader.
At times, you may realize that your brand is not easily identifiable, or even potentially outdated. Or you may simply want to modernize your image or adapt to a changing society. When that happens it may be time for you to consider rebranding. But what does that entail?
What Exactly Is A Rebrand?
A rebrand is what businesses go through when they decide to change elements of their brand image or reinvent their identity. Remember back in 2019 when Dunkin officially rebranded when the dropped the “Donuts” from their brand name and logo. The brand wanted to modernize the experience and ensure that their brand perception was not just about donuts but also great beverages and delicions food. The rebrand kept them relevant and they were able to create a new energy around their brand.
Rebrands happen for various reasons such as:
- – Changes in organizational structure or leadership
- – Business acquisitions
- – Response to public perception or negativity
- – Staying on trend or keeping up to date
- – Differentiating from the competition
Whatever the reason or reasons, rebranding can be expensive. The average initiative to rebrand your business can cost anywhere from 10% to 20% of your annual marketing budget. So it makes sense that how much thought and preparation you put into it can determine if a rebrand is successful or not. In our example above, what Dunkin did was a success. They kept true to their original heritage but updated their look and vibe that was the first step to transforming the company to meet the demand of today’s consumer. However, there are a lot of things to consider when rebranding a business. A rebrand can significantly impact your brand, especially the digital presence and SEO.
Digital Rebranding: What You Should Consider
Digital rebrands typically are part of the process of a company rebrand, and this occurs when a company decides it is time to update their online presence. This could be a website update, a social media profile update or anything else that reflects their new identity.
There are a few ways that a business can rebrand, some of which include changing a business logo, updating the business name, or even updating a company’s core values or mission statement. A small rebrand could just entail a new logo design, whereas a full rebrand may be new logo and business name and a complete website overhaul. Whatever type of rebrand your company is considering, you must consider your SEO standing because you will still want people to be able to find your business online.
SEO Impact: What is the Benefit of Rebranding?
At times, a rebrand may be necessary and a good thing if you are trying to draw in a new audience and generate more buzz about your brand. From a digital perspective, a rebrand with a new website update will involve a review of the content and the user experience. Looking deep into this and deciding what is performing and what isn’t to update your website could be a major benefit. By refreshing content and getting rid of content that is outdated or no longer relevant, you could actually increase rankings and positively boost your SEO.
SEO Risks When Rebranding
Just like there are benefits for SEO when rebranding, there are quite a few risks that must be considered. A rebrand can be a good thing but the key is to understand the challenges and have a strategy in place to avoid potential problems.
Rebranding can temporarily disrupt or even completely scrap rankings. Search engines will need to re-index the updated website so this could cause a momentary loss of rank and lead to a traffic drop. And if the website migration was done incorrectly, this could cause more permanent ranking fluctuations. Remember that the content on your site holds keywords that may be ranking in search results. Any removal of that content or changes to the verbiage can impact ranking.
Additionally, there is always a potential for lost backlinks. If another website was using your brand name as part of anchor text, rebranding may devalue some of your existing backlinks. Or you may lose them, especially if pages are missed during site migration that held valuable backlinks.
Rebranding Strategies to Minimize SEO Risks
Now that you understand both the benefits and risks of a rebrand to your business’s SEO, it’s critical to understand how you can strategize properly for a successful outcome.
Understand Performance PRIOR to Rebranding
Audit your current website to get a full understanding of its performance, including top performing web pages, keywords that are ranking and where they are ranking and what pages are eliciting traffic. You will want to have a strategy in place to preserve the loss of performance, so the first step is knowing what is and what is not moving the needle.
Have A Redirection Plan
You will want to make sure you are setting up redirection properly. Implementing 301 redirects from your old URLs to the new destination is essential to preserve rankings. Make sure to map these out so that they make sense and you can retain link equity.
Keyword Research and Mapping
Make sure that with your audit of performance prior to launch, that you also look at your keywords and goals for post-launch. Do the research to see what gets search volume and map out your URLs, indicating if they are already ranking or not and for what keywords. Having a keyword map will keep your new rebranded website organized and help to avoid overlapping content re-creation as well as keyword cannibalization. Also, launching fresh content can help to rebuild any rankings as well as to display a new branding and tone of voice.
Update All Branding Elements
Another major consideration is to plan time to update all branding elements. If your logo changed, you will want to update the new logo in all online mentions and all social platforms. Prioritize your Google Business Listing for optimal consistency. If you changed your business name, you will also want to update your web pages and posts with your new brand name, including title tags, alt text, meta descriptions and headers. Running a crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog can help to streamline this process that could be very time consuming.
Submit an Address Change With Google Search Console
If you have changed your domain, you will want to submit an address change in Google Search Console to tell Google that your website has “moved” to a new house. You will also want to submit a new sitemap and request URL indexing. This will help to speed up the process of Google indexing and ranking your new website.
Consistent Monitoring
You must monitor rankings and traffic often after launching a rebrand to be aware of issues that could arise and address them quickly. You will also want to monitor your backlink profile with tools like Ahrefs or Semrush and be very aware of lost backlinks that could affect your website’s traffic.
Also note: if you do decide to change your domain when rebranding, you will want to strategically plan to acquire new backlinks to that new domain and update all profiles on external platforms such as social media and local directories. Maintaining your referral links will be essential to sustaining performance.
Do You Have Questions About Rebranding?
If you are contemplating a rebrand for any reason and want to consult with a professional marketing agency, contact the HardPart team today! Our Scottsdale marketing agency will provide you with some initial insight and guidance surrounding your project and can also help with marketing services. Call our team today!