How To Keep Your SEO Game Strong During a Brand Makeover

A rebrand is a fantastic way to keep your visual design, messaging, and customer experience fresh and relevant. However, migrating or consolidating brand assets comes with notable SEO implications. Done well, a rebrand doesn’t necessarily mean a brand will lose its SEO rankings and traffic. Here’s how to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks:

1. Run a thorough prep cycle. Brands will need to assess current state benchmarks for their technical SEO and identify which pages on their site are generating the most traffic. It is also a good idea to inventory and track all of your content so that, when the time comes, you can redirect your audience to past content without friction. Brands preparing for a redesign should also ensure that their analytics are properly configured and that the existing site is fully backed up.

2. Next, the web designers and developers you’re working with will need to run a series of tests on the to-be-released, rebranded site’s staging environment. Comb through to ensure that all of the links are correctly redirecting.

3. Once the migration has occurred, you’ll have a brand new site to introduce to Google’s algorithm. At this point, it is important to transfer all of your pre-existing page values to the new site by informing Google that your new site is the successor to the old one.

4. Rebrands are exciting, and it can be tempting to run all of the changes at once. Rushing the process will only make you more vulnerable to errors. Instead, divide the process of changing your content from changing your domain. For instance, one expert suggests tackling web design changes before making alterations to your content, web hosting, or other dimensions of the site.” 

 Track the new site’s impact once the rebrand is complete and your migration is all in order. Revisit the benchmarks you created around high-performing pages to determine whether their rebranded equivalents are pulling their weight. It is not unusual for search engines to get confused in the initial days and weeks of a rebrand, but usually, these kinks will work themselves out. If your brand is preparing for a redesign, partner with ASTRALCOM. Learn more about how we work with businesses across sectors to support cutting-edge SEO strategies.