Changing business name from keyword to brand name, what are the effects on SEO?

[Townpages]

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

[Maayboli]

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.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.

[Townpages]

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!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.