Retaining old brand traffic after a rebrand

[SeenDigital.co.uk]

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 forever

Is there anything else you would add to that?

Thanks,

K

[EGOL]

Make the new site kickass better.  That's why you are doing all of this, right?

[MoosaHemani]

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!

[SeenDigital.co.uk]

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?

@Moosa

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?

[EGOL]

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.

[NickLeRoy]

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.

[SeenDigital.co.uk]

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.

[SeenDigital.co.uk]

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.

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