Rebranding is not something that a company faces regularly so when it’s done it has to be done properly. The process requires a lot of work and attention to many details, with all parts of your business working together and redirecting their time and energy into reinventing your image. Poor decisions can effectively ruin your business.
The positive side of rebranding is the potential for your business to thrive and to be cooler than you could ever imagine. Your brand can become iconic, it can become recognizable and influential, and don’t even get me started on the profit.
But let’s just take a step back for a second. Profit is a long way down the road, and on that road, you will find many dangers of rebranding, which is why you should always start by asking yourself if you even have to go that far in the first place.
What is Rebranding And Do I Need It?
As a process of changing a corporate image of a company, rebranding can include, among many other things, a new name, new logo, website, etc. The whole image of a company is basically replaced by a brand new image, but some elements can be retained if they can still fit the new image. Furthermore, as we are going to see, later on, some elements have to be preserved.
A company can think about rebranding for many reasons, most of which have to do with staying competitive and relevant. They are basically just keeping up with trends and getting ahead of the competition. Whether it is a shift in focus or shift in targeted audience, it’s always about progressing.
So, to answer the question of whether or not you need rebranding: If you think that your company is at a dead end, if you want to give it a makeover or if your company simply has a midlife crisis and wants to try something new and wild, maybe rebranding is a logical next step. On the other hand, if you have some doubts and concerns than maybe it’s just not the right time.
Once You Decide to do Rebranding
Here is where the fun part starts. This is the part where SEO comes to the stage, takes a bow and crashes your dreams of ever having a super awesome company like they were a rotting toothpick and SEO was a Hulk. But this is only a hypothetical worst-case scenario.
The best-case scenario can also be achieved, but it’s a real endeavor, not to be taken lightly or on your own. It doesn’t matter the experience or skills you or your employees have. If this is not your primary service, do not try rebranding without proper guidance or counseling by the companies that actually do provide this service.
Rebranding means that you are probably going to be changing the website structure both in code and content, so be sure to look for an experienced web development agency to work with your SEO team. Don’t be afraid to hire a company to supplement your in-house team as a tech force. This way, you will ensure quality and constructive feedback on both ends and end up with a well-documented and well-optimized transition.
Even so, there are still things you have to know in order to protect your SEO rankings and stuff you can do to keep rebranding as painless as possible.
SEO-friendly rebranding
Changing the name is the biggest step a company can take when it’s rebranding and it’s by far the most drastic one. The whole strategy and everything you do next depends on whether or not you will change the company name and if you do, be ready to migrate to a new domain.
A new domain means no more traffic from backlinks, no more organic search traffic, no more anything. It doesn’t sound like something you would want to do, but there is a way to lessen the negative impact, by simply setting up 301 redirects. Everything from your new website will lose relevance to the pages from the previous site, which means that you have to redirect all the strayed visitors to the relevant pages on your new website.
Another helpful piece of advice would be to keep as much content as possible. Even though it might be tempting to freshen up your content to match your new company looks, it may be better to salvage as much as you can, especially if your website has been out there for a while. Other than the fact that people will recognize it, Google with its crawlers and its indexing might be an even better reason to keep the old content.
With the changes Google made by replacing View Image button with the Visit button, it became clear that this will influence SEO a lot. Additional traffic is now brought to the owner of the page where the image belongs, as users can only see the images on these pages. In the context of rebranding, this means that all images you use on your new website must be relevant, optimized and high-quality in order to attract more traffic.
When talking about SEO you can’t fail to mention that Google’s updates are continuously being made to the search algorithm. Fail to think about these factors or have no knowledge or experience in optimizing for them and your rebranding process will most likely be difficult.