Rebranding is often done by brands and companies who re-launch their business because of new products, services, and oftentimes creating an entirely new identity that is part of an overall strategy of a product or service. Rebranding also takes when a company wants to reposition itself in the mind of stakeholders, and more importantly, its competitors.
In the world of SEO and social media, rebranding is possible and achievable, albeit needing more efforts. To rebrand for SEO and social media purposes, there are two important things to accomplish.
First is domain migration. In SEO, the web address or URL should contain the brand name. Migrating to a new domain involves transferring not only the brand name but the content as well. This task should be a group effort of the SEO and online marketing team to be able to discuss major problems, pitfalls, and future SEO efforts.
Before announcing the change, purchase the domain name and its variations to assure the protection of the brand. For domains that have been previously owned or are currently owned by other businesses, be ready to purchase it from them and leverage the site with 301 redirects. These domains should be cleaned up before completely migrating to make sure that no black hat SEO practices are done which could penalize you in the future.
Once you’ve decided on transferring SEO content to a new domain, what type of strategies should be practiced. Since you’re starting anew, it is recommended to do best practices from the start instead of going back and forth trying to fix it once it has been launched.
With two domains, the old one and the new one, you have to choose which SEO contents will be transferred to the new domain to avoid duplicate content. For content that stays on both domains, there should be a plan as to how they should appear. Prioritizing comes into play because a decision has to be made as to which domain will be given more SEO value.
Because there are now two domains for your brand, usability becomes crucial because we do not want to confuse visitors who come into our site. The goal of both domains, which is basically to convert visits into sales, is to offer a seamless navigation so users will not find it frustrating to visit your site.
The SEO process is just the first part of rebranding with search engine optimization and social media marketing in mind. The second part of this series will discuss how changes should be made in social media once rebranding takes place.
SOURCE
IMG 1 Source
IMG 2 Source
