The Effect of a Re-brand on SEO

Whether you have totally rebranded your company, merged with or been bought over by another company can all lead to a change of your company name and along with this your domain name.  Obviously you don’t want to lose your Google rankings and the credibility you have built up over the years of hard work on your website.  Your Google ranking is affected by a number of factors, a few of which are listed below.  The two factors which you will lose out on are the age and history of your domain.  Registering a new domain for your company is just like starting all over again.  The new domain will have no history and no credibility so until you build this up your new website will have a poor ranking.  This takes TIME.  It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into it.

Without boring you with the technicalities of how to get round this, Google allows us to pass the creditability over from your old domain to your new.  You can put a 301 redirect in place and let Google know about the change through the ‘Change of address’ feature in Webmaster Tools.

We recently put this in place for a client who bought over Lisburn Dental Spa.  After purchasing the business they rebranded it to Calla Dental and bought a new domain with absolutely no history behind it.  Many of their clients were used to the branding associated with Lisburn Dental Spa.  As a result of some work including a 301 redirect and using the ‘Change of address’ feature in Webmaster tools, Calla Dental have now much better rankings and even when you Google ‘Lisburn Dental Spa’, Calla Dental comes up number one!

What affects your Google Ranking?

Domain

• Age of Domain
• History of domain
• Keywords in domain name

Architecture

• HTML structure
• Use of Headers tags

Content

• Keyword density of page
• Keyword in Title Tag
• Keyword in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)
• Keyword in header tags (H1, H2 etc)
• Keyword in body text
• Freshness of Content

Per Inbound Link

• Quality of website linking in
• Quality of web page linking in
• Age of website
• Age of web page
• Relevancy of page’s content