The Effect of a Re-brand on SEO

Whether you have totally rebranded your company, merged or been bought over by another company, this 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, where the new domain will have no history and no credibility, so until you build this up your new website, you will have a poor ranking. 

Without boring you with the technicalities of how to get around this, Google allows us to pass the credibility over from your old domain to your new one.  This can be done by putting a 301 redirect in place and letting Google know about the change through the ‘Change of address’ feature in Google Webmaster Tools.

We recently put this in place for a client who bought over Lisburn Dental Spa.  After purchasing the business they re-branded it to Calla Dental and bought a new domain with 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? Here are just a few!

Domain

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

Site 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

If you would like to chat further about what SEO services we can provide, call us on 028 90 73 11 90 or email incoming@thewebbureau.com.