The launch of a rebrand is an exciting time for any business. If you’ve been through the process before then you know it’s no small feat to undertake. A successful rebrand lies in the extensive and meticulous preparation that goes behind it – there’s more than just changing your logo and updating your marketing collateral.
The why and how of rebranding
Rebranding is an incredibly powerful opportunity for companies to evolve with their target audiences, thereby strengthening their market presence and connection with consumers. The key to this evolution ringing authentic and finding a foothold with both old and new customers is ensuring that there is a carefully considered underlying strategy, one that can be translated into a story that immediately makes sense to your audience. The telling and retelling of this story is what solidifies the new brand in the minds and hearts of consumers, until your new brand becomes firmly established and recognised. You can read more about how a rebrand can strengthen a business in our handy ebook The Guide to Rebranding.
What’s critical to consider in rebranding?
Discovering how you want to position your new brand requires a fair bit of looking inwards as this is a chance to re-establish your position in the marketplace. Strong brands are self-aware ones, built on a strong foundation of market and audience research. Only when you really understand what your business stands for, what your target customers want, and what will set you apart from the competition, can you build a brand that has lasting value.
Once you build out the essence of your new brand, it’s important to consider how it will be launched. Making a list of all the touchpoints and materials that need to be rebranded is critical to making the transition, from old to new, a smooth one. A missed touchpoint can lead to confusion and dilute your new brand launch. Our Brand Audit Checklist is a helpful tool to guide you in reviewing the logistics of getting your new brand out to your audiences.
Criticality of the digital audit
Beyond the day-to-day activity of making the new brand visible to the world, there’s one important factor in rebranding that is often undervalued and overlooked: the impact your rebrand might have on your SEO. Online visibility is hard earned and it can sometimes takes years to build up your search engine ranking. Ensuring you take the steps to mitigate potential risk to your Google ranking is as important as launching the visuals of your new brand.
What to consider from an SEO perspective when you’re rebranding
Redirects
If you end up creating a new website, ensuring all pages from your old website redirect to the new one is important. Your new website’s domain authority won’t be as strong as your old one right off the bat, it takes time to build this. To push users in the direction of your new website you can employ automatic redirects to the relevant pages on your new website. This will start automatically navigating traffic via redirects to your new website until such a time that your new website outranks your old and you can pull the plug on the old domain. It’s critical to also consider the links that exist within pages and articles, to ensure all digital touchpoints consistently point to your new website.
Backlinks
All the hard work you’ve put into creating and publishing content will have gained you authorship and authority, especially if backlinks exist from external sources. These backlinks are key to boosting and maintaining your search engine rankings. Make sure you comprehensively audit all external sources who have referenced and linked to your content, and request that they update these backlinks to where the new pages are housed on your new website. The more credible backlinks exist in the web, the better your ranking.
Search terms
It can take time to rank for certain Google Keywords, so it’s important to start the process of researching what terms you want to be ranked for early. Names that are constructs and made up terms have the advantage of being a unique search term and easier to rank for. There might be some unique positioning or products that come with your rebrand and it’s a good opportunity to ensure these keywords are ranked for when users are searching.
For more information on things to consider when rebranding, download our Brand Audit Checklist which includes a section on SEO considerations.
