Today, we’re going to talk about how to rebrand your website without losing organic traffic. So with your website, if you want to interchange your name, the simplest thing to do, is it three oh one redirect and everyone knows this. You do a three oh one redirect from your old domain name to your new domain name. You still could potentially lose a little bit of traffic. But typically it bounces back fairly quickly within a few months. But it’s not that simple. And I’ll start off with some of the things that you need to button up when doing a rebrand.
Some of the things are one you need to actually change all your internal links. So you can’t just do a three oh one redirect. You need to go and take all your internal links and change the URLs for the manually, because you don’t want Google to crawl the link and then be like, oh, this is three oh one. Just hard-code the correct URL in there in the first place. Cool on my side. So when we talk about crawling a website, so it’s really important to have. Neil hit on this, but you want to have a consistent URL structure. You’d want to change things up too much.
You want to make things fairly consistent, right? It’s oh, okay. All of these three ones are going over here, but if you have, let’s say you remove all your internal links, you have a different structure for the entire website. It’s going to be really hard for search fighters, to, to crawl stuff. So using a tool like screaming, frog I w I love it for giving me an overview of what’s going on with my entire website, all the links that I have. And then you can layer that on with an H refs or, an Uber suggest, whatever tool that you want to use. But screaming, frog is great. From a crawling perspective, make sure you have consistent link structures. And it also one of the most important things are your category page. Especially if you’re an e-commerce site, like a Zappos, as an example, you might have shoes, you might have dresses, you might have, men’s basketball shoes and all that. Like you got to keep those consistent.
Most people, they start to lose track of all of these the foundational pieces of the website. And then it’s no wonder that they lose all their traffic. Yeah. And a lot of it has to do with brand queries as well. So when you do a rebrand, people may not know your new brands and make sure you do advertising campaigns around your new brand emails. All that kinda good stuff. Take the omni-channel approach. So then that way you’ll get brand praise for your new brand as well. In addition to the old one, of course, but then this way it starts carrying over and ensures that you’re going to constantly do well with your new brand as well. Yeah. This seems like an old tactic over here, your homepage actually, most of the time has. The most link equity. If you have really important pages or new pages popping up on the rebranded site leverage the homepage, right? Like people still, they poopoo on the footer links, but the footer links are still very powerful. Just don’t overdo it. Just to drive some signals, we talked about drill links, right? Just to drive the right signals for the search engines.
Final thing I’ll say from my side is just make sure that you’re patient with this because I’ve done these kind of complete rebrands or redirects, big projects, but sometimes it might take a couple of weeks for the traffic to completely recover maybe sometimes a couple months. Yeah. And last, at least on my end. When you’re doing a rebrand, don’t do partial rebrand. Like some people are like, oh, I’m going to change part of my side and then change the rest later on it’s all or nothing. You want to take a one big switch and just be like, all right, old brand new brand, release it all at once. Make sure you submitting the site map to Google search console and make sure that they’re able to call your site, your servers looking good. And if you do all of that, you should be fine. All right. So that is it. For today. Don’t forget to rate, review and subscribe to this podcast. It helps us grow. And if you want to hang out with Neil NEI, come September, check out marketing school, the IO slash L I V E live. And we’ll catch you tomorrow.