A company owner’s biggest fear is losing website traffic, online leads, and prospect calls because they lost their top Google ranking for their most important term when they launched their new website. Make sure your web team does everything correctly while rebranding and relaunching.
Rebranding Your Business or Simply Changing Your Domain Name but Scared of Losing Google Ranking?
We’re glad you’re here because we don’t want you to lose your hard-earned search engine rank when you establish your new website on a completely another domain name.
We’ve detailed the most important actions to take when changing your company name, website URL, business address, and phone number, adding an SSL certificate to make your site more secure, switching to a new hosting company, or launching a completely new website.
1. Pick a New Company Name with an Available, Matching Website Address
When you’ve decided on the perfect company name, make sure the domain name is available for purchase, preferably the.com version, though it may make more sense to buy a different extension for certain industries. .io extensions are popular among technology and SaaS organizations. Even if you are unsure about the company name, go ahead and purchase it. A domain name costs about $10 and can be gone the next day if you think about it too long.
The right domain name may save you thousands of dollars in time and effort spent trying to rank higher in search engines and gain free visitors. Choose a catchy URL to increase clicks. It would be ideal if you could discover an open domain that is both short and includes your most important keywords.
Likewise, check the website of your local Secretary of State to ensure that the legal name is also available. If you already have a legal name but wish to rebrand your business, just obtain a DBA, or do business as. As a result, you may carry on with all legal parts of your business as usual.
If you get a DBA, make sure to notify your bank. As a result, you won’t have any problems depositing checks or receiving ACH payments. In addition, order fresh checks, business cards, and so on.
Check the history of your new domain name. You don’t want to buy a domain name that was previously connected with spam or other bad publicity. You may verify this by going to “Wayback Machine – Internet Archive” and searching for your domain URL. Also, look up your domain name on the internet. Just in case the results are questionable.
If you have access to a backlink analysis tool. You may scan the domain to check whether it was previously owned by someone who established a lot of spam links to it. If they have, you probably don’t want to deal with a number of low-quality connections at the start of your project. It may have an impact on your ability to get your fresh new website out of Google’s sandbox.
2. Create a New Logo
To make it easier for your web developer, attempt to establish a new logo with a similar aspect ratio and colors; otherwise, plan on a website redesign project that may cost you more than you planned to spend on your “simple” rebranding project.
3. Pick a Better Hosting Company
Website uptime, reliability, and speed are other essential ranking criteria. If you are not completely content with your website hosting business, now is the time to transfer.
An ideal hosting environment employs the most recent version of PHP, allows for the creation of a staging environment, performs daily backups, and allows for simple restoration.
You don’t want all of your hard work to be limited by a poor hosting environment that slows down or crashes your website when it receives a large number of visitors.
4. Create a Demo Site to Test the Changes
Do not ask your web developer to submit your new logo to your existing website without first viewing and approving it.
Ideally, you should make a version of your website and put it in a staging environment where it is not visible to the public but where you and your developer may review changes before they go live. Put your new logo on your staging site. If you want your rebrand to be as easy as possible, make sure your designer designs a new logo with the same aspect ratio and colors as your former logo. Large modifications in the aspect ratio or color palette of your logo may need greater adjustments throughout your website.
Replace the previous company name wherever and update the text to reflect the changes. We recommend keeping your previous name on the text for a time so that customers and search engines can clearly understand it’s the “same” firm with a new business name. “ARF Services, formerly known as ARF Design, your favorite web design agency in Florida, USA,” is a good example.
If you decide to migrate your website to a better host, make sure to set up the demo site on the new server. The same code can be rendered somewhat differently by various servers. This is very important when upgrading from an earlier version of PHP. This is why it is essential to test your site on the same server where it will be hosted after launch.
5. It’s the Perfect Time to Restructure Your Website
Most websites add pages and parts over time, and some services and products are terminated. Changes that aren’t well-planned might cause chaos on your websites. Even if you feel your website is well-organized, you may wish to provide new services or goods to your clients or highlight something else for your visitors.
It’s the ideal moment to rethink and rearrange your website in light of future expected services and capabilities.
Sitelinks are provided with a decent site structure. Sitelinks are a Google Search listing type that displays your site’s main page as well as various internal links. It might enhance search engine clicks to your website. When redesigning your website, use the following process.
Create a website hierarchy by A hierarchy is similar to a family tree, with the home page at the top. Pages are divided into categories, which can be further divided into sub-categories. Create a website hierarchy by A hierarchy is similar to a family tree, with the home page at the top. Pages are divided into categories, which can be further divided into sub-categories.
6. Update the Company Name Throughout the Website
Replace the old company name with the new one, but maintain the old brand name on at least a few pages.
Replace the previous company name wherever and update the text to reflect the changes. We recommend maintaining your previous name in the content for a while so that consumers and search engines know it’s still the “same” company with a new business name and URL. “ARF Services, formerly known as ARF Design, is your favorite web design agency in Florida, USA,” for example.
7. Update the Company Name and Logo in Your Autoresponders and Form Mailers
Change the company name and logo in your “thank you” emails and autoresponders, too.
8. Reoptimize Your Website
You probably want to ensure that your prospects can still locate you under the old and new company names. You should also ensure that you rank high for your most important keywords.
In your content, meta titles, meta descriptions, and image ALT text use both corporate names. Remove duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. Think about improving or replacing underperforming material. Repair any broken connections.
9. Update Home Page Content
You will almost certainly have a new tag line, featured offerings, and you will almost certainly want to announce a brand change on your home page. As a result, your existing customers, prospects, and followers will know they are in the correct place.
10. Write a Blog and Press Releases Announcing the New Company Name
Take it a step further and create a thorough blog post detailing the modifications. Explain why you relaunched your company and what benefits your clients will receive under the new structure.
People searching for your old brand name will be able to readily find out that your company name changed and why if you release a press release that is picked up by many state and national papers. It leaves a trail for search engines and previous clients to follow in order to discover you again.
11. Check and Improve the Mobile Experience
Even the most successful websites can be improved. You should test the visitor experience not just on desktops and laptops, but also on mobile and tablet devices, horizontal and vertical layouts on various operating systems and browsers. A new logo may have a detrimental impact on the mobile experience, therefore your developer must check and improve as needed.
To guarantee that your website is mobile-friendly, use a service like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
12. Improve Site Speed
If your site is slow and your budget permits you to spend on some speed optimization operations, request that your developer increase the speed of your website.
GTmetrix is a free service that can assist you in identifying any speed difficulties.
13. Make Your Site Secure with SSL
If your website is not already running on a secure, HTTPS:// URL, we highly advise you to change it immediately. It also has a strong impact on search engine ranking.
14. Make Sure Your Website Is Accessible
If your website is not ADA-compliant, now is the time to fix that as well. Making your website accessible to everybody improves the number of potential visitors, users, or customers; it may provide significant financial rewards, and it is the right thing to do ethically and legally.
A technology like ADA Website Compliance Monitoring may make this simple and cost-effective.
15. Setup Permanent 301 Redirects
When a visitor finds an old URL through a bookmark, article, or Google search, you want to ensure that they land on the latest version of your site.
Make careful to change any redirects that your previous marketing agency or developer set up. Chain redirects are frowned upon by Google, and they can also cause technical issues.
Don’t forget to create new human-friendly XML sitemaps based on your new site layout. Some good WordPress plugins can produce sitemap.xml and HTML sitemaps automatically.
16. Launch Your Website Very Carefully
It’s not as simple as pressing a button and being done. If your website is powered by a content management system such as WordPress or Drupal, you don’t want to lose any recent modifications you’ve made to your marketing website while creating the demo site. You don’t want to lose recent client registrations or order history if you operate an online business like WooCommerce or Magento. Copy the code and modifications, but leave the form submissions, user, and order tables alone in your database. To conclude, do not replace user-generated material such as user passwords, user names, billing information, addresses, and so on.
Test your form mailers to ensure that you receive website submissions. It’s also essential that your third-party connections, such as your chosen CRM and marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Pardot, MailChimp, or ERPs for eCommerce websites, are correctly configured.
You should often change your URLs in third-party tracking programs such as Google Analytics, HubSpot Analytics, call tracking systems, and so on.
17. Watch for User Generated Content Especially for eCommerce Websites
We discussed it before, but we wanted to dedicate a section to user-generated material. Don’t overwrite tables containing user-generated material such as product, customer, user, coupon, and so on! When customers come to us from unskilled developers, they frequently complain about lost customer accounts, purchase history, and having to ask clients to register again or reset their passwords before their successful login to the new website.
18. Don’t Forget to Turn On Search Engines
Make sure to allow search engines if you use a content management system like WordPress. Also, ensure that your robots.txt file does not prevent search engines from accessing your website.
19. Update Your Tracking and Analytics Tools
In Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google My Business, and any other monitoring tools change your domain name.
20. Update Your Social Media Profiles with the New Company Name, URL, Logo, and Profile Images
It’s essential to have the correct URL everywhere on the internet, especially on active social media pages. If you handled your 301 redirects correctly, the browser will still return you to the correct page, but a genuine URL will benefit your website more than a redirected old link that technically no longer exists. It is also a Google ranking element, and you want a reliable link linking to your website to have a greater impact on search engine ranking.
21. Change Your Business Name and Website Address in Directory Listings
To make these changes immediately after publishing your new site under a new domain, look for a solution that can perform speedy bulk updates. The sooner you make these modifications, the better.
22. Did you get a New Name? Announce It to the World!
Probably the first thing you want to do after ensuring that the new URL is up and running, all links are correctly redirected, and all functions work as intended. Is to promote your new name and domain name on social media and wherever else you can.
Press releases and email newsletters are also very important. Send your visitors notes with links to your blog that explain why the modifications were made.
23. Search and Fix the Rest Manually
Simply do a Google search for the previous company name and links after you “think” you updated your name and links elsewhere on the web. You’d be surprised by how many websites have material linking to your former domain name. If you notice a significant number of websites with backlinks, this indicates that your marketing agency did an excellent job of advertising your company online.
Some of these old connections may never be updated, but your aim is to contact every single website owner and ask them to update their website to refer their content to your new URL and web pages.
24. Update Your Links in Your PPC Ads
It is sometimes forgotten, but updating your links on any PPC Ads you have running is an absolute requirement.
25. Update Your Landing Pages and Other “Hidden” Content
You may have “hidden” landing pages and other material that is difficult to locate. Make sure you are familiar with your website and that you are updating the material everywhere, including the difficult-to-find areas.
26. Monitor Your 404 Clicks and Broken Pages
Install a 404 plugin to detect links that visitors may click on and end up on a page that cannot be found. You do not want broken links on your website. Locate and repair them.
Are you thinking of rebranding your company but worried about losing ranking and leads?
It's probably one of the most important tasks you want to complete right the first time in order to keep your website rating and amount of internet leads constant. If you need professional help, please contact +92 (309) 514-8449 or set up a meeting with one of our website rebranding specialists immediately.
