Eric Siu and Neil Patel walk through rebranding a website without tanking search traffic. Use 301 redirects, update internal links, keep URL structures the same, and submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. Crawl your site with Screaming Frog or Ahrefs first to catch problems before launch.
Today, we're going to talk about how to rebrand your website without losing organic traffic.
So with your website, if you want to end up changing your name, the simplest thing to do is a 301 redirect. And everyone knows this. You do a 301 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 301 redirect. You need to go and take all your internal links and change the URLs for them manually, because you don't want Google to crawl the link and then be like, oh, this is 301. Just hardcode the correct URL in there in the first place.
Well, 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 don't want to change things up too much. You want to make things fairly consistent, right? So, okay. All these 301s 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 spiders to crawl stuff. So using a tool like Screaming Frog, 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 Ahrefs or an Ubersuggest, whatever tool that you want to use. But Screaming Frog is great from a crawling perspective. Make sure you have consistent link structures. And also one of the most important things are your category pages, 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've got to keep those consistent. Most people, they start to lose track of all 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 brand. So make sure you do advertising campaigns around your new brand, emails, all that kind of good stuff. Take the omnichannel approach. So in that way you'll get brand queries for your new brand as well, in addition to the old one, of course, but then this way it starts carrying over and it 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 poo-poo 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 internal 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. Cause 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, you know, a couple months. Yeah.
And last but 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 site 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're submitting the sitemap to Google Search Console. Make sure that they're able to crawl your site. Your server is 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 and I come September, check out marketingschool.io/live, and we'll catch you tomorrow.
