Your business’s brand is one of its most valuable tangible assets. A well-curated brand can foster loyal customers, improve the perception of your brand’s products and services and contribute to your overall success.
Unfortunately, not all brands withstand the test of time. After acquisitions, outdated designs and irreparable PR disasters, it can be virtually impossible for some businesses to move forward without a rebranding strategy.
Implementing a brand refresh can have plenty of benefits. However, from a digital marketing perspective, a business rebranding plan could affect existing strategies, such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing and your overall strategy moving forward.
In this blog, we share some actionable tips for a successful business rebranding with minimal negative impact on your digital marketing efforts. We look at:
• Understanding the Need for Rebranding
• How Rebranding Can Affect Your Digital Marketing Strategy
• SEO-Friendly Rebranding Strategies
Understanding the Need for Rebranding
To start, not all businesses need to rebrand because not all businesses need market repositioning.
A rebrand is about realigning your brand goals, values and target audience. When done right, a rebrand signals a brand evolution and how your business is changing to accommodate the ever-evolving marketplace.
One example is when Dunkin’ Donuts rebranded itself into “Dunkin’” in 2018. This brand refresh reflected the market repositioning and how it offered more than just donuts. In addition to the name change, its logo redesign featured its shorter name and a streamlined, modern aesthetic.
We recommend looking at your business’s current performance before deciding if a rebrand is necessary. Some of the signs your business is due for a refresh:
• Outdated Branding: If your branding looks old-fashioned or doesn’t reflect your brand evolution, it might be time for a brand refresh to one that resonates with your audience.
• Change in Direction or Focus: If your business has evolved or changed its products, services or target market since its inception, your brand might no longer accurately represent what you offer and may need a brand transition to reflect change.
• Negative Perception: If your brand has faced public relations issues or negative perceptions, a rebrand can help you distance yourself from past controversies and start fresh.
• Merger or Acquisition: If your business has undergone a merger or acquisition, a rebrand can help signal the brand transition and create a unified brand identity for the newly formed entity.
How Rebranding Can Affect Your Digital Marketing Strategy
As you implement your rebranding strategy, you may notice a significant drop in traffic and engagement on your website and social media accounts, as well as a drop on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs).
To mitigate this, it’s important to consider how your rebrand can affect your existing digital marketing strategy.
Here are some ways a rebrand can impact them:
Impact on SEO
Rebranding can significantly impact your business’s SEO efforts, both positively and negatively. When executed strategically, successful rebranding can improve SEO by refreshing a brand’s online presence, enhancing its relevance and aligning it more closely with user intent. However, if not carefully managed, rebranding can also disrupt SEO performance.
“When a business undergoes a rebrand, it may face challenges in maintaining its search engine rankings and ensuring consistency across digital channels,” said Ken Romero, Thrive’s Demand Generation SEO Strategist.
“This includes updating website URLs, refreshing keyword targeting and preserving brand authority established through previous SEO efforts.”
When a company rebrands itself, it may change its domain name or migrate to a new website platform. This can impact how search engines like Google see your website, impacting factors such as search rankings and organic traffic.
Social Media Marketing
Rebranding can impact your social media marketing strategy. Since a rebrand could change your business’ values and alignment, rebranding can influence everything from brand messaging and content strategy to audience engagement and platform selection.
Successful rebranding can refresh your social media presence, attract new followers and strengthen relationships with existing customers. However, it also poses challenges, including maintaining brand messaging consistency, managing audience expectations and navigating potential backlash from loyal followers.
SEO-Friendly Rebranding Strategies
Here are some rebranding tips to consider for your SEO efforts during a rebrand:
301 Redirects
Romero recommends using 301 redirects to maintain SEO authority. This technical SEO strategy automatically forwards users and search engines from your old URL to another. Users who recognize you with your old brand, click on old backlinks or bookmark your page may continue to search for your old website, so the 301 redirect sends users to the new page. This can preserve your existing SEO efforts and keep the user experience seamless. Through this redirect, you can reap benefits such as:
• Prevent Dead Links and Error Pages: These lead to higher bounce rates, leading to lower rankings. A 301 redirect ensures users are seamlessly transferred to your new URL, especially if they have bookmarks of your old pages or click on dead links.
• Redirect Link Equity: Creating a new URL without a redirect means rebuilding your SEO from scratch. In terms of link building, that means losing valuable inbound links you already have, which can negatively impact your search engine rankings. Through a 301 redirect, any backlinks pointing to your old URL will contribute to the ranking potential of your new pages.
• Update Search Indexes: Failing to redirect to your new URL means that search engines like Google see you as a totally new website and separate from your existing brand. Unless you want to start from scratch, placing a 301 redirect passes any existing rankings and relevance signals to your new pages, minimizing the loss of visibility and traffic from search engines.
• Update Your On-Page Elements: Romero recommends updating meta tags, headers and sitemaps to reflect the new brand identity. Aligning these elements with the brand’s messaging and value proposition can improve organic click-through rates and overall search visibility.
Audit Your Pages
Your website’s existing SEO value is linked to specific pages and the entire website structure. Auditing your web pages before rebranding can mitigate the negative impact on your SEO.
A comprehensive audit allows you to identify all existing URLs and assess their current SEO performance, including keyword rankings, backlinks and traffic. It also helps you spot duplicate content, broken links or technical issues on pages that don’t need to be redirected post-rebranding.
By understanding which pages drive organic traffic and perform well in search results, you can prioritize and ensure your business’ SEO value is maintained. This allows you to let go of low-performing pages and replace your old content with newer, better-written content.
Data Monitoring and Analytics
Regular monitoring lets you track key metrics such as organic traffic, keyword rankings and your backlink profile. Monitoring these can help you identify fluctuations or anomalies early on. If your rebrand impacts your SEO, you can quickly address any issues and implement corrective measures to prevent your existing SEO value from declining.
Consistent monitoring also provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of your SEO strategies post-rebranding. Based on your data, you can assess the impact of changes made during the rebranding process and make data-driven decisions to optimize your SEO efforts accordingly.
Inform Google of the Changes
“Inform Google of the change through Google Search Console to help index the new site appropriately,” Romero said. Google Search Console’s tools help with Google analytics and maintaining your site’s search traffic and performance on Google Search results. Depending on the changes to your website, you may need to do one or both of these steps.
You must submit an updated sitemap.xml file to help search engine crawlers find the important website pages on your domain. If you’ve applied the 301 redirects, there should be a list of URLs you’ve redirected to your new site. Not all URLs need to be on the file – just the ones that should be indexed. If you’ve changed your brand name, you need to update Google about the brand transition to the new domain using the Change of Address tool. We recommend following Google’s guide to move your site to a new domain.
Social Media Rebranding Tips
Aside from SEO, you should also consider how rebranding can affect your current brand visible on your social media accounts. Here are some ways to minimize the negative impact of a rebrand.
Create Consistency Across Platforms
Every touchpoint should reflect the same color schemes, typography and messaging, from social media profiles to website design and physical storefronts. A logo redesign, for example, can rejuvenate a brand’s image and create a unified branding strategy. A new logo shared across all platforms can signal a fresh chapter in your business while maintaining continuity.
When consumers encounter a brand with consistent branding across various platforms, they are more likely to perceive it as reliable and professional, even during your brand evolution, if your efforts are consistent. Consistency eliminates confusion and strengthens brand recall. Whether it’s a website, email newsletter or packaging, an effective logo redesign that is seamlessly integrated can reinforce your brand’s identity.
Use Different Platforms
Shifting the focus to different platforms, experimenting with new content formats and refining targeting parameters are potent strategies for invigorating business rebranding efforts. By diversifying platform presence, a brand can tap into varied audience segments and engage with them on their preferred channels.
Experimenting with new content formats injects freshness into branding efforts. Whether through interactive videos, immersive storytelling or user-generated content campaigns, exploring novel formats keeps the brand dynamic and resonates with evolving consumer preferences.
Rebranding Your Business? Let’s Show Off Your New Look Online
Rebranding can be a smart step to keep your business relevant in an ever-changing marketplace. By knowing these rebranding tips and understanding how your rebranding strategy can affect your digital marketing strategy, you can take steps to minimize its negative impact while implementing a successful market repositioning.
Planning a business rebrand? With Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, you can adjust your SEO, social media and other digital marketing strategies as needed with careful planning and execution. From managing your social media accounts to the more technical aspects of migrating to a new URL, our experienced specialists can assist in various meaningful ways. Let’s find an approach that works best for your brand, objectives and stakeholders.
Get in touch with Thrive today to discuss your successful rebranding strategy implemented with effective digital marketing plans.
