Digital Marketing & Rebranding Hell: Mad as a Scientist in the World of SEO

Going through a rebrand? You may be about to enter the world of mad science, digital marketing & rebranding hell.

The good new is: you don’t need to be a mad scientist to preserve website traffic from digital marketing and SEO during a rebrand.

The process of rebranding provides a wonderful opportunity for creating a forward momentum in your business and in order to preserve your website’s traffic, you will need to consider a 301 redirect strategy.

To get an idea of how you create a successful 301 redirect strategy and survive a rebrand, check out the journey of PrixCar Services.

PrixCar's Mad Science Journey of SEO, Digital Marketing & Rebranding

In 2012 PrixCar Services Pty Ltd acquired Toll Auto Logistics and Autotrans Express to deliver fully integrated, end-to-end supply chain management services for the Australian automotive industry.

This acquisition brought the arrival of PrixCar Transport.

Several years later, PrixCar Transport has become Australia’s largest, fully integrated service provider for build, storage and distribution of automotive and high & heavy machinery.

From an online perspective, PrixCar Transport is arguably the dominant player in the market.

The transition from Toll Auto Logistics to the PrixCar brand wasn’t necessarily smooth sailing.

Having been involved in the growth of the Toll Auto Logistics brand online, any rebranding exercise needed to be done with caution.

At risk was the substantial search traffic base we’d developed.

Here’s an insight into how we addressed search traffic, overall digital marketing & rebranding through the use of 301 redirects.

301 Redirects to Change Page URLs

According to the Google Search Console Help page:

“If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommend that you use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page. “

So, if the rebranding involves a simple change in the primary domain name (E.g. http://domain1.com to http://domain2.com), it is entirely possible to use this redirect strategy to automatically instruct the search engines to treat any instance of http://domain1.com as a redirect to http://domain2.com).

If using WordPress, a freely available plugin like Simple 301 Redirects makes this really easy.

Assess the Inbound Traffic Patterns prior to a Rebrand

Before you jump right in to creating 301 redirects (forwarding one URL to a different URL), it’s important to assess your site’s analytics.

For large sites, identifying each and every page and setting up a redirect can be quite a lengthy process. If time is of importance, you may be better off applying an 80:20 approach to deciding which pages to redirect for “go-live”.

Take a look at the landing pages that lead to 80% of your inbound traffic. These are the pages that you might want to focus on first. By identifying the best performing pages, you can save a lot of time and resources.

Pages or blog posts that didn’t receive a visit in the last 90 days can probably be left for another day).

If you any active email campaigns, affiliate links or backlinks that may be affected by any redirects, make sure your links are current and are forwarded to the correct destination page.

Create 301 Redirects

You have two options when creating redirects: 301 (move permanently) and 302 (move temporarily). During a rebrand, you’ll most likely use the 301 redirect.

Don’t redirect internal links.

Instead, take the time to manually change internal links so that they point directly to the intended page. This is commonly an area in which link juice can be lost as search engines will not like the unnecessarily, complicated journey of an internal link.

Check all existing image links and associated names. Be certain that images on a page use the correct URL (and not a redirected one).

While you will use the 301 redirect for your rebranding needs, ideally you will want to eliminate all redirects within 90 days or so. This will ensure the streamlined communication between search engines and your site.

In order to support PrixCar in their digital marketing & rebranding process we prepared a 301 redirect strategy for their site.

By creating this strategy, we were able to preserve most backlinks and traffic arriving from social media, email marketing and anything else that was shared before the rebrand.

Preparing your business for a rebrand? You’ll want to contact us today to avoid the digital marketing & rebranding hell you might be unprepared for.