Changing business name from keyword to brand name, what are the effects on SEO?
-
I think it's best to give you an example to illustrate what I'm asking here.
Current Brand Name: Keyword Driven Brand Name (keyworddrivenbrandname.com)
New brand Name: KDBN (kdbn.com)
What will the effects of this change be. I'm slightly worried that we have lots of links with the anchor text "Keyword Driven Brand Name" and we rank very well for terms like "Keyword Driven" and "Brand Name".
I guess what I'm asking is, do we need to go and change all those anchors to KDBN and will this upset our search rankings. Or do we leave the existing anchors? But will Google see this as over-optimised anchor text and penalise our website?
Decisions decisions!
Also, should we leave the old brand name in our title tags, at least for the transitional period, i.e.
KDBN | Targeted Keyword | Keyword Driven Brand Name
Any help with this would be really appreciated,
Many thanks
-
That's a pickle!
Yeah, whatever you choose I might suggest making the changes gradually. Introduce elements one at a time instead of all at once. In this way, you might be able to preserve some of your established link equity and relevancy signals.
-
Thanks for your reply Cyrus,
Further to your advice, here's another problem, whilst re-branding we're also looking to build a completely new website to market the new brand. The new website will have a completely different structure and mostly different content.
Because of this, it's going to be hard to keep elements the same. Would you recommend changing the domain name over first and leaving the existing site on the new domain name for a few months and then updating the site to the new design? i.e. redirecting old pages to new
Many thanks!
-
While I can't say for sure, I'd say you're safer off keeping any existing anchors as-is. Changing existing links could have unintended consequences, and you don't know what the effect will be of keeping them the same.
As for your title tags and other site elements, if you are doing a domain migration, it's best to keep as many elements exactly the same as possible - at least during and in the first couple months after the transition. In this case, I'd ask if your visitors will recognize the new brand name, and if it makes sense to keep the old keywords.
-
If you have two separate domain names, I would continue to keep them separate and not redirecting one to another. The fundamental strategy I would choose is to gradually move company specific content to brandname.com and keep educational, promotional content on keywordname.com so use that as your thought leadership platform with very relevant links to brandname.com.
over a period you will see people searching for your brand directly going to main company website. People looking for your content will first go to keywordname.com, get educated and most likely gopto brandname.com. By creating your own brandname.com is a great idea since it will create your own traffic stream which is a great competitive advantage. A pure keywordbased domain name is vulnerable to a better SEO execution by competition so can't last forever.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site naming - longer tail with keyword or short but off-term - does it matter?
So, we've established that the actual domain name is not a big ranking factor for google. However your chosen domain & site name will feature in your content so I'm figuring it does matter indirectly. Eg given a choice between: bobsfidgetspinners.com, welcome to "bobs fidget spinners", we sell fidget spinners.... or spinnersfidget.com, welcome to "spinners fidget", we sell fidget spinners I'm going on the assumption that the former is better because it introduces more on-term content (as well as nicer branding). For the limit content that talks about your brand name anyway. Is this a correct assumption? Would it make any difference if the rest of the site content was on-topic (and good, obviously)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HSDOnline0 -
Hold Off on SEO Changes After Domain Migration?
We migrated our domain on April 4th. Our domain authority has dropped from 22 to 8. Traffic is down from 90 visits a day to 10. Search console has indexed about 120 out of 600 pages. I have been told it may take several months to recovers some element of domain authority. My SEO consultant has planned on implementing the following changes immediately: 1. Change in URL structure
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Build internal links (my site has very few).
3. Optimize URLs for specific keywords
4. Keyword optimization of URLs using Yoast.
5. Modify Schema Do we risk confusing Google further by making these changes until are domain authority and traffic has recovered? Is it safe to proceed with some "softer" changes such building internal links and keyword optimizing text whicl avoiding more disruptive changes such as re-writing URLs? Are we better off focusing on off site ranking factors such as link building and local SEO until domain authority recovers? How about only adding new content to the site such as blog posts and listings? To complicate matters the site is old and dated and we are working on a new UX design. So perhaps it would be better to launch the new UX at the exact same time as the onsite SEO optimization occurs. This could be less work and less disruptive. At the same time I would very much like to enjoy benefits of optimizing SEO now. Any thoughts????? Also, my domain migration has killed traffic. It is very concerning!! Is a 90% drop in traffic normal in the first ten days!? Thanks everyone!!!
Alan1 -
Old Website Build Effecting SEO
So this is a bit of a strange one. My latest website was built on a different domain, then transferred over (as opposed to being built on a subdomain). I was told that the domain which my site was built on wasn't indexed by Google, but looking at the Google Search Console I can see that the old domain name is showing up as the most linked to domain name of my current site - meaning it was indexed. The domain (and all of its pages) does have a 301 redirect to the new website home page (as opposed to their individual pages), but could this be causing me a problem with SEO? Additionally, my website has a sister (UK and US websites), both link to each other on the footer (which appears on every page). Could this be pulling my SEO efforts down if it is a do-follow link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Adding Video to Landing Pages-Beneficial SEO Effect in Terms of Links & Visitor Engagement?
I run a New York City commercial real estate in New York City. Lately, I have started to produce 30-second videos about property listings and neighborhoods. I have noticed that the engagement for these videos on Facebook is much higher that for text posts. Should adding these videos on our website (hosting them on Youtube) result in increased visitor engagement? Could there be a positive SEO effect such as more links and higher quality links? Anyone have any experience with this? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Do onpage named anchors play a part in SEO?
Hi Is having on page links from top to bottom etc using keywords as anchors a good methodology? Does it help the page for those words? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
Language Attribute - does changing it make a difference to SEO and Search?
I am an SEO newbie, but learning fast. 🙂 I am based in London, UK and have a website: www.twofourseven.co.uk. I noticed that the language attribute was set to 'en-US'. I work in London as well in international locations in the Middle East and Asia. Thinking of this I wanted to ask the experts if given that I am based in the UK, would changing the language attribute make a difference to search results? If so, would 'en' be better than 'en-GB', which might be too specific? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | twofourseven0 -
Why my own page is not indexed for that keyword?
hi, I recently recreated the page www.zenucchi.it /ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.html on the third level domain poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it by putting it on the home page. The first page is still indexed for the keyword poltrona frau brescia . But the new page is no indexed for that keyword and i don't know why ( even if the page is indexed in google ) .. I state that the new domain has the same autorithy and that i put a 301 redirect to pass his authority to the new one that has many more incoming links that did not have previous .. i hope you'll help me thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidoboem0 -
In-House SEO - Doubt about one SEO issue - Plz guys help over here =)
Hello, We wanna promote some of our software's. I will give u guys one example bellow: http://www.mediavideoconverter.de/pdf-to-epub-converter.html We also have this domain: http://pdftoepub.de/ How can we deal about the duplicate content, and also how can we improve the first domain product page. If I use the canonical and don't index the second domain and make a link to the first domain it will help anyway? or don't make any difference? keyword: pdf to epub , pdf to epub converter What u guys think about this technique ? Good / Bad ? Is there the second domain giving any value to the first domain page? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | augustos0