Will Rebranding My Company Hurt My Clinic’s SEO?

Will rebranding your company harm your SEO? This is a question I get asked all the time, and what we're diving into on this episode of the Propel Your Practice Podcast. 

If you're a clinic owner looking to get more traffic to your website and improve your online presence, then you're in the right place. Whether you're just getting started or had to practice for years, we provide chiropractors, physical therapists, and other clinic owners with actionable digital marketing strategies, including local SEO and effective website best practices, to help you propel your practice’s online presence. 

On the Propel Your Practice Podcast, you'll learn simple and actionable solutions to help your clinic rank on Google and beat your competition. 

This podcast is presented by Propel Marketing & Design and I'm your host, Darcy Sullivan. Today, we're talking all about rebranding and SEO. 

Spoiler alert, I'm just going to go ahead and let you in on the secret. It's not the rebranding itself that overly impacts SEO, it’s how you handle it. And the impacts could be positive or negative, depending on the elements you put in place when you are doing the rebranding. 

So that's what we're diving into today. We've had questions come in regarding rebranding, regarding renaming, regarding this, that, and the other. 

A few weeks ago, we did a podcast about how to create an SEO friendly company name for your clinic. You can jump back and listen to that if that is something that you're considering, but on today's episode, we're specifically talking about rebranding. 

Now, rebranding is different than doing a website redesign. We will be discussing some elements of your website, because it's hard not to talk about those when you're talking about rebranding, but it's a different animal unto itself. 

So, in a couple episodes coming up from now, we will discuss creating a new website and items that you need to take into consideration from a content and SEO standpoint.

And today, again, we're talking more about rebranding, and again, it's not the rebranding itself that impacts SEO, it’s how you handle it. 

So, when somebody comes to me and they say we're nervous, we want to rebrand our company, but we're afraid it's going to harm our SEO, the first thing that I do is I ask them a couple questions.

I ask: 

• Why do you want to do the rebrand? 

• How big of a rebranding are you going to do

• What outcomes are you looking for from the rebranding

• And, what's your timeline? 

And these questions help us really outline all of the tasks that are involved with the rebrand. 

So, why do you want to rebrand? 

Well, there's tons of reasons why people might want to rebrand, right? They might want to update the brand. They might be trying to target a new audience. Maybe they're a chiropractor and they're moving from being a sports chiropractor into more family chiropractic. Maybe they're trying to target a new area. 

You know, we talked about this, again, on how to change an SEO-friendly company name. 

If you were a chiropractor and you had picked a city name to include in your company name and now, you're trying to expand your area, that can be an issue. 

Or maybe you purchased the company or the company was handed over to you and you want a different overall positioning strategy. 

All of those things come into play when it comes to rebranding. You want to make sure that, overall, the new content on your website and your overall online presence, along with when somebody walks into your organization, reflect the new branding that you're going after. 

So, by first asking yourself those questions, it will help you outline the steps that you need to include. 

So, what is the end result that you're really, overall, hoping for? Because, if it's to connect with a new audience, you want to make sure that you've already clearly defined who that new audience is and how you're going to target them. 

So, in the example that I mentioned earlier, if you are a sports chiropractor but you want to move into family chiropractic, how have you clearly identified that new target audience? 

We did a podcast called How to Attract the Right Audience to your Website and Social Media. If you haven't done that exercise and clearly identified the buyer personas that you're trying to target, you want to take those actions before you start the rebranding process. This will help you not only from an SEO standpoint, a content standpoint, but an overall marketing standpoint. 

We also have a really great resource that we’ll include in the Show Notes, of drafting out those buyer personas, or deciding and determining who your actual target audience is. 

Once you have that element intact, then it's time to ask the question: can you do it in stages? Do you need a plan, or is it something so small with rebranding that you're just, you know, switching out a logo and changing a couple colors around on your website? 

That doesn't require a long, detailed out plan, but other bigger rebranding projects do. 

If you are in the middle of rebranding your clinic and you would like further assistance from a company like us, please feel free to reach out to Propel Marketing & Design. You can always visit our website, propelyourcompany.com and click on Book a Discovery Call, where we can go into more detail about our suggestions for a big rebranding project and how it can help to really amplify your SEO. 

But back to today's topic. If you have the ability to gradually go into the rebrand, there might be some steps that you want to take earlier on to help you get in the right framework for it. 

Let's look at an example of that: Let's say that you are going to completely switch the brand of your company into your chiropractor, but you're not switching the name of the company today. You might wanna start to consider, if you're doing YouTube videos, to stop wearing the company logoed shirt that maybe you were wearing in previous videos and maybe just do a solid color shirt, so you wouldn't be promoting the brand that you were or currently are. 

It would allow you to move in the direction of being able to promote the new brand that you're becoming and, in that instance, when you go on to the video, you could say, “Hello, I'm Dr. so-and-so,” instead of, “Hi, my name is fill-in-the-blank, with company fill-in-the-blank.” 

If you're just referring to yourself as you, versus you and the company that represents the company name you're gonna change, that gives you content that will help- gradually help- you make that move over. 

Other things to consider are photos on your website. If you're doing a rebranding, do you need new photos or are the photos on your website going to represent the brand that you're becoming? 

Once you have an idea of a complete list of everything that needs to be tackled with your rebrand, then you can start to timeline everything out. 

So, let's look at a couple examples because, again, there's gonna be a big difference between doing a small rebrand versus a larger rebrand. 

So, on the smallest scale of things, let's just say all you're doing is switching out your logo and you're switching out some colors, your color scheme on your website, on all of your marketing materials… 

Well, taking the time to flip that logo and make sure that on every single one of your social media sites that you've updated that to the new logos, which have your colors, that only take a couple of hours. I mean, not even, right? You can get that done in an hour, easy peasy. 

Is that gonna affect your SEO? Probably not. But it can if you're not taking it into account SEO. Even for images, you wanna make sure that you're optimizing them, that you're adding alt text, that you're sizing them appropriately, and that they're a good representation of the brand that you're representing. 

Now, that's simple, right? A small rebrand of that type should really have little to no impact on your SEO. 

But then there's usually a larger rebrand that's happening, and if you are doing a larger rebrand, you have more things to consider. 

The cons of doing a larger rebrand without having a complete plan in place are that online, you can have mismatched listings. People won’t be able to find you. You could lose the recognition that you've tried to have and grow over the past years. You might even lose customers or website traffic. 

But when it's done correctly, you can connect with the right audience, which might be, again, a different audience than your previous audience was. It can allow you to have a stronger brand. You can have a stronger SEO, better search rankings, better content marketing plan. You can improve your public image and you can help differentiate yourself from other companies. 

We're gonna go over some tips for rebranding without losing your search engine ranking, but before we do that, I wanna mention if you haven't already, please be sure to check out our free online training the Five SEO Secrets to Owning the First Page of Google Without Buying Ads. You can do that by visiting propelyourcompany.com/learn. 

If you are not familiar with everything that goes into SEO, it's a really good place to start by taking that free workshop. 

So, we already gave the example of if you were just doing a small rebrand, that it was just the company color and logo- again, not a big effect when it comes to SEO. But what if you're taking it up a notch? 

What if you are maybe just doing a new tagline and you're trying to target a new demographic? For example, let's say you were the chiropractor who was a sports chiropractor, and now you wanna move into family chiropractic. 

You're gonna be targeting a new audience. So first you wanna go through that exercise of identifying who your new audience is. Then, you want to re-examine the current content on your website. You'd wanna do a content audit to find if the website clearly matches the brand that you're trying to become? 

If, in that example, your images on the website didn't match the images of your new clientele, you'd wanna start to switch those images out. If you had old content that was driving traffic to your website, you have to ask yourself- do I keep this content if it's not going to attract the right audience? 

The answer is probably no. 

But if the answer is no and you want to remove that content, you have to realize that, yes, your website traffic will go down and there's a right way and a wrong way to remove content from your website. 

If you are removing content from your website, usually you want to do what we call a 301 redirect. For instance, if you were, if your website was yourwebsite.com/page-five. And page five- you no longer want it to exist, you don't want somebody to get an error message, a 404-error message, when they land on that page. 

Instead, you'd wanna do a 301 redirect to direct it to something that's more relevant. In some cases, this is either your homepage or a general services page. If it was a blog post that you have a better blog post for, you'd redirect it to that specific unit. If it was generalized information, like on a blog post, you might then just redirect it to your home blog. 

But, if you are doing a new tagline, a new demographic, then you wanna map out what content are we gonna start to create to attract that new audience? In this case, you probably will see some fluctuation. If you're removing content that was previously driving quality traffic to your website, you will see a dip. 

Now, if you want to do a slower transition, for example, we've seen it work well where people target the new demographic while keeping the content on their website in part geared towards their old audience. 

So, what does that look like? Well, it might look like switching out the images so that they relate more towards your newer audience but at the same time, maybe under- if you were a chiropractor- under your Conditions pages or Services pages, keeping some of that old content until you've got better content to override the old content. 

Now, if that is the situation, you're in, again, go ahead and map out- okay, what are- if I'm a chiropractor and I'm switching to family chiropractic- do I need to put together content on prenatal? Prenatal chiropractic care? Do I need to put together content on infant chiropractic care? And start building out that new content. 

You can do that gradually, but again, it's better to have a plan. 

Now, most people, when they want to know about how a rebrand is going to either harm or help their company, or when they're doing a major overhaul, a complete rebranding, where they are changing their name; which, again, if you're considering changing your name, go check out that podcast we did about picking out an SEO friendly name where they really want to differentiate themselves from the brand they were previously. 

If that's the case, again you want to go through and identify who your new target audience is. But you're going to have a longer laundry list of things that you need to do for the overall rebranding process and you're going to want to timeline those out. 

Are you getting a completely new website? Again, we're talking about websites here, but this isn't an episode that's solely devoted to websites. We'll be doing a podcast coming up soon and specifically about what to consider when you're doing a brand-new website. 

But here, for your rebranding, you want to make sure that you have a full list of all marketing materials that are going to need to be updated- whether they're print, whether they're digital, whether they're anything and everything. 

You also want to plan that gradual adjustment, if you can. So, if you launch your new website, I always suggest at the beginning of the transition, when you launch your new website, that down towards the bottom of the homepage or somewhere maybe even the footer that you mention previously that your company was named fill-in-the-blank. 

You know, that you go through a whole launch of the rebranding. This could include everything from doing a press release, which I highly recommend when you're doing such a big rebrand. It would include, again, updating all of your social media to reflect your new branding. You've got business cards, you probably have T-shirts that need to be ordered, or whatever your team members are wearing. 

You also need to make sure that all of your online listings match the new company branding that you, if you change your actual URL, that, again, that you have a full list of old URLs and they're mapped out to match the new URLs. 

And, of course, you want to make sure that you let Google know, along with all of the other online listings. 

So, as we move forward, like I mentioned, a couple upcoming podcasts will include local SEO, what to do when you're relocating, creating a new website, cleaning up your online citations. 

We'll be talking a lot about AI. We'll be talking about your Google Business Profile. We'll be talking about keyword research. We'll be talking about Google Analytics.  

We've got a lot of great stuff lined up, but if there is something specific that you're interested in hearing, please, please, let us know. You can do so by finding us on Instagram @propeyourcompany and dropping us a line. 

Send us a DM. Let us know if you enjoyed this episode. Please share it with a friend, a colleague, or leave a review. But I really want to circle back to that it's not the rebranding itself that impacts SEO. It's how you do it. 

So, make sure that you have a plan in place, that you have outlined everything that's gonna need to be updated, that you have the resources aligned with who's gonna tackle what and when it's gonna be tackled, and see what you can do gradually and then what has to be done all at once. Good luck and happy rebranding. 

Well, hey, before we head out, I want to invite you to join in on a free masterclass I put together on the Five SEO Secrets to Owning the First Page of Google Without Buying Ads. You can find a link to sign up for this free masterclass in the Show Notes for this episode or by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. 

During this workshop, we do a deep dive into strategies to help you improve your online presence. Including your Google Business Profile, that's what used to be called the Google My Business listing and what controls the Google Maps section, along with how voice SEO plays a big role in today's search and where you should be focusing your efforts online for the biggest impact.

All right. Well, that's it for today. Again, you can join the masterclass by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. And if you have a topic that you would like to hear on an upcoming episode of Propel Your Practice, please send it in by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/podcast-topics or looking for the link in the Show Notes. 

Thanks so much for your time. I'll talk to you soon.