Ask An SEO: How Do We Shift Google From Our Old Brand Name to Our New One?

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3 days ago
3 min read

Article by Mordy Oberstein

A rebrand can take time to register in Google’s results. Here’s how to align assets, third-party mentions, and signals to support the change.

The question for this edition of Ask An SEO comes from a reader who’s trying to make their rebrand stick in search:

“Our company recently went through a rebrand with a new name. We’re seeing our old brand name still dominating search results, while our new brand barely registers.

What’s the best approach to transition brand equity in search from our old name to our new one?”

Having your old brand name appear on Google can be extremely frustrating. You just launched a new brand name, spent a lot of time working on it, and here you are stuck on the search engine results page with the old name.

It’s genuinely frustrating.

There are essentially three steps here:

1) Handle your own ecosystem.

2) Request changes to third-party sites.

3) Build up your new brand name so you don’t have to rely on No. 2 happening.

Aligning The Assets You Control

The first, and obvious thing to do, is ensure your new brand name appears consistently across all the assets you own.

Some of these places are entirely obvious, like your homepage. Obviously, you’re going to change how you refer to yourself on your homepage.

However, there can be a lot of nooks and crannies across your ecosystem that may still mention your brand’s former name.

This can include:

Title tags and meta descriptions.
Alt text.
Knowledge Base pages.
Structured data markup.
Unused social media accounts.
Employee bios (both on and off your site).

It’s a matter of crossing your i’s and dotting your t’s. If you’re a big brand with a broad ecosystem, this can be more complicated than it might seem.

Let’s imagine for a moment that what changed is not the main brand name but a product name or the name of a sub-brand.

There could be thousands of pages that you would never even think of that might reference the old naming.

In such a case, you should conduct an extensive audit. I recommend this in general, even if you are not a huge website – it’s so easy to forget a page that references your naming and that such a page even existed.

This should help ensure your own brand SERP is aligned with the new naming as much as possible.

However, there are still elements even on these SERPs that will need some help, such as your Knowledge Panel. For this, we need to think beyond your owned assets.

Align Third-Party Assets

Getting others to recognize your new brand name is a little tougher than just combing through your assets to ensure alignment (which, as I said earlier, might not be as straightforward as it may seem).

Getting third parties to pick up on your branding change is incredibly important.

The underlying goal or concept is: We want people to talk about you and to mention your new brand name when they do.

Within this task, there are things that are easier to accomplish and things that are much harder.

Start with the easier things. Getting these done will help you push areas that you have less influence over.

One easy place is author bios. If you, or anyone in your company, has contributed content to a third-party site (whether it be an article, webinar, podcast, etc.), there is often a bio that will mention, if not link to, your company.

Make sure these bios are up to date and reflect the current and only the current company name.