It is not uncommon for a young business to go through some changes and growing pains, and you may end up deciding to change the name of your business at some point. Perhaps you want to incorporate and you get told that your business name is taken or that it contains a word you are not allowed to use. Perhaps you were running a partnership and your partner has left the company, so now you decide that you want to have a different name. Alternatively, your business name could have been overly specific, leaving you deciding to pick something more general as your business evolves in scope.
Whatever your reason for wanting to change your name, it will leave you in a difficult position when it comes to marketing and branding.
Things To Remember When Changing Business Name
Firstly, if the name change is a major one, then it will mean that you probably need to buy a new domain name. This could negatively impact your SEO because you will be using a newer domain name with fewer incoming links. The search engines like ‘aged’ domains because they show stability. A new domain does not have that history and it does not have incoming links attached to it.
A second issue is the references to your company name in general. If the search engines see a pattern where, when people are talking about high quality coffee, your shop name gets brought up a lot, then your shop name will become, in abstract terms, related to high quality coffee. If your shop name changes, you will need to re-build that ‘link’ in the search engine’s databases.
You can mitigate the issues with incoming links if you keep your original domain name and use redirects to point all links to the new one. This will buy you some time to get all of the webmasters that you work with to update their links to the new domain – but it’s almost inevitable that you will find some webmasters have abandoned work on their sites, and that some will simply refuse to change their links, or won’t even see your mails. There may even be some directories that you have submitted to that have no way of having the links in them updated. So, if you opt to do a redirect, expect to keep your old domain name for a long time.
Conclusion
If you decide to change your business name, then use it as an opportunity to focus on SEO in general. Write press releases to coincide with the new branding, focus on social media marketing for a while, and get your most loyal customers to spread the word. This is a chance for you to make a fresh start, unencumbered by any mistakes that you may have made during your previous marketing. If you do it right then it could be a huge positive for your company, and a chance to bring in people that were previously not familiar with your business. Every change can serve as an opportunity for your business to grow. Visit https://scottkeeverseo.com/clearwater-seo/ for information.
