Great marketers are always improving their websites. They update content, add pages, target new phrases and test new calls to action… They optimize.

But optimizing can only get you so far. Eventually, it’s time for a big change. The messaging feels off. The design looks old. The backend is clunky. Results are flat. Usually after 4 years, it’s time to change everything: the copy and code, the layouts and the look. Every pixel is reconsidered… They redesign.

But once in a great while, the identity itself needs an update: the name, the logo, the messaging, everything… They rebrand.

And a rebrand could mean a new domain name. This brings up some big questions and real risks. This is the biggie:

Can you change your domain without affecting SEO?

The short answer is no. Changing your current domain name changes the URL of every page on your website, which means that Google will recrawl, re-evaluate and reindex each page. This is one of the hidden costs of rebranding.

But if done properly, traffic will come back to pre-launch levels.

The goal: Preserve rankings and maintain search traffic

It is possible to minimize the SEO impact and recover completely. This is what success looks like in Analytics.

Note: I would show you this in GA4 but we didn’t have it set up prior to launch!

This is a recently rebranded company with a new domain but the same Analytics account. I’ve created two segments: organic traffic to the old hostname (orange) and organic traffic to the new hostname (blue).

You can see the drop as Google crawls, indexes and ranks the new URLs, and then organic traffic returns to its pre-domain change levels. In total, it took about seven weeks.

It is impossible to “transfer your rankings” from one domain to another. You cannot simply move your search traffic from one set of URLs to another. The best-case scenario is to take the hit and then fully recover.

The key is to mitigate the risks of long-term damage. To help you do that, we’ve created this guide.

This is not a guide for server administrators. We’re not covering the technical steps involved with setting up servers, updating DNS records and launching websites.

This is a guide for digital marketers. These are the steps that marketers and web development teams can take to get the greatest benefit and do the least harm. This is how to preserve your SEO and rankings when changing your domain name.

1. Vet your new domain
2. Back up your website
3. Make a list of pages with SEO value
4. Maintain keyword relevance
5. Make a page about the rebrand
6. Redirect the old site to the new site
7. Update all internal links
8. Link reclamation
9. Update Google Search Console (GSC)
10. Update your directories and social media accounts
11. Update key events in GA4
12. Update third-party tools
13. Update Google Tag Manager
14. Monitor search traffic

1. Vet your new domain

Before you begin the rebranding process, you’ll want to make sure that you’re selecting a quality domain name. You’ve probably had a lot of marketing-focused conversations already: is the name unique and custom? Does it make sense in the context of your products and services?

These are important questions, but you should also be using an SEO lens to vet your domain:

• Are there opportunities to have a keyword-rich domain?
  Do some research to narrow down some rich keywords and keyphrases related to your industry or business. Don’t force it, but if there is a way to incorporate a keyword that feels cohesive, it could benefit your website.
• Are you avoiding hyphens, numbers and double letters?
  You may think that hyphens and numbers improve readability or offer a unique domain name, but there are a few reasons many SEOs recommend avoiding them. Not only are symbols, double letters and numbers more difficult to remember, they can quickly be misunderstood or misspelled, decreasing traffic to your site and inadvertently sending leads elsewhere. Moz also states that the use of hyphens strongly correlates with spammy behavior, which may impact your credibility or authority.
• Is there a bad history with the domain, such as a history of abuse (bad or spammy backlinks), phishing or malicious activity?
  A bad history can negatively impact your credibility, authority and ability to perform well on search engines. Using tools like Moz, you can check your Domain Authority, if there are any spammy backlinks and health to gain more insight on the status of your new domain name.

Once you are confident in your new domain name, you can get started creating content to boost your new site’s traffic and rankings.

2. Back up your website

Website backups are essential for safeguarding your site’s data. Generally speaking, backups should occur every day, if not more than once per day. It’s especially important to frequently back up your sites (new and old) when going through a website redesign or rebrand.

Not only does this protect your data and reduce downtime, it gives you peace of mind while actively working on building a new website. Your users are still able to access your site with confidence and ease, and you don’t have to start from square one if there happens to be malicious activity, human error or some other mishap that interferes with your existing or new website.

3. Build a list of all of the pages with SEO value (not just your high-performing pages)

In any redesign, with or without a new brand and new domain, preserving your SEO is all about preserving URLs that bring in traffic and help you rank. While many content marketers will immediately focus on the most high-performing pages, it’s important to preserve a range of pages to prevent your traffic from taking a nosedive. This means three things:

• First, ensure that the new site has corresponding pages for each of the high-ranking, high-organic traffic pages from the old site.
• Second, make a point to search for often overlooked and forgotten orphan pages that may still have SEO value but don’t show up in GA or a crawl. Create corresponding pages for these as well.
• Third, confirm that the content on all of the new pages is just as relevant and keyphrase-focused as the content on the old pages.

If the old site had a page that ranked well and attracted visitors, but the new site no longer has that page, search traffic will drop. You no longer have a competitor (a page) in that competition (that keyphrase).

This is the main reason that website redesigns lead to lower organic traffic.

To find a prioritized list of high-performance URLs in GA4…

Go to the Engagement > Pages and Screens report. Create a comparison for “Medium includes Organic.” Here’s ours. I’ve excluded blog posts using a filter since those are typically lower priority.

And don’t stop with this mini-audit. Ideally, the new site has new pages targeting new phrases.

In reality, it’s common to deliberately exclude certain high-ranking pages from the new site. They’re old and irrelevant. The traffic wasn’t valuable. No one cares anymore about that content and those visitors because it wasn’t driving results. No problem. But make the decision intentionally. Decide together, document your decisions and set your expectations about post-launch organic traffic accordingly.

It can also be beneficial to use a sitemap crawler or link database, such as Screaming Frog or Ahrefs, to locate orphan or noindex pages. A site URL that isn’t your highest-ranking can still provide significant SEO value through incoming external links, internal links or traffic that isn’t picked up in GA4 for a number of reasons.

4. Maintain keyword relevance

Once you’ve compiled a list of important pages on your existing site, you can begin the process of repurposing and optimizing that content. If the content on those pages isn’t changing, you have less to worry about. But often, rebranding means new messaging, and new messaging means new content.

So of course some of these pages (i.e. the homepage) will be rewritten. But for the really important pages, those that promote the services and rank for the commercial intent phrases, the new copy should maintain the keyword relevance for those important phrases.

Remember to follow a hierarchical heading structure and write clear, concise and keyword-focused copy in your headings.

Use Google Search Console to find the phrases for which these pages rank…

Of course, you can use a paid SEO tool. But here’s how to do it with a free, more accurate tool that you probably already have set up.

Go to Google Search Console (GSC) and click on the Search results report. Click on the “Pages” tab to see all of the pages that rank and get traffic from search. Then click on the page to drill down into that URL.

Now you’re looking at the search performance for every keyphrase for that page. Here’s ours for one of our key pages.

If you rewrite the page, do your best to preserve the relevance for the phrases on this list, or you’ll hurt the rankings for that phrase on that page. That means:

• The primary keyphrase is in the title, header and body text (in this case, the primary keyphrase is simply the phrase for which the page has attracted the most clicks)
• The secondary keyphrases appear in the body text (in this case, these are the other phrases for which the page has attracted clicks)
• The primary keyphrase appears in the anchor text of internal links from other pages to the page
• The word count of the page isn’t significantly reduced
• Find more SEO best practices here.

Don’t worry about variations of grammatical forms and plurality. Google doesn’t care.

You can also use an on-page SEO recommendation tool, such as the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant or MarketMuse. Use it side-by-side with WordPress (or any CMS) to make the recommended changes.

In reality, it’s common to deliberately change the keyword focus of high-ranking pages on the new site. Some of these phrases just aren’t that important. In the tension between SEO and brand messaging, it’s common for messaging to take precedence.

Again, this is not a problem. But make the decision intentionally, document your decisions and set your expectations accordingly.

Next, create one new page for the new site…

5. Make a page about the rebrand

Imagine the new website is live. Two minutes later, someone searches for the old brand name. What will they see? Google will show the new site …but they’ll be confused. This isn’t the brand I was looking for.

To help people who searched for the old brand, make a page about the switch. It’s basically a press release launch announcement, but it’s optimized for the old name.

Put the announcement right in the title tag, and give it a relevant URL and meta description. If, for example, you’ve rebranded from “Legacy Brand” to “NewCo” people who search for the old name will see this. They won’t be confused. You’ve given them a path.

Navigational queries are supposed to have high clickthrough rates, right? Not if you completely removed the old name from the web without leaving a helpful trail behind.

All the URLs and content in place? It’s launch time!

6. Redirect the old site to the new site

When preserving SEO in a website launch, redirects are critical. When the domain name is changing, they’re even more important. The risk of missing something is even higher.

In a normal website redesign, some of the URLs can be carefully preserved. Google doesn’t need to reindex pages that didn’t move. The new homepage, for example, has the same site address as the old homepage.

Redirects are important for two reasons. First, you want to help Google find the new URLs quickly. Second, if there were links to any of your pages, you want to pass that link equity to the new pages on the new domain name.

If you don’t redirect, you’ll break links on other people’s websites and hurt your own site’s Domain Authority. (Read how to relaunch a high-ranking website)

But we’re here because we’re changing the domain name itself. So everything must be redirected. There are three approaches with three levels of difficulty and effectiveness:

• Bad, but easy: Redirect everything to the homepage. This takes almost no effort, but it’s not good for SEO.
• Better, but more work: Redirect directories of pages. It’s fast to take an entire directory (or folder) of URLs and redirect them to a single, relevant page. For example, if you’re changing the domain of an ecommerce site, you may choose to redirect the entire product catalog (every URL of every product) to the main product page on the new website.
• Best, but hardest: Redirect pages one by one. Audit the existing website and map those URLs to the URLs on the new site. Whenever possible, redirect a specific old page to a specific new page.

Which level of effort is right for you? It depends on two factors.

• Are any of these pages already ranking/attracting visitors? If yes, handle them with care.
• Are there other sites linking to these pages? If yes, handle these with care.

If the URL has no rankings and no links to it, the risk is zero. Redirects from pages that have no SEO value have no SEO impact.

Which of your pages has been linked to from other websites? For this, it’s best to use a professional-level SEO tool. But let’s go back to Google Search Console, which shows which of your pages has been linked to the most.

The report you’re looking for is under Links > Top linked pages. I recommend sorting by “Linking sites” rather than “Incoming links.” The number of websites that link to a URL is more important for SEO than the total number of links.

Redirects from these pages to new pages will have far greater SEO impact than redirects from other pages. So the idea is to pass that link equity specifically to pages that get the most benefit from the links, the corresponding new page or any search-optimized service pages.

Include any subdomains

It’s likely that there are pages, sections or even entire subdomains that you missed. We’ve seen clients who forgot to mention that they have tools and services built on subdomains, which of course will disappear unless they are moved and redirected.

Here’s a tool for finding subdomains . Run it. It’s free. You might be surprised at how many subdomains are attached to your primary domain and need to be moved and redirected.

If you did miss anything, it will show up in a post-launch audit. Check your 404 “Page Not Found” URLs in Google Analytics to see if you missed anything. This is one of several ways to use Analytics to see if anything is broken on your site.

7. Update all internal links

Your internal links, which link from one page on your website to another, are an important part of on-page SEO efforts. Internal links strengthen keywords by signaling value, support search engine crawlability and help users navigate your website.

It’s important that you update any instances of internal linking on your website- from the homepage to blog articles to lesser-used landing pages. If you have accurately set up site redirects, links that aren’t updated will still take users where they need to go.

But too many redirects can harm user experience and site speed, so updating links directly is often the best way to ensure that link is taking your users (and search engines) where they need to be. How much better is a direct link than a redirected link? Unknown and unknowable. But it’s likely similar to the loss of link equity known as “Page Rank decay” which many SEOs estimate at 10-15%.

Fortunately, there are many tools available, such as Ahrefs or Semrush, that can audit and identify any internal links redirecting to your old domain.

8. Reclaim your links

Some links you can’t update yourself. They’re press mentions, links in guest post author bios, image source links, etc. These require outreach.

The act of reaching out to editors and politely asking for a link (or unlinked mention) to be updated is called link reclamation. It’s something SEOs pay close attention to for good reason. A link directly to your website is better than a link that passes through a redirect.

So every reclaimed link is a good thing.

Use an SEO tool (SEMrush, Moz and Ahrefs are the most popular) to generate a list of links to your website. Or, go back to the free tool we used earlier, Google Search Console. Go to Links > Top linking sites.

If you have contacts at any of these companies, send them a quick note, letting them know about your rebranding and new domain name. Ask them politely if they wouldn’t mind updating the link on their website. They’ll understand.

If you don’t have a contact at that company, you can try a bit of networking. Use LinkedIn to find an editor. If you find someone, take your time connecting and making a polite request. They probably get a lot of spam outreach. But this isn’t spam. It’s just keeping things accurate and up-to-date.

Tip! To see mentions of the new brand, set up a free brand mention alert such as Talkwalker Alerts . It will send you a weekly email telling you where your brand was mentioned. It’s another link reclamation opportunity that affects SEO.

9. Update Google Search Console

Next up is informing Google of your move, so you can continue to measure and track important information.

Under “Settings” you’ll find a “Change of address” feature. This is how SEOs tell Google that their website has moved. Just like you do at the post office.

You’ll do this after you’ve set up your 301 redirects. And you’ll need to be the verified owner of both domains, ideally using the “Domain name provider” method. Once these steps are complete, enter the address of your new home and click the “Validate & Update” button. This is how you inform Google of your domain migration.

You’ll also want to build and submit your new sitemap. This doesn’t guarantee that Google will download or use the sitemap for crawling, but it does give a slight nudge.

You can do this by:

• Using the Sitemaps report
• Using Search Console API
• Specifying the path to your sitemap in your robots.txt file
• If you use RSS or Atom, WebSub can broadcast your changes to various search engines

Find more information on submitting your sitemap here.

10. Update your directories and social media accounts

There are probably a lot of places on the web that reference your old domain name. This is a quick reminder to go find them all and update them, links and logos.

• Local directories
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Twitter/X
• Facebook
• Email signatures
• UTM parameters

There may be many others. A quick way to find them is to search Google for references to the old brand, but exclude your own website from search results. Just search for your old brand using a negative site search operator (i.e. “orbit media” – site:orbitmedia.com).

Scan through, looking for accounts and pages that you can update. You can do this anytime before you update the domain registration and relaunch.

Google Business Profile

When a potential visitor searches for the brand (old or new) they will probably see a knowledge panel on the right side with a lot of info about the business. Take a look.

When you search for your brand, as long as you’re logged into the Google Business Profile admin account, you’ll see that you have the ability to make edits. This is another part of the SEO impact of changing domain names. It needs to be updated.

There are at least three sections here that need to be updated: the name, the logo and the website.

11. Update events and key events in GA4

Although it might be tempting to start fresh, and your web development team may tell you it’s easier, do not start new analytics accounts. It will make pre-post measurement difficult, which makes finding and addressing issues difficult.

It’s important to have the most up-to-date information in GA4 to continue tracking key events, traffic and rankings. First, you should change the account name and property names, so they won’t reference the old business name. Then do the following:

1. Create events in the Configuration section for each of the conversions, using the event name (such as generate_lead) and the location of the thank you page (page_location contains /thank-you/)
2. Mark those events as conversions with the little toggle on the list of events.

All done! Everything you toggle appears in the Reports > Engagement > Conversions report.

Update other relevant admin sections

After you’ve turned on tracking for important events in GA, you should also take the time to update any and all relevant admin sections on various analytics and marketing tools, like GTM, GSC and others.

12. Update third-party tools

The accounts for each of the tags in Tag Manager will need to be updated. So log into all of those tracking services (Hotjar, LiveRamp, NewRelic, etc.) and tell them what your new domain is.

If you don’t, the connection between that service and your website will break. You’ll stop getting data in that SaaS tool. You’ll have a data blackout until you fix it.

This is an excellent time to audit your “martech stack” and review everything inside your GTM container. It’s likely your site is running Javascript and you are paying for services that you aren’t actually using.

If so, you’re wasting both your visitor’s time (slower loading pages) and your money (monthly subscription services).

13. Update Google Tag Manager

As with Google Analytics, you should not create a new Google Tag Manager account. That’d be weird. One of the beauties of Tag Manager is that you can easily move the container, with all of its tags, over to the new site.

Hopefully, you are using a variable for your tracking code. It’s a best practice. If it’s a variable, there is no need to add it manually to every tag. Just click that little lego icon and reference the variable!

There may be other places in GTM where the old domain is referenced. For example, event tracking often references your domain.

Here’s an example…

I once set up event tracking to count offsite link clicks and track what people are clicking on to leave my website . It uses an event, which is triggered by a rule that references my domain. If the Click URL doesn’t include my domain name, it must be an exit click.

But if I change my domain, this event will fire for every single click until I update it!

If nothing else, take a minute to click around in GTM, looking at tags and triggers for instances of the old domain, then change the domain.

14. Monitor search traffic

Now is the time to monitor your traffic (and focus on your breathing). As previously stated, you should expect to see a dip in search traffic and rankings temporarily as you change your domain and the URLs of all of your site’s pages.

If you’ve gone through this process carefully, targeting similar keywords, redirecting traffic and ensuring your backend is a well-oiled machine, you should see your traffic bounce back to pre-launch levels. This won’t happen overnight, but should hopefully look close to normal after a few months.

Just be sure to keep an eye on any indexing issues, 404 errors and other SEO issues through alerts in GSC, GA4 and other reporting tools. Seek out any issues or room for improvement, make changes quickly and repeat. Soon enough, your traffic will be back to normal (and hopefully surpassing that of your previous domain!)

Beyond the website

Of course, changing the address of your website is only one part of a rebranding effort. Just as important is the communication, external and internal, that happens around the rebranding effort. Let’s wrap with some input for website owners from branding expert and friend, Charlene Gervais.

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Charlene Gervis, Co-founder of Bluegreen Branding “Like many major initiatives, a corporate rebrand often starts with a bang and ends with a whimper. Sometimes the end product is rushed or half-baked, which can cause disappointment, confusion, and lost opportunity. Or the work continues but the communications stop, leaving the impression the rebrand stalled or quietly died. Other times the work culminates with the outward expression (digital reboot, new marketing and sales materials) but stops short of the more existential components. How will the rebrand change how we hire, measure performance, and promote employees? How will it inform future product launches and ongoing brand stewardship? Addressing these questions ahead of time is often what separates great rebrands from meh ones.“

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