Lots of companies have rebranded to update their image and appeal more to their target audience.
But rebranding has lots of unpredictable consequences, like changes to search engine rankings, that can be devastating for businesses.
Take Looka, for example. Sixth months ago, the AI-powered logo-making service rebranded from LogoJoy to Looka and lost 80% of its organic search traffic.
Organic traffic accounted for 50% of the company’s revenue, so losing it was a huge blow. Looka had to lay off 32 of its 40 employees and is still trying to recover from the huge dropoff in traffic.
Dawson Whitfield, Looka’s CEO, recently told BetaKit that the company only expected a 20% or 30% drop in organic traffic after the rebrand, which just goes to show how unpredictable organic search traffic is.
It’s impossible to predict how a rebrand will affect search engine rankings
One of the key takeaways from this story is that it’s impossible to predict how rebranding your business will affect search engine traffic.
As Econsultancy points out:
No two rebrands are ever the same and Google is constantly changing as well. What others have reported in the past when changing their domain names might or might not reflect what another company is likely to experience. Knowing this, businesses are wise to consider more extreme worst case scenarios.
Just because other businesses in your industry have changed their domain names successfully doesn’t mean that your rebrand will go smoothly. You have to consider and prepare for the possibility that your organic traffic will take a nosedive after you rebrand.
As the saying goes, better safe than sorry.
Don’t jump headlong into a rebrand
Another thing that businesses can learn from Looka’s mistakes is to complete their rebrands in stages.
Looka switched their domain name and made changes to both their service offerings and website at the same time. With all those changes, it was hard to know what was responsible for the drop in traffic.
Marketers have speculated about why their traffic dropped, and have come up with a few possibilities:
- Looka changed their site architecture at the same time as their domain name, something Google warns against
- The company removed or changed URLs responsible for a large portion of their traffic
- The new content on Looka’s site related to their expanded service offerings caused a drop in traffic
- The change from Logojoy to Looka caused their rankings for logo-related searches to drop
At the end of the day, though, Looka will never know why their traffic tanked because they made too many changes to their site simultaneously.
If Looka had made slow, incremental changes to their website, they may have been able to identify which elements of the rebrand were causing a drop in traffic and fix them before the damage was done.
To head off a disaster like the one Looka experienced, businesses should go slow with their rebrands and take things one step at a time.
Consider whether or not you really need to rebrand
Some businesses really do need to rebrand, but Looka probably wasn’t one of them.
After Looka rebranded, many people commented online that LogoJoy was a better name that created clearer brand associations.
So before you take the plunge and rebrand your business, make sure to test out the name change using focus groups and surveys.
You might just find out that you don’t need to rebrand after all.