In this episode, we will be answering a listener question about how to maintain SEO when changing the name of a business and creating a whole new website.
I am joined by my go-to SEO source, Meg Casebolt.
You can connect with Meg at https://loveatfirstsearch.com/
To read the blog post on this topic referenced in this episode
Submit your questions for a future episode by joining us at http://www.joinfruition.com
In this episode, we will be answering a listener question about how to maintain SEO when changing the name of a business and creating a whole new website.
I am joined by my go-to SEO source, Meg Casebolt.
You can connect with Meg at https://loveatfirstsearch.com/
To read the blog post on this topic referenced in this episode
Submit your questions for a future episode by joining us at http://www.joinfruition.com
immediately go to the story that I am just. This person just can't get rid of me. They're like leave me alone, I don't want anything to do with your shit.
Meg Casebolt:When you and I had a really good time like recording that podcast, it was all pity.
Brooke Monaghan:Yes, exactly, you did it to be nice to me and since then you've realized what a loser and a just total piece of garbage I am. Welcome to another episode of Make your Business Work For You. I've got two new episodes for you today and in this one we're going to be answering a listener question. This is a question about managing or maintaining SEO when going through a rebrand or building a new website, and for this I pulled in Meg Casebolt. Meg uses she and her pronouns. I pulled Meg in because she is the person who I would go to if I had a question about SEO. Part of the promise of this type of Q&A episode is that I'm going to pull in people who I know are qualified to answer your questions. So we'll be joined by Meg. I'm going to share Meg's information in the show notes, as well as a couple of resources that she shared, but before we get into the episode, just a couple of reminders. The first thing is that you can submit your questions to the show and I will pull in an expert contributor to discuss a response to your question by going to joinfruition. com. In the month of October, so if you're listening to this live, that is right around the corner or here in the month of October 2023, you will be able to, for free, access the support tier in the Fruition community space, where you can get a guaranteed answer to your questions from an expert contributor, and you also get the full interview in video format as soon as it's recorded. So, in other words, you don't have to wait for. You don't have to wait for it to come out on the podcast. So the clip that you heard in the beginning of this episode, before we went into our intro here, was from that kind of extended interview, because I'm friends with most of the people who I end up on these calls with and we're just chit chatting and I include all of that in the extended video format. If we are beyond the month of October, then not to worry, you can come to joinfruition. com and join us in the support tier that would allow you to get those videos, and everyone can ask questions. So head over there and ask your questions. Finally, if you would like to support the show, please make sure that, if you have not already, you leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts and you share this episode with somebody who you know needs to hear it. It makes a big difference and I so appreciate you.
Brooke Monaghan:All right, let's get into it. When I started my business, I created a website that, over the past seven years, has gained some good SEO. I want to rebrand my business, including a name change, which would mean that I need to redo my website, but I'm nervous about losing any established SEO cred. My questions are: one, is this a valid concern? And two, who do I turn to for support to make sure that I'm doing this correctly? In other words, I get a little confused. Who do I hire for the stuff? An SEO expert? A website designer? A website developer? What's even the difference between all of those incredible people? So let's start with number one.
Meg Casebolt:Okay, so I'm grateful because you sent me this so I could prepare and I know the order in which the question was answered. So you want to rebrand your business, which is fantastic. If you already have some authority on your website, that's really great, right? Especially if the rebrand is a rebrand, not a pivot. If you're like this is the name of my business before I got married and now I'm married and I changed my last name, I think you and I talked about name changes, like if it's just a name change and you're not also adjusting your services, this can be a pretty straightforward process, but we will see a drop in your SEO because Google attributes your authority to your domain. So if you're at brookem. com versus brookemonaghan. com, like, google doesn't know that that's the same .com, that you're the same person. So what Google thinks about is what's the authority attached to that domain?
Meg Casebolt:I, before I rebranded my SEO agency to Love at First Search, I had it under a personal sort of superhero brand called Megabolt Digital and basically I took all the same information that was on my page and just went like here's the Megabolt Digital page. And then I took the domain and went now we're calling it Love At First Search. And when you set it up that way, when you migrate, when you switch the domain, but you don't move anything, you don't change anything, it's just the domain then there is a little bit of a dip in your SEO, as Google's like oh, it used to be called this, but now it's called this and the new name doesn't have that history.
Meg Casebolt:But if you hire the right person to make that change for you, it's really more of like a change of address form than it is a move, right? Like going to the post office and saying I was at the corner of Main and State and now I want my address to be one Main instead of one State, but you're not changing that much. So the post office can still send you mail. But often when people do rebrands they change a lot of shit too right when you're like I used to have this thing, but as long as I'm going through this rebrand process, it's not just gonna be, I'm gonna change my brand colors, it's also gonna be I'm gonna make a pivot. When that happens, we have to be careful about not just changing the domain, because if you're just changing the domain and you're saying all the mail that went to this address now goes to this address, you may lose a couple envelopes and stuff, but it's not like like Google still will understand if you're pointing all the same traffic to the same place, okay, you'll pick up some of those backlinks, you'll pick up some of that authority.
Meg Casebolt:But once we start to change the copy on the page, once we start to change the services on the page, once we start to go well, that blog post isn't relevant anymore, so I'm just gonna take it down. This is where you need to do, probably some sort of audit of what's working on your existing site so that as you make those changes, you can either maintain or improve the traffic that's already coming to your website. So I'm trying to come up with an example off the top of my head. I didn't prepare this much, but let's say that you have a blog that's like it's kicking ass.
Meg Casebolt:It's bringing in a ton of traffic for you and then you're like, well, that's not really relevant to what I do anymore, so I'm just gonna delete it while I'm going through this rebrand. Then, as you're, or, I'm gonna rename it and I'm gonna move it. If you don't set up a redirect, if you don't give Google like this is where you used to have this information and now it's here, here then Google thinks that it's gone forever. So if you're just rebranding and all you're doing is changing your domain, that actually isn't that complicated. You can go into your domain server. You can change your name servers.
Meg Casebolt:It's like maybe a 10 minute process for a web developer, for somebody who knows what they're doing and I'll talk in a minute about designers, developers, SEOs right, if you're redoing everything, then the first step is I want you to do an audit of what's working so that way you don't lose any of what you've already spent all this time creating this credibility.
Meg Casebolt:Right, take some of that information about what's working. You know you can go into your Google Analytics, your Google Search Console. You can hire somebody to help you with this, but take a look at what's working. What are your existing keywords? What are the pages that are bringing in traffic? And map out: on my old website, here's what was working, and I want to make sure that that information transfers over to my new website. And if there's a phrase that does really well for me on my old website, I want to make sure that that phrase appears in the copy of my new website. I want to almost like map out what was working and then make sure that each of the things that's working on the old website carries over into the new one.
Brooke Monaghan:So you're saying make sure that. So if you have a blog post that's performing really well, like, make sure that that blog post is still living under the or at least the keywords that you're using for that blog post, or like something related to that blog post with, like, the words that are working really well, is living on the new website.
Meg Casebolt:New website. And it's clear that it's gone. So if you're just going like, okay, I'm moving from WordPress to WordPress and I'm taking this you know this existing website, and just changing the URL of the domain, but everything else is fine, then you might be at like a site level, be able to be like well, it used to be ADC and now it's XYZ. com, right, that shouldn't be too problematic.
Meg Casebolt:[Brooke Monaghan] But if you're like, you're building a whole new site [Meg Casebolt] If you're building a whole new website and then you flip the switch and it goes from you know dead to alive. You're like Frankenstein, bringing this thing to life Right. When you do that, you need to be careful, because if you're like I'm just going to copy paste all the stuff from my old website to my new website without taking down the old website, then it's going to look like you're plagiarizing yourself. Or if you move over half of it but you're like I'll move over the second half later, then if you don't you know export, import correctly, then you could potentially like lose all the traffic for the things that haven't been imported.
Meg Casebolt:Or if you're like I was on WordPress but now I want to be on Squarespace and all of Squarespace blogs have like domain. com, slash, blog, slash this, and they import and all of the permalinks have changed, then it looks like it's all brand new content. So I'm giving you the worst case scenarios here because I do want to strike a little bit of fear of God into you when you're doing this and say hire a professional [Brooke Monaghan] yes, okay, I'm scared. [Meg Casebolt] Hire a professional. Because the timing of this is really important. When you turn the power off on one house and turn the power on on the other house, we want to make sure that the furniture has moved.
Brooke Monaghan:Right. Now I happen to know I'm going to keep this person anonymous, but I do know who submitted this question and I do know that in this person's case this is not going to be a pivot. This is going to be literally a name change and a domain change and like they might change some things on the website, but the website is going to stay. But I like that we are going into the other options because I am in the middle of a pivot, so I'm just like selfishly sitting here like, and then also [Meg Casebolt] Give me all the information.
Brooke Monaghan:[Brooke Monaghan] Yeah, I'm like I don't even have good SEO. So I don't know what I'm scared of, but keep going, keep going. I'm glad you're here. We're going to be okay.
Meg Casebolt:Let's talk about those three professionals that you could hire here. Okay, so this person specifically said I don't know who to hire. Should I hire an SEO person, a web designer, a website developer? I want to talk about the differences between those. I'm an SEO person.
Meg Casebolt:I care about what's the structure of your pages, what's the? You know, what are your permalinks looking like, so that Google can send them to the right places? How are things linked between them? What are all your keywords? I care about that side of things and like how quickly does your page load, so that way Google doesn't send to a page that takes eight minutes to load on mobile, right? I care about how the experience is for people coming to your website from search engines and I care about how easy it is to navigate, so that way Google's little crawler robots can can find what they're looking for.
Meg Casebolt:Before I was an SEO person, I was a website designer. As a website designer, I was like all right, I'm in WordPress and I need to make sure that this background color is the same as the brand colors and these words show up in this place and this image looks really clear. But I wasn't necessarily thinking about things like page speed load time and menu structure and like that kind of thing. I was like I want to make this beautiful and I want to make it something that people want to read. There's the difference. Some web designers know some SEO. Some SEO people can make things that are beautiful. There's not always an overlap here in the Venn diagram.
Meg Casebolt:Web developers aren't looking at how pretty things are. They are making sure that they work very functionally. Sometimes people are developers and designers. Designers make things that look beautiful. Developers make things that are structurally strong. It's like almost like an architect versus an interior designer. Architects can build you, you I used to work at an architecture firm, so I tend to go back and forth on this stuff. Architects can build you a blueprint. That is like almost like a structural engineer versus an architect, where it's like I want to make sure that this building stands up. I want to make sure that when people move through there are no doors into rooms that don't exist.
Meg Casebolt:Developers make things run smoothly. Designers make them beautiful and the SEO people make sure that there's a mailbox outside that has a phone number in front of it so you can find it. So for your question submitter. They might just need a developer to go into the domain hosting service and flip a switch from a custom name server to a different custom name server and bloop, within four hours it's all done. That developer probably costs you I don't know $100 to $200 an hour and it can be done and you don't have to think about it again and it's done correctly. If you're doing some of that other stuff where you're like, I want to make sure that as I move from this place to this place, you can hire someone like me an SEO person who will do that auditing and be like all right, let's also make sure that this moves here and this moves here, and let's map out the things and let's do the customer experience and all that.
Meg Casebolt:But then I'm not going to be the one who goes in and I'm like oh, let me re-code your website Right. Set up the HT access in the text. You know, robos. txt files. That's a developer that's my structure around me or die.
Meg Casebolt:So you might need all three of those people if you're doing a complete brand overhaul. You might need the SEO person to make sure that the traffic continues to move to your website. You might need the designer to make sure that it looks great, that it looks like something that people want, that it's functional, that the user experience is good, and you might need the developer to make it work really well.
Brooke Monaghan:Great. Okay, so I'm gonna recap what you said and make sure that I understand it, because then we can make sure that our listeners understand. Okay, so for the person who is submitting this question, who I'm pretty sure is just gonna be changing their name and thus changing their domain, that might be as simple as you go into where you ever like you're hosting [Meg Casebolt] Go daddy or whatever. [Brooke Monaghan] yeah, I use Hover, I think. Or you might have done it through Squarespace or something like that, I don't know. You're just changing, you're getting a new domain and you are just literally changing the domain that links to the existing website. There might be a dip, because Google has to catch up with the fact that this is now changing. It doesn't know that credibility that you built up around that old domain, Google has to catch up with the fact that all of that stuff is on a new domain. It's like you're having to rebuild that a little bit, but it's already set up in a way that you know works. You can expect it to catch back up. That right? Okay.
Meg Casebolt:Y ou definitely also want to say that old domain, everyone that sends traffic to that old domain, we want to send it to the new domain.
Brooke Monaghan:[Meg Casebolt] So you might have to set up a redirect.
Meg Casebolt:You might have to call it a parked domain. I can't remember all the different terminology because I'm not a web developer.
Brooke Monaghan:Got it. Okay. So if you need help with that, that's going to be a web developer, but you don't really need to worry that much. There's going to be a dip, but it's going to pan out and you know what you have to do. So you might just have to bite that bullet. But if you are pivoting or if you are rebuilding a totally new website, then what you want to do to not have all of your SEO cred vanish is audit what is actually working and what about your website is actually working well with the SEO?
Brooke Monaghan:What people are finding you, through what pages maybe they're landing on like what's working really well, and you want to make sure that you are incorporating that into the new website and an SEO person is going to be the person who's going to help you do that and help you map all of that out so that you can then bring it to your web developer, who helps you with the new website not designing the new website, but creating the structure of the new website to make sure that all of that is included and in the right places. I don't even know what the terminology is for that, because that's not what I do and that's not what Meg does, but they're going to bring it to life. So Meg is going to like SEO architect, design the whole thing, and then you're going to bring it to your engineer developer who's going to be like here's how we actually make that happen.
Meg Casebolt:Mm-hmm. Okay, yeah, and as you're doing that redesign, you're like I want to change the colors, I want to make the page look different, I want to make sure that the call to action buttons get to this place. That's when you might hire a designer. So the SEO person in our metaphor, it might be the architect, who's thinking about where things go. The developer is the structural engineer who makes sure that everything actually works and that the plumbing's in the right places. I mean, the architect, they're going to worry about that too. It actually wouldn't be the structural engineer, that would be the mechanical, electrical plumbing engineer. [Brooke Monaghan] But the point is [Meg Casebolt] The point. And then you bring in somebody who's like this is the wall color that I want, this is how I want this, this is where I want the bed to go right. It's three different things, but they all work together to make sure that you have a beautiful home.
Brooke Monaghan:Great, and it might be that there's some overlap, but at least now you know the questions to ask to find the right person, because if somebody says, yeah, I'm a designer, but I'm also, like, a developer, you can run this by them and say, ok, well, here's a situation with the SEO and here's what I've gotten from this audit that I've done, and I really want to make sure that all of this carries over. Do you know how to do all of that in the back end to make sure that, whatever. You know what questions to ask, to make sure that they are at the level that you need them to be at to maintain your cred.
Meg Casebolt:And if you're not sure, ask around, because all of us who are doing this know people who do it. Agencies are more likely to be able to have everyone in-house, but I will share a blog post with you so that you can put in here that I wrote that was like here are these different scenarios with lists to like here are my preferred developers. So if you need a developer, don't call me. But if you need someone to do the SEO audit, before you go to a developer, let's have a conversation. And even if you have a developer and you're like I just want somebody who is only focused on this, you can hire somebody for like an hour to just review your stuff right and be kind of in your back pocket.
Meg Casebolt:So, it doesn't have to be all the people.
Brooke Monaghan:Yeah and y'all. I'm just going to say this because sometimes I say like, oh, yeah, no, you're going to want this person to do that. And I see the people get scared because they're like I had to pay all of these people and whatever. It's not that expensive. People will pay like 10 grand to join a mastermind and are like scared to hire a lawyer. And I'm like, get your priorities in check. You know like you got to. It's really not that expensive.
Meg Casebolt:Yeah, you're going to hire me for like a half an hour to talk you through this for your own website for like 150, 200 bucks. Like it doesn't always have to be. You have to hire somebody to do it. Sometimes you want somebody to come up and be like here's the plan for you, and people will usually do that. You know.
Brooke Monaghan:And maybe you do have to pay a couple grand for one of these things, but like if the reason that you're in a bunch of programs that cost more than that is because you're trying to motivate yourself to do the work, and then you could just take that money and pay someone else to do the work and do it right and get it done. I'm just saying it might be easier. Like I am a coach so I, listen, I think that all of that stuff is great, but I'm just saying like sometimes you need to just go and find the person who's right for the job and just fork over 500 bucks and just get it done right and move on with your life.
Meg Casebolt:You don't need to know how all this works. You need to have somebody who can do it for you sometimes. [Brooke Monaghan] And focus on your own work.
Brooke Monaghan:Or maybe you heard everything that Meg just said and you were like, oh got it. Yeah, I know how to do all that. Great, perfect. Go for it. Meg, This was so much fun.
Meg Casebolt:Sorry, sorry for getting really deep, but it's a deep question, right, like there's a lot of different nuance.
Brooke Monaghan:Oh no, I took it there. I always take us there. That's the whole point of this podcast.
Meg Casebolt:So we don't need to gloss over any of this, we can just go dig right in.
Brooke Monaghan:Yes, that's what I want to do, because I know that people ask questions and then they hear like the most " of the three steps and you're like, but what about the 75 steps of step one that you didn't talk about?
Meg Casebolt:And like what are the variations and how is this different if this is the case?
Brooke Monaghan:Right, right, right. Okay so I'm going to link that blog post. If you want to go and find Meg, I'm going to put all the information in the show notes, including the link right to that blog post. I can tell everybody listening the reason that I hunted Meg down to answer this question and risked being annoying because I was convinced that I was being annoying which you're not alone is because I personally have everything that I don't know that much about SEO, but what I do know I learned from Meg's free resources. They're awesome, and if you're reading those and you're like this does not do it for me I am not the kind of person who wants to do this then just hire her and then she can do it for you.
Meg Casebolt:But that's pretty much how we work now. It's free resources and done with you support. I want people to understand sort of how this works, but not have to figure out how the whole thing is made.
Brooke Monaghan:Yeah, this was so much fun. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time and knowledge and wisdom, and I cannot wait to see you again.
Meg Casebolt:And now that I know that you're doing this, just shoot me a message or a voxer when you have another question and we'll just hop on and record it Now that I know to look for it now it'll be easy. I can't wait. I'm excited. All right.