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:
- Handle your own ecosystem.
- Request changes to third-party sites.
- 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.