Rebranding or natural falloff?
One of the side effects of our rebranding from RevaHealth.com to WhatClinic.com is that visitors who originally came to the site before the middle of August last year generally aren’t aware of the name change. Over the last few months we’ve been going back to visitors who didn’t successfully choose a clinic on their first attempt and asking them to come back and try again. As you can see from the chart above, those who were already familiar with the name change convert significantly better than those who weren’t.
There is of course a natural falloff in conversion rates, as you can see even in the difference between visitors from November and visitors from September, but I’d be inclined to attribute most of the step fall in return visitor conversion to the name change itself. It’s just another thing to keep in mind if you consider rebranding your own website.
Hi Philip,
Interesting blog post – with actual information so thin on the ground, most people are flying in the dark with respect to changing their brand name online or even just their domain name.
It looks like you’ve handled it really well. In order to get here, you’re obviously tracking the Actual visits but you’re only publishing the conversion rate. What change has there been to actual visits – even % or scale-wise (without revealing any hard numbers) ? That would be quite interesting. Ultimately of course, it is all about conversions.
I have three questions for the team @ WhatClinic.com.
1. I still get confused when I see Whatclinic.com and start talking about Reva Health (I did this just last night actually) – why didn’t you go with the “formerly Revahealth” tag like Aviva have been doing with Hibernian or Ask and Jeeves did when they merged/changed? You went directly for the clean break…
2. I understand branding just as much as most people – but SEO traffic is often about generics – so if you’re looking for a doctor in Dublin, should you need to care about the brand? This post makes a good argument for the brand…
3. I’m colour blind (well, deficient), like 1 in 7 men (it doesn’t affect women as much, apparently). I can’t follow your pie chart easily – it’s really hard to read (yes, i can remember the months in order but I can’t focus on any of the lines and work out which one I’m at) – just a point that’s very easily overlooked!
Hi David,
Just to be clear, the figures above specifically relate to returning visitors from a recent email campaign we ran, as opposed to all returning visitors.
When we went about rebranding the site we did plenty of research. Our experience certainly differed from what we would have expected. There were two real issues that I feel were largely due to the size in terms of distinct pages of our site.
Google removed RevaHealth.com pages from the index far faster than it replaced them with their WhatClinic.com equivalents, and when the WhatClinic.com pages did appear in the index, they only sometimes retained their SERP positions, i.e. the domain or page rank / trust wasn’t being passed on in all cases.
This meant we had some real up and down moments with our visitor numbers after the rebranding, with the lowest point being as much as 70% down from our peak. Thankfully we’re past all that now, but I’d say it took around 4 months in total from the rebranding for things to settle down.
In answer to your questions:
1. We did run the “Formerly…” tag line for around a month, but with so much of our traffic being from new visitors (over 80%) we found it didn’t make a difference to bounce or conversion rates.
2. This post doesn’t really say anything about the brand in relation to the conversion rate of organic traffic – it’s specifically about visitors we’ve emailed and asked to return. One of the effects we’re hoping for in relation to the brand / domain and organic traffic is increased click through due to a clearer understanding of the brand WhatClinic.com versus RevaHealth.com.
3. I’ve redone the bar chart with clearer labeling so hopefully it’s easier for you to read now!
Hi Phil
Ah, I didn’t realise it was just e-mail visitors. Thank you too for updating the bar graph – much better!
If you signal that the pages are removed, Google will remove them as fast as possible.
Moving SERP’s doesn’t really exist as a concept. Google will display the highest ranked page that exists in it’s indexed pages list. The new pages will obviously have 0/low authority in the beginning.
If we upgrade/move a site, we leave both running concurrently, even if on the same domain.
It can take a month for PR shaping from the most important pages (e.g. your home page and other hubs) to point down, and ideally you’d love some stability in this period, removing the old site and redirects once the new pages have taken a higher ranking – that would be my best advice if anyone wanted to go through the same process.
Removing all your old pages without having your new pages establish a SERP is a guaranteed loss of SERP/SE traffic in my opinion, until the new site gains all of the authority needed.
Hi David,
Given that one of our constant concerns about our site is duplication of content we didn’t feel that running the two identical sites side by side for any length of time was a good option.
We didn’t tell Google explicitly to remove RevaHealth.com pages wholesale, rather we used their Webmaster Tools change of address tool and kept both sites active, 301′ing RevaHealth.com pages to their equivalent WhatClinic.com pages, as they advise themselves.
Unfortunately for us it didn’t go quite as documented but for many others on the web it has gone much more smoothly. Again I’d say one of the primary reasons for this was the sheer volume of pages we have in the index. I’m sure smaller sites wouldn’t have exactly the same experience.
We’ll do a post someday soon about the whole experience, and what we would do differently if we were ever to do it again.
The duplicate site/content issue is a bit of a misnomer but I’ll discuss that off line
When you have a page that pops-up with a 404-error page, that’s a pretty good signal in it’s own right to Google to remove it. A dynamic 404 page that handled and sent the user to the most appropriate page without returning a 404 would definitely have smoothed things out.
A smaller site may have the same issues – especially if they don’t shape or share their authority out. Many just have the home page and/or the blog root as the high points of authority. 15% or less of authority jumps a 2nd degree – so even if you had 100 pages or 20 in the 2nd/3rd tier – these could all be abandoned.
It’s not the size – its the architecture.
At least your new architecture was able to spread this properly – a month isn’t very long at all given the sheer number of pages you have!
Well done guys!
I’m not sure where you got the idea that we had 404′d any pages. In fact, all the old RevaHealth.com addresses still work, with a 301 to their new WhatClinic.com address. Believe me it’s very rare that we’d let any page return a 404 by choice.