We have merged or are rebranding
Two firms are becoming one, or the firm is changing its name, its domain, or both. The designers are busy with the logo and nobody has yet asked what happens to twenty years of search visibility, the reviews under the old name, and the clients who will search for a firm that no longer exists. This page is the sequence that moves all of it across without losing it.
A name change done well costs a few weeks of slightly lower visibility. Done badly, it costs a decade of authority, and the loss is not visible until three months after the launch party, when the enquiries stop.
Trusted by firms including
What is actually at stake
The brand work is visible and the migration work is not, which is why the migration gets left to the last fortnight. Six things carry the firm’s online value, and each one can be lost in a different way.
- The rankings attached to the old domain
Years of links, mentions and history point at the old address. Google will transfer most of that to a new domain if every old page redirects, one to one, to its equivalent, and keeps doing so for years.
Lost by: redirecting everything to the new home page, or letting the old domain lapse. - The reviews under the old name
Google reviews belong to a Business Profile. A profile can be renamed for a merger or rebrand with the right documentation and keeps its reviews. A new profile starts at zero.
Lost by: creating a fresh profile “for the new brand” and closing the old one. - Searches for the old name
Clients, referrers and the local press will search for the old firm for years. The firm needs to be the first result for its own former name, with a page that explains the change.
Lost by: deleting every mention of the old name, so a competitor’s “formerly” page ranks for it instead. - The fee earners’ own visibility
Solicitors are searched for by name. Their profile pages carry rankings and links of their own, and their LinkedIn profiles point at the old firm.
Lost by: new profile URLs with no redirects from the old ones, and LinkedIn left as it was. - Listings and citations
The Law Society, the SRA record, legal directories, local directories, the Chambers, the Chamber of Commerce: dozens of places state the firm’s name, address and phone. Mismatched listings confuse Google about which business the profile belongs to.
Lost by: updating the website and nothing else. - Email and tracking continuity
Old email addresses on which referrers rely, the analytics history, the ad accounts and their learned data, the call tracking numbers in use.
Lost by: new accounts for everything, so the first year of the new brand has no baseline.
The sequence
The order below is for the full case: new name, new domain, new website, merger of two firms. For a simpler rebrand, skip the steps that do not apply; the order of the rest still holds.
-
Eight to twelve weeks before
Inventory everything the old brands own
Before a decision is made about what the new site will contain, know what the old sites contain and what each page is worth. A full crawl of every domain involved, matched to Search Console data: which pages get impressions, which have links from elsewhere, which produce enquiries. In a merger, this is two sites and two sets of data, and the overlap between them is where the decisions are.
- Every URL on every domain, with traffic, links and conversions
- Every Business Profile, with review counts and who has owner access
- Every listing and directory entry, and the login for each
- Every ad account, analytics property and tracking number, and who owns them
-
Six to eight weeks before
Map every old page to a new one
The redirect map is the single document the migration depends on. Each old URL gets one new URL that serves the same purpose. Where two merging firms both have an employment page, one new page replaces both and both old ones redirect to it. Where an old page has no successor, it either gets one or is deliberately retired, in which case the redirect goes to the closest relevant page rather than the home page. Nothing goes to the home page in bulk; Google treats that as a soft removal and the authority does not transfer.
Build the new site’s structure from the map, not the other way round. The structure a designer proposes rarely has a home for the old firm’s best-performing guide, and the map is how that gets noticed in week six rather than on launch day.
-
Four weeks before
Prepare the things that take time to change
The SRA needs notifying of a change of name or a merger, and the new name must be approved before it is used in publicity; the SRA’s rules on firm names apply. The Law Society listing, the directories and the Chambers of Commerce all have their own lead times. Google Business Profile name changes for a rebrand need supporting documentation and can take a fortnight. Email domains need setting up with the old addresses forwarding indefinitely. None of this is marketing’s glamour, and all of it has to be ready for launch day.
- SRA notified; new name cleared for use
- Business Profile rename requested, with the documents
- Directory and listing updates scheduled for launch day
- New email domain live; old addresses forwarding
- A “we have changed our name” page written for the new site, naming the old firm or firms, with the reason and the people
-
Two weeks before
Build and test the redirects on a staging copy
Every line of the map tested before launch: old URL requested, new URL returned, one hop, status 301, no chains, no loops. The new site crawled with the old URLs as the starting point. Analytics and tracking installed on the new site and verified. Search Console set up for the new domain and the old one still accessible. The old firms’ key referrers told the date, personally.
-
Launch day
Switch, redirect, tell Google, tell everyone
The new site goes live. The redirects go live at the same moment. The Change of Address tool in Search Console is submitted for each old domain, which tells Google explicitly that the move is deliberate. The Business Profile rename goes through. The listings update. The announcement goes out: the website page, a LinkedIn post from every partner, the regional press, an email to clients and referrers from the managing partner, and the “formerly” line added to the footer and the office pages. Every fee earner updates LinkedIn the same day.
-
The first month
Watch the crawl, fix what it finds
Search Console for the old domain shows redirects being followed; for the new one, pages being indexed. Rankings for the main terms will wobble for two to six weeks and should return to roughly where they were. Reviews should still be attached. The old name should return the new site as its first result within days. Anything that is not happening gets fixed that week, not at the quarterly review.
- Daily: crawl errors, redirect failures, indexing of the new pages
- Weekly: rankings for the top terms and the old firm’s name; review count on the profile
- Monthly: enquiries and files against the pre-launch baseline, which exists because the analytics history was kept
-
For years
Keep the old domain, keep the old name visible
The old domain is renewed indefinitely and keeps redirecting; the cost is trivial and letting it lapse hands the firm’s history to whoever buys it. The “formerly” page stays. The old name stays on the office pages and in the Business Profile description for at least a year, longer if clients still search for it. The old email addresses keep forwarding. The merger is finished when nobody searches for the old name any more, and that is the clients’ decision, not the firm’s.
Nobody notices a migration that went well. The one that went badly is noticed in month three, when the managing partner asks why the phones are quiet and the answer is “the old website”.
Three kinds of change, three levels of risk
Not every rebrand needs the full sequence. What determines the risk is whether the domain changes and whether two sets of history are being combined.
A redesign with a refreshed brand. The URLs can stay the same, and if they do, almost nothing is at risk. If the redesign changes URLs, the redirect map still applies, but within one domain, which Google handles easily.
The usual mistake is treating a redesign as a reason to “tidy up” by deleting old content that was quietly ranking.
Low risk, if the URLs surviveThe full sequence above, for a single set of history. Done properly, rankings return within a couple of months and the reviews and listings carry over. The decision to make carefully is whether the new domain is worth it at all; a brand can change without the web address changing, and many firms keep the old domain for exactly this reason.
Manageable, with the mapTwo histories, two sets of reviews, two sets of listings and often two cultures of doing things. The sequence runs twice in parallel and the redirect map has to resolve every overlap. The acquired firm’s visibility is the one most often lost, because the acquiring firm’s team does not know what it had.
Where the acquired firm’s name has real local value, keeping it as a trading name of the new firm, with its own office page and profile, is often better than retiring it.
High risk, and the highest return from doing it wellThe brand itself, briefly
This page is about not losing what the firm has; the brand work is about what the firm becomes, and the two meet in a handful of places. The new name needs checking against the SRA’s rules on firm names, the domain needs to be available in .co.uk as well as whatever is chosen, and the name needs to be searchable: a name shared with a bank, a football club or a common word will compete with them for its own brand search forever.
The new site needs to carry the proof the old one had: the people, the reviews, the case studies, the offices, the transparency pricing. A brand launch that replaces all of that with a manifesto and a photograph of the atrium has thrown away the reasons clients chose the firm. And the tone of the new site should be decided by who the firm’s clients are, not by the agency’s portfolio. The branding page sets out how we approach that part; this page is the plumbing it sits on.
- ✓Checked against the SRA’s requirements for firm names
- ✓Domain available, including .co.uk, and secured
- ✓A search for the name returns nothing the firm will be confused with
- ✓Trade mark search done
- ✓Social handles available or secured
- ✓The old names will be kept as “formerly” lines, and in which places
- ✕A name chosen for the logo rather than for being findable
Questions firms ask about merging or rebranding online
-
How much visibility will we lose?
With a complete one-to-one redirect map, the Change of Address tool and the listings updated, most firms see a dip of a few weeks and a return to the previous position within two to three months. Without those, the loss can be most of the old domain’s authority, and it does not come back on its own.
-
Should we change the domain at all?
Only if the old one is wrong for the new firm. A brand can change its name, logo and site while the domain stays, with the old name redirecting from a new domain if the firm buys one. Keeping the domain removes most of the risk on this page. If the domain must change, follow the sequence.
-
Can we launch the brand first and sort the website later?
Not without losing the brand search. If the name changes before the website does, clients searching the new name find nothing or find the old site under the old name, and the press coverage of the launch links to a site that is about to be redirected. Launch them together, or launch the site first.
-
What about the acquired firm’s website?
It redirects, page by page, to the new site, and the domain is kept. If the acquired firm’s name is being retained as a trading name, its site can remain as a smaller presence that links openly to the main firm; what it must not be is a duplicate of the main site under a different name.
-
Our old site has thousands of pages. Do they all need mapping?
Every page that has traffic, links or a purpose, yes, individually. Pages that have none of those can be mapped in groups to their nearest relevant section, or deliberately retired with a 410 if they were the kind of scaled content Google penalises. The inventory in week one is what tells you which is which.
-
When should we involve you?
Before the new site’s structure is agreed, which is usually earlier than firms think. The redirect map shapes the structure, and the inventory shapes the map. If the designers are already building, there is still time; if the site launches next week, there is a shorter version of this plan and we will run it.
Plan the move before launch day
Tell us what is changing, which domains are involved and when the launch is. We will inventory what the old brands own, build the redirect map, and run the sequence alongside whoever is doing the brand and the build.
- A conversation about the change: name, domain, firms involved, launch date.
- An inventory of the old domains and profiles, with what is at stake and the redirect map.
- The sequence run to the launch date, and the first month watched.