Relocations and Rebrands: How to Manage Big Changes to Your Listings

Considering a relocation or a rebrand? Moving your business to a new address or changing your business's name both provide exciting opportunities to reintroduce yourself to your customers. But before you can do just that, you need to ensure your customers can still find you – and search engines know which information is correct!

Updating your listings is a critical piece of relocating or rebranding your business. You might think it is as simple as marking your old location as "closed" on Google and creating a new profile, but the reality is that there are several factors to consider for each major publisher – and the best route depends on the specifics of your move and your location's online reputation.

For both Google and Facebook, the options depend on how far your location is moving. If you are relocating to an address within roughly a one-mile radius (a "near" relocation), you can simply update the address on your existing profile to reflect the new location. If you were to create an entirely new profile for the new location, you would run the risk of Google and Facebook marking the new location as a duplicate of the old location; learn more about the downfalls of duplicate listings in this blog post. As with any major content changes on Google, you may be asked to re-verify your business with the updated information, so be on the lookout!

If your new address is more than a mile away (a "far" relocation), you have two options. You can either update the address and re-verify (same as for a near relocation), or you have the opportunity to mark your existing location as permanently closed and create a new listing entirely. The choice will depend on your approach to the existing online reputation of your location.

If the reviews and user-generated content (such as user photos) are no longer relevant given your relocation, this is a good opportunity to start fresh. On the other hand, if the reviews and user-generated content are still relevant to the location and you wish to maintain them, you should keep and update your original listing.

If you are rebranding a location but not moving to a new address, your options are similar – you can either update the business name on the existing profile – you may be asked to reverify it – or you can create a new listing. As with relocations, you should also consider whether your reviews and user-generated content are still relevant. If they are not, you should create a new listing to reset its online reputation. For example, if ownership has changed and business itself has changed significantly, your old reviews will likely no longer apply, and you should create a new listing.

The customer experience is another important consideration. Creating a new listing and marking the old one as closed will allow the old location to continue to appear on maps for a few months with a "permanently closed" indicator, ensuring a smooth experience for customers who search for your old business name. On the other hand, this could create a confusing experience for customers searching for your newly rebranded business. Make sure to consider what is best for your customers and how they will search for you when deciding how to proceed with rebranding your listings.

Note that if you decide to create a new listing as part of your rebrand, it may be marked as a duplicate – especially if your locations are hotels or financial institutions. Since restaurant rebrands are more common, a new listing for a restaurant likely will not be marked as a duplicate.

After a rebrand, you may also want to reorganize your Google location groups to reflect the new branding. Similarly, be sure to reorganize your Facebook brand pages to reflect the changes as well.

Relocating and rebranding listings both indicate a major change to publishers. When these kinds of large changes occur, Apple and Bing will frequently just create new listings, and the old listing will remain live as well. The best path forward is to work directly with Apple and Bing. Work with Yext Support to alert Apple and Bing of your relocation or rebrand so that all teams can collaborate to ensure the right process is followed.

If you decide to create a new listing in the Yext Knowledge Graph as part of your relocation, we recommend keeping the old location live on listings for three to six months. Keeping the old location data synced to publishers for a short time after it has closed helps ensure that the old location cannot be marked as reopened by a user or similar.

In the case of a rebrand, you should be sure to reexamine your Knowledge Graph configuration. You may want to update fields or entity templates to reflect the new business name or any other major changes to your business.

Finally, any major change to your locations could have an impact on user access in the Knowledge Graph. If necessary, you should update your Knowledge Graph folders to ensure all users have access to the correct locations.

Relocating or rebranding your business is exciting, but there are also several considerations when updating your listings to reflect the change. It's crucial that you get it right. Yext is the industry leader in listings, and we are here to help! If you are planning a relocation or have recently completed one, reach out to your Yext CSM or contact Yext directly to make sure you take all the right steps to update your listings.