Rebranding Without Losing SEO Equity: How We Boosted Site Health from 64 to 98
A careless domain change can wipe out years of search visibility in a week, and local medical practices have the most to lose. Here is the migration playbook we used for Lunamé, which also took its Semrush site health score from 64 to 98.
The High Risk of Domain Migrations and Rebrands
When a business rebrands, the executive conversation is about visual identity. New logo, new palette, new copy.
Nobody in that room is thinking about redirect maps, which is how rebrands quietly cost a year of search visibility.
Done carelessly, here is what happens:
Legacy URLs that ranked for years start returning 404 Not Found.
A decade of accumulated backlinks now point at dead pages and pass nothing.
Googlebot walks into redirect loops or soft-404 traps, and organic bookings fall off a cliff about three weeks later.
Gambhir Cosmetic Medicine rebranded to Lunamé Medical Aesthetics, which meant a new domain and a rebuilt WordPress platform at the same time. Our job was to make the move without losing the rankings the practice had spent years earning.
Here is the sequence we followed. The rebuild also took the site's Semrush site health score from 64 to 98, though that was a consequence of the work rather than the point of it.
The most common mistake in a domain migration is the catch-all: every old URL redirected to the new homepage. olddomain.com/coolsculpting-philadelphia lands on newdomain.com/ and the agency calls it done.
Google treats homepage catch-alls as soft 404s. The individual treatment pages lose their history, and there is no arguing with it afterward.
So we crawled every legacy URL, pulled historical landing pages out of Google Analytics, and listed the pages carrying the most backlinks. Each one got mapped by hand to its closest match on the new domain:
Running the redirects in Nginx rather than through a WordPress plugin keeps each hop at a few milliseconds instead of a full PHP bootstrap. With tens of thousands of crawl requests during a migration, that difference decides how fast Google finishes re-indexing.
2. Rebuilding the WordPress Platform for Speed & Health
The old site ran on a third-party page builder with shortcodes nested four levels deep. Semrush scored its site health at 64/100, and the mobile load times matched.
The replacement is deliberately plain:
No page builder. Native Gutenberg block patterns only, so the markup that ships is the markup we wrote.
Asset handling. All photography converted to WebP and AVIF with responsive srcset sizes.
Local medical schema.MedicalClinic and Physician JSON-LD covering hours, geo-coordinates, specialties, and practitioner credentials.
The Measurable Results
Site health. 64 to 98 out of 100 in Semrush, after clearing redirect chains, HTML warnings, and missing alt attributes.
Rankings. The practice's top local positions held through the move. There was a dip in the second week, which is normal, and positions recovered without intervention.
Bookings. Faster mobile loads and a shorter consultation booking flow both correlated with more completed appointment requests. We would not claim the rebrand alone caused it, since the booking flow changed at the same time.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How long should 301 redirects remain active after a rebrand?
Indefinitely, in practice. Google needs about a year to fully transfer signals, but printed collateral and old bookmarks keep sending traffic long after that. Redirect rules cost nothing to keep. Removing them costs you every link still pointing at the old domain.
When should you submit a Change of Address in Google Search Console?
Right after the new domain is live and you have verified the 301s resolve correctly. Submitting it before the redirects work tells Google to move a site it then cannot follow.
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