The Impact of Changing Business Names on SEO: A Case Study of Southern Cross Group Services

We faced legal issues related to advertising and optimizing our services under an unregistered trading name, which led us to change our company name from "Southern Cross Group" to "Southern Cross Group Services". However, we did not change our business URLs.

After the business name change, we noticed some negative impacts on our online presence, particularly:

  1. Our business brand name clicks, impressions, and keyword positions dropped in Google Search Console.
  2. Some of our backlinks still mentioned our old business name "Southern Cross Group" in their anchor text. This could potentially result in a decrease in backlinks and search engine rankings for our website, as these backlinks are no longer as relevant to our new business name "Southern Cross Group Services" according to Google.

According to the Google Search Console tool, we observed the following drops in click and impressions for the query "Southern Cross Group":

    Minus 40 clicks and minus 142 impressions for the query "Southern Cross Group" in the past 30 days.


     Minus 63 clicks and minus 2007 impressions for the query "home page URL - https://scgroup.global/"


     Minus 60 clicks and minus 2720 impressions for the Australia country (targeted country)


We also noticed a significant drop in all countries and a decrease in top linking text "Southern Cross Group" from number 1 to number 14. 


 Additionally, our external links dropped from 4006 to 1842 after the business name change.

To minimize the negative impacts, we took the following actions:

  1. Updated our website and various online platforms with the new business name and new logo, from "Southern Cross Group" to "Southern Cross Group Services."
  2. Did not use "301 redirect" as we did not change the URLs on our SCG website.
  3. Monitored our keyword rankings and online visibility closely after the change to identify any further negative impacts.


We also updated our website name and meta tags, as well as requested updates to our business name on various backlinks, including:

  •     https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/southern-cross-group-services
  •     https://www.hotfrog.com.au/company/1072227137474560/southern-cross-group-services/wetherill-park/facilities-services
  •     https://www.tuugo.biz/Companies/southern-cross-group-services/0050004024870
  •     https://www.truelocal.com.au/business/southern-cross-group-1/wetherill-park
  •     https://www.yelp.com/biz/southern-cross-group-services-wetherill-park
  •     https://www.superpages.com.au/company/1462782928433152/southern-cross-group-services/wetherill-park/security-services

We also updated our social media platforms with our new logo and business name, including:

  • LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/southern-cross-group-services-pty-ltd/
  • Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/SouthernCrossGroupTM/
  • Twitter - https://twitter.com/SCGroupTM
  • Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/southerncrossgroup
  • YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@SouthernCrossGroupServices

Overall, the negative impacts have been minimized and clicks and impressions are now stable.

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