Rebranding

One of the biggest projects I managed was the digital portion of the rebranding process when the Monterey Institute changed its name to the Middlebury Institute and updated its logo and tagline as well. The automated portion of the task did a basic “find and replace” of the key phrases, but it didn’t catch everything because of occasional misspellings or alternate versions of how people referred to “the Institute.” Additionally, there were many graphics and PDFs that had the old version of the name, so we had to manually go through over 6,000 pages online to find and update those items.

I decided since we were reviewing the website so thoroughly anyway, this was the perfect opportunity to also edit the website for SEO. The issue was that there were so many web editors across the institution who were working on the site all the time that sometimes best practices went out the window.

With my small but mighty team of 4, I created a checklist that included ways to update headings to include keywords, optimize image sizes, fix broken links and optimize hyperlinks to not just say “click here,” fix misspellings, and of course update what we came there to do in the first place—change the old name to the new name.

After four weeks of steady work, we only had a handful of PDFs left to update and replace, and our errors showing in Google Search Console were greatly reduced, resulting in much better search engine placement. And our Google results were successfully updated to display our new name rather than the old.