Maintaining High Search Visibility Through Redesigns - PubCon New Orleans 2014
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Transcript of Maintaining High Search Visibility Through Redesigns - PubCon New Orleans 2014
Sanity Through a
Redesign!!!
Barbara CollNOLA 2014@webmama
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Maintaining... Through a Redesign
Sanity – insert your own definition
Visibility – in organic search results
The Realistic Ability to Measure – a major redesign is going to make it hard to compare apples to apples.
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Top Reasons for Redesign and #1 Effect on
Measurement, Visibility and Sanity
New SEO Company = Tactical changes too many to mention in this small box
New CEO/CMO = New brand agency, new web design
Repositioning of Company/products = New content, new keywords
Company Name Change/Acquisition = Domain Name Change. Every URL Changes
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Prepare for Redesign (1)
Keyword discovery research – what keywords define the company
Which content drives traffic into site (review landing pages) and set content/SEO strategy to maintain that content
Look at Page Authority (moz.com) and don’t kill pages with high page authority
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Keyword Category Domination
Company = VMware
Keyword = virtualization
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Instances of Keyword/Content
http://www.vmware.com/products/
http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/ *
http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/virtualization-basics/what-is-virtualization.html *
http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop-virtualization.html *
* URLs/Filenames the same as pre-redesign
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Internal Content Links Maintained
Footers
Imagery
Main Nav
Video
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Prepare for Redesign (2)The Tedious Part
WebMaster Tools – Queries, Keywords, Clicks - TAKE SCREENSHOTS!
What do search results look like today! TAKE SCREENSHOTS!
As much as I hate to say it – run ranking reports
Set up redirect file for .htaccess
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Pre-Redesign (3)
Competitive Positioning – Who’s There in search results
Paid Search – Gap Analysis – SearchLight has been recommended
Inventory which page names are changing Set up redirect list for .htaccess file Use 301 redirects Consider leaving high Page Authority pages’ URLs the same regardless of high value of adding keywords to URL Test redirects before launch
Filename Changes
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Little Things
Error Page in place?
Turned on the tracking code (since it was probably off on the beta site)?
Filtered out the design/development team (Search company too) from the analytics?
Connected Google analytics and Google Webmaster tools and have the same person looking at both
Don’t forget the marketing automation forms since they tend to be on a subdomain of the old domain which may get deleted
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Error Page: Count it in Analytics
Example of Error Page
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Launch
Sitemap.xml
Fetch in Google Webmaster tools
Ask for updates on key external links
Fingers crossed
24 hour surveillance
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Right about Now
Spot check for redirect errors – click on organic search results
Home page change? 3 hours
Sitelinks? 1-3 days
Old and new URLs at same time – yup – some overlap
DNS propagation – 4-5 days across world
Major ranking changes – 2 weeks
Launch
2-weeks
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What can you compare from previous site?
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Organic Search TrafficComparing Pre-Post LaunchTraditional Analytics
Full siteVisitsUnique VisitorsTime on siteBounce rate
Traffic to pages where URL has NOT changed
QuestionableNumber of Pages Viewed/visitForm completions
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Organic Search TrafficComparing Pre-Post Launch Queries, Keywords, Clicks
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What CAN’T you compare from previous site?
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Organic Search TrafficWhat you CAN’T CompareContent by page (unless you kept the URLs the
same) (ie. Visits to company/mgt/ceo would need to be mapped to company/management/ceo)
# of Pages visited
Path through site
Top content
Landing pages
Questionable Consumption of resources (whitepapers, etc)
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Suggestions / Observations
Go back and revisit your screenshots of search results prior to redesign.
-Did it work?
-Do the snippets make sense?
Question – when do you intervene?
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VisualSearch
Turns UpLots of Things
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VMware Case Study -
Domain Change
Case Study
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Prep Work
Page by Page 301 redirect set up
No pages added. No design changes.
Ran sites in duplicate for a few hours to get a few important things done Testing internal links (especially back and forth from blog) WebMaster Tools verification Prepared a new XML sitemap for submission Testing of Google Analytics on .com
Warned executives that their site may disappear from search results for a while
Made sure company IP address, my company and design team was filtered out of site analytics for new domain
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Immediately
Told Google and Bing that we had switched domain names through their webmaster tools
Checked tracking system for both site and marketing automation tool (lead generation) Ie – filled out forms
Hand Searched – followed results checking for 301s in place
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Waited a few hours…then..
Turned on the redirects
Uploaded a new sitemap – wanted to make sure the redirect was working as a 301 so I waited about 4 hours
Used Webmaster Tools and Microsoft and did a Fetch of the main pages
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Remember..
Change email addresses
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Initial Consequences
Nothing happened
Double listings on some page results
Loss of sitelinks
Switch over of brand search – no sitelinks or even little links
Google+ got it all wrong (next story)
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Identical to pre-domain change.
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Barbara Coll
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