PubCon demands details about search marketing and this presentation provides lots of details about what to do and not to do during redesigns in order to maintain high search visibility. Of interest to SEOs, webmasters, web producers and web marketers.
2. @webmama
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.
3. @webmama
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
4. @webmama
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
8. @webmama
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
9. @webmama@webmama
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
12. @webmama@webmama
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
15. @webmama
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
17. @webmama
Organic Search Traffic
Comparing Pre-Post Launch
Traditional Analytics
Full site
Visits
Unique Visitors
Time on site
Bounce rate
Traffic to pages where URL has NOT changed
Questionable
Number of Pages Viewed/visit
Form completions
20. @webmama
Organic Search Traffic
What you CAN’T Compare
Content 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)
21. @webmama@webmama
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?
26. @webmama
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
27. @webmama
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
28. @webmama
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