7 STEPS TO A SUCCESSFUL ENTERPRISE SITE TRANSITION

A BrightEdge Webinar

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OVERVIEW• 7 Steps to a Successful Site Transition

1. Take Aim!2. Know your Baseline3. Know your URLs Keep the Good, Dump the Bad4. Pre-Work Makes the Dream Work5. Making the Transition6. Factors to Post-Launch Success

- Measure - Monitor- What’s the new Baseline?

7. Track performance (and maintenance): Ongoing!• Questions?

Are we there yet?

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FIRST THINGS!1. A realistic plan is the most important

component!

2. Mistakes in Redirect logic can cost millions!

3. Understanding the Old Site is just and important as launching the New Site

4. Know who owns Analytics for each region

5. Get your tags straight from the beginning (sounds 101 I know)

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READY. AIM…PHASE 1: SET OBJECTIVES

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ONE VISION1. Agree on the target

1. Countries?2. Languages?

2. The Three BIG Questions- How much time?- How much money?- Who will be involved?

3. Create a detailed map of every foot of the process

4. Communicate and confirm! 5. Put it in writing

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WHERE ARE YOU?PHASE 2: KNOW YOUR BASELINE

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ON YOUR MARK…• Know what success looks like – see

the finish line

• Plan for it: a new site sees a short-term drop in organic search performance

• Don’t worry, it’s completely normal

• When done well, a transition creates greater site performance

• To understand performance and success of the new site, create a pre-transition baseline report

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Get Set…

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BASELINE REPORT

Create your project tracking to monitor, manage, and assess performance

• Leverage the platform to establish baselines and dashboards!

• Create a report before the site launch to ensure accurate data

• If possible, include 12+ months of prior organic search data to account for naturally occurring ups and downs

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WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOWReports should contain:

• Organic traffic• Keyword rankings• Crawl levels (found in Google Search Console)• Indexation levels (do a “site:” search)

For sites that do online sales or lead gen, include these results for Organic search:

• Revenue• Number of transactions• Conversion rate of search to sales (%)• How many leads/e-mail addresses collected• Total number of downloads

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KEEP THE PLAYS THAT WORKPHASE 3: URL REDIRECT MAPPING

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KEEP YOUR PRODUCERS PRODUCING REDIRECT VALUABLE URLS

Two Parts:1. Keep the pages that produce —

ID High Value Pages (HVPs) and retain them where possible

2. Redirect Mapping — One to one, one to many…doesn’t matter – create the map to preserve equity

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BEST PRACTICES FOR SEO-FRIENDLY URLS

• On international & multi-lingual sites, use sub-directories instead of sub-domains. This increases the value of links at the domain level

• Keep URLs short and friendly

• Directory and Page Names should be search and keyword-friendly

• Avoid dynamic parameters and characters (if possible). Otherwise make sure canonicals are implemented.

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AUDIT+PLANNING=SUCCESSYES, IT’S PHASE 4

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Not that kind of audit.

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WHAT HAVE I GOT?

1. Crawl the site, inventory the site, check out backlinks, know what works and what doesn’t

2. Are my HVPs also my most important content? The 80/20 HVP rule

3. Talk to stakeholders about important ‘in country” pages

4. Develop prioritized approach to evaluate & tag the new site

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GET TO WORKDon’t forget the easy stuff:• Page Titles & H1s• Crawlable HTML copy and links (content

should not render as JavaScript or Flash)• Images with friendly names & ALT tags• Pages with multipage results should

include pagination tags• Schema.org markup (where

applicable)• Create formulaic meta data

recommendations• Create a user-friendly 404/Error Page

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THINK ABOUT THIS STUFF• HREF LANG tags for international sites

• XML Sitemaps for each language & country

• “Master Keyword List” including localizations. • Build master translation tables• Build groups for each

country/language

• Create keyword to HVP relationships so you can track in BE when the time comes

• Establish webmaster accounts in country and early

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FLIP THE SWITCHPHASE 5: TRANSITION TIME

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HOUSTON, WE’RE (ALMOST)

READY FOR LIFT-OFFLAUNCH CHECKLIST

1. Prepare robots.txt file2. Test crawler access3. Prepare XML sitemap(s)4. Identify/Correct broken links5. Check 301 redirects6. Crawl key meta tags

1. Language2. Canonical

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It’s Alive!

WHEN YOUR NEW SITE GOES LIVEImmediately start testing. Here’s what to do:

• Manual checks • Monitor crawl errors• Check error page delivers a 404 code• Check all templates to validate changes

were implemented (do this before launch too)

• Confirm the updated XML sitemap(s) is/are in place

• Make sure you’re found!• Upload new XML sitemap(s) to Google

Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

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WE’RE ALMOST THEREPHASE 6: POST-LAUNCH REVIEW

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IT’S ALL IN THE PERFORMANCEEnsure success:• Measure impact the new site on all aspects of your business• Monitor traffic closely• Create new baseline reports to track progress• Weekly updates to baselines for 90 days or

more

What to watch for:A post-launch drop in traffic/rankings could last 3-6 months

Even the best site transitions will see some drops in performance

To help buffer this temporary loss in traffic, consider spending more on paid search

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TRACK AND MAINTAINPHASE 7: POST-LAUNCH SUPPORT

Now it get’s easy, right?

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NOW THAT’S DONEAt this point, return to normal

operations of ongoing support (yeah right!)

• Continue to track site performance

• Find and address common problems

• Fix and maintain!

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Hey, that wasn’t so hard…

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Hey, that wasn’t so hard…

Steve KrullCEO – Be Found Online

773.904.1182steve@befoundonline.com

@SteveKrullwww.linkedin.com/in/stevekrull

THANKS