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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