Martin Williams, SEO Manager, AO.com Martin discusses how 4 'failures' helped AO.com get stronger and increase the visiblility and importance of SEO within the company.

1. © 2018 AO World All Rights Reserved
Do we learn more from our SEO
failures than our successes?
Martin Williams
SEO Manager AO.com

2. How 4 ‘failures’ helped ao.com get stronger
1. What happens when you move from one domain to another
and get it wrong?
2. What happens when everybody on the SEO team leaves?
3. What happens if you lose your best content?
4. What happens when you muck around with your megamenu?

3. But first – who is ao.com?
Don’t worry, we aren’t touting for business!
bold

4. What happens when you move from one
domain to another and get it wrong?
• Spent years up to 2013 building paid link volume – against Google guidelines in 2013
• Moved from appliancesonline.co.uk to ao.com when hit by a penalty on the old site and not “cleaning” the new site.
• Lost £millions
• It took 3 years to recover our rankings
Move from Appliances
Online to AO.com
Hit by penalty
Penguin 4.0
Ao.com not “clean”

5. How did this make us stronger?
• Well, it increases the visibility of SEO in the
company!
• It meant we had to be better at SEO than anybody
else just to catch up
• High levels of spend and IT resource on technical SEO
• We became very good at building “white hat” links
• We built content capability in-house before most
companies thought of it:
• Over 250 in market content pages, including buying guides,
best pages, tips and tricks.
• Over 750 lifestyle pages targeting out of market customers.
• We became good at what Google wants from a website.

6. What to do if you have to move domains
• Stop everything else you’re
doing and make sure you do
this right!
• Make a checklist of the
things you think you need
to do.
• Check with everybody in
house (and make them
realise how important this is).
• Get outside help!

7. What happens when everybody
on the SEO team leaves?
The SEO team one minute….
The SEO team the next minute

8. What happens when everybody
on the SEO team leaves?
The answer….
The paid search team!

9. How do you make your paid
search team SEO experts?
• I asked them! They were up for it!
• Three stage training programme
1. Initial keyword, position and
question analysis.
2. Advanced SEO tools and
advanced analysis
3. How to optimise the website from
the results of the analysis.
• Control of Paid and SEO
workload via sprints, Trello
boards and daily(ish) stand ups.

10. How did this make us stronger?
• We developed a multi-skilled Search team.
• Analysis and optimisation now done for paid AND organic search.
• Greater influence over IT and company developments.
• A more engaged search team!
• Allowed us to help other parts of AO-World group.

11. What happens if you lose your best content?
• In March one of AO’s companies moved their content hub and didn’t tell anybody!
• It was discovered a month later when organic search sales started to fall
• 301 redirected and re-indexed new pages and updated links on site.
• But it did affect eCommerce visibility!
-80%
-70%
-60%
-50%
-40%
-30%
-20%
-10%
0%
Content Hub Ecommerce pages
The effect on visibility of losing
your content hub pages
Content hub
moved
“WTF did you
do?!”

12. How did this make us stronger?
• We now know how
valuable the content hub is!
• Nobody moves pages now
without talking to a wider
audience.
• SEO education and
outreach increased across
the website and the wider
business.

13. What happens when you muck
around with your megamenu?
Added tracking
terms
• In May we added URL tracking to the mega menu.
• And we did everything right!
• 5-10% fall in tracked visibility
• Circa 4-6 weeks to get back on track

14. How did this make us stronger?
• We now know how important
the megamenu is for visibility!
• Built better control into the
megamenu
• Reviewed the megamenu for links
that do not improve SEO or UX.
• Beginning a set of testing on what
should be in the megamenu.

15. How 4 “failures” helped ao.com get stronger
4 key takeaways
1. Changing domains on a website may be one of the most important
things you do.
2. Bringing paid search and SEO teams together can give great
benefits to the company (and to SEO).
3. Content hubs are important to your rankings, even if they are
bringing little direct income to the website.
4. Your megamenu can help you to boost rankings and change the
way your customers navigate the site.

16. © 2018 AO World All Rights Reserved
Thank you!