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.

1. Sanity
Through a
Redesign!!!
Barbara Coll
NOLA2014
@webmama

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

5. @webmama
Keyword Category Domination
Company = VMware
Keyword = virtualization

6. @webmama
Instances of Keyword/Content
http://www.vmware.com/products/
http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/ *
http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/virtualizatio
n-basics/what-is-virtualization.html *
http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop-
virtualization.html *
* URLs/Filenames the same as pre-redesign

7. @webmama
Internal Content Links Maintained
Footers
Imagery
Main Nav
Video

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

10. @webmama

11. @webmama

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

13. @webmama
Error Page: Count it in Analytics
Example of Error Page

14. @webmama@webmama
Launch
Sitemap.xml
Fetch in Google Webmaster tools
Ask for updates on key external links
Fingers crossed
24 hour surveillance

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

16. @webmama
What can you compare from
previous site?

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

18. @webmama
Organic Search Traffic
Comparing Pre-Post Launch
 Queries, Keywords, Clicks

19. @webmama
What CAN’T you compare from
previous site?

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?

22. @webmama
Visual
Search
Turns Up
Lots of Things

23. @webmama
VMware Case Study -

24. DomainChan
ge Case
Study

25. @webmama
Tidemark.net
• Hundreds of external links
www.tidemark.com
• 3 external relevant links

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

29. @webmama
Remember..
Change email addresses

30. @webmama
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)

31. @webmama
Identical to pre-domain change.

32. @webmama

33. Barbara Coll
@webmama
#PubCon