In this dynamic session, search marketing leader Barbara ’WebMama’ Coll will update you on how search engines find your content, how to identify gaps and assess whether you have the right content on your site as well as on the distributed web content you control. She’ll walk through examples of site redesigns and domain name changes; focusing on how to ensure findability and visibility during and afterwards.

1. Barbara Coll
CEO,
WebMama.com Inc.
@webmama
Content,
Search and
Getting
Found

2. 2
Title of Talk: Content, Search
and Getting Found
Getting Found for What?

3. 3
Getting Found for What?
 Quality Traffic
 Job Seekers
 Qualified Potential Customers
 Customers
 People familiar with your brand
 Could be all of the above

4. 4
Getting Found for What?
 Quality Traffic
 Job Seekers
 Qualified Potential Customers
 Customers
 People familiar with your brand
 Could be all of the above

5. 5
Goals of a Keyword
Discovery/Optimization Project
 Specifically looking for 5-20 words/phrases
that are highly relevant that can be used
for content and source code optimization
 First step to increasing/maintaining
visibility in search engine results for
specific words and phrases relevant to
what the external audience is looking for
 Appear in top 3 organic search results for
chosen keywords/phrases (*)
 Get leads from organic search traffic

6. 6

7. 7
Indentifying Gaps
 Google Webmaster Tools – content scrape
(www.google.com/webmasters/tools*)
 Ranking Reports (moz.com*, Brightedge*)
 Competitive analysis – what are they optimized
for – are you?
 Paid Search Keywords (ispionage.com*)
 Hard one – review industry papers – see where
you are left out – see words they use – do you?
 Call Your Mother
*Requires an account for detailed information

8. 8
Filling the gaps
 Paid search is a partner
 Content development with internal linking
 Content development outside the site (new
policies about guest blogging)
 Focus on what you can control

9. 9
Brand domination - required

10. 10
And …. More Domination

11. 11
How did they find you anyways?
 Following external links and finding your new
content
 Following your internal links - if you link to a
page from the home page then since you
think it is important so will the engines
 You told them through the Webmaster Tools
 The press release you put out
 The blog you wrote

12. 12
Story: New Site Design Launched Mar
7. Draft/Beta/Test site had
noindex/nofollow meta tags. Weren’t
removed until March 27.
Visitor Traffic from Google Organic

13. 13
Domination

14. 14
Maintaining Visibility

15. 15
Case Study - VMware
 Full L&F and site architecture
redesign
 36 languages
 2M pages
 Search Visibility Guidelines in Style
guide
 Web Producers and Content
Owners Trained on Guidelines

16. 16
Keyword Category
Domination
Company = VMware
Keyword = virtualization

17. @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

18. 18
Internal Content Links Maintained
Footers
Imagery
Main Nav
Video

19. 19
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

20. 20
Visual
Search
Turns Up
Lots of Things

21. 21
VMware Case Study -

22. 22
4/25/14

23. 23
Tidemark
 Domain Change
 Tidemark.net to www.tidemark.com
 NO other changes were made during
domain change
 Situation
 .net had 3400 external links into the site
 .com had 3 links that were relevant
 Had to gain Google’s trust

24. 24
Switch Occurred 11/14 5:30pm
 Prior to switch internal links were tested by lots of people
 Once switched over redirects from .net to .com were tested by a number of
people. 404 page was also tested.
 Once comfortable that site was stable (about 9am next morning) the
following steps were taken:
 Google was informed of switch from .net to .com in 3 ways
 From .net webmaster tools account we through the switch to tell them
we had changed the company domain
 We asked the engines to ‘fetch’ the .com pages (a way of getting them
to look at the pages sooner)
 We submitted an automatically generated sitemap which was crawled
on 11/18.
 All actions were also taken with Bing (therefore also Yahoo)

25. 25
External Link Update (moz.com
opensiteexplorer)
^86

26. 26
Domain Authority
26

27. 27
Ranking and Traffic Growth
Trend line shows
keyphrase/words
above 51 organic
results
Organic traffic

28. 28
How Do People Mess Up?
 Keep old test site rules/code in place
 Robots.txt excluding important directories or engines
themselves
 Meta Tags that tell the engines what to do
 No 301 redirects from old pages to new pages
 Have an error page in place that insults the visitor (or even
have no error page in place)
 Forget to turn on the analytics for tracking the new site
 Forget to update all content controlled by company – especially
need to update Google+
 They only look at rankings and not at the actual, visible to
searchers, results

29. 29

30. 30

31. 31

32. 32

33. 33
Paid Search – using assets
instead of just text ads

34. 34
26
4
30
33
$409
$1,649
$318
$186
$-
$200
$400
$600
$800
$1,000
$1,200
$1,400
$1,600
$1,800
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Oct
Nov Dec Jan
Leads vs CPL
Leads
CPL
With the addition of
white papers the
CPL went from over
$400 to $180. CTR
increased 47% and
conversion rate
increased 218%.

35. Thank you.
@webmama
bcoll@webmama.com