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