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This summer was a tumultuous one for Google algorithm updates. Since the beginning of May, we've gone through seven of them, each varying in severity, but the public outcry has been consistent: A group panics, some remain calm, and the Interwebz explodes with "How to Recover" posts.
Wouldn't you love to be in a place when you laugh in the face of Google algorithm updates? These tactics could help you get there.
1. Focus On Your Branding, Not Your Ranking
Look at the results for "flat screen TV" and tell me what the listings have in common. Do it. I'll wait.
They're all brands.
That's where search engines are going. They're favoring real company stuff over stuffed keywords and one-way links, and you don't have to be a household name to do it. It means doing things like:
- Sponsoring local events and community involvement.
- Giving away content (and maybe the occasional iPad) for free.
- Paying attention to what your users want and giving it to them.
Perhaps the big brands do have it easy, not because they have the household name, but because they were around before everyone started freaking out about links, title tags, and keywords. They were doing things the right way that got them exposure – well, most of them anyway – and when things went online, that did too.
2. Give Users a Good Experience
It's impossible really hard to have a good website that ranks well for a long period of time if it doesn't give your users a good experience. If people like your website, they come back. They share it.
We know Google is making a push where a site's quality is more important than the number of links pointing to it:
In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.
While that's still largely subjectively – How exactly do you define "high-quality sites," Google? – and I hate giving guarantees when it comes to search, there's one thing I'll rest my laurels on: Your website will always be "quality" if it gives your users a good experience.
Incorporate user experience consulting into your search and digital engagements. This includes things like:
- User research.
- User testing.
- Split testing.
- Conversion rate optimization.
Visual Website Optimizer is a great tool for split testing because it allows you to make layout styling changes without needing a developer, which, if your agency is like mine, is harder to get your hands on than Google's actual ranking factors. You can also set up usability testing through there if you don't have in-house resources for a full user test.
But this isn't just about giving users a good experience on your website because, before they even make it there, they're likely interacting with you someplace else first. Think about the links they're seeing of yours, how you look in SERPs, your Facepook posts, your graphics, everything: If you were a user, would you click on them?
3. Preserve Your URLs
Outside of breaking news, old URLs will rank the best. While 301s and canonicals are heaven sent for SEO professionals, they strip out a fraction of equity, and in this day and age, even the smallest amount can make a huge difference.
Unless absolutely necessary – like you're dealing with a site architecture that's been picked apart and puzzled together so many times that it's one hot mess – keep your URLs the same. When you add new features to a product or update your service offerings, do it on the same URL.
Apple does this with each new release of the iPad or iPhone. When they launch an update, it goes to /iphone/ or /ipad/; they don't create entirely new URLs for the product they're promoting and instead shuffle the old version to a new URL. This means you're launching a product with some equity already built up.
Summary
Let's be clear: Sustainable SEO is a slow process. There are such things as quick wins – small, easy fixes you can do in the first weeks of a client engagement that prove your worth and show you mean business – but rarely will you see quick results. And that's OK: Since when does anything worthwhile ever come without a lot work?
Article Post @ Search Engine Watch
Launching a new website is hard. Launching a new brand with that new website can be downright madness.
Just ask Moz. Or iAcquire. Apparently, 2013 is the year of the marketing agency rebrand, and I'm happy to announce we're part of that list, too: Last week, 352 Media Group became 352.
Those 2½ months spent building our new website and our new brand were the hardest I've ever worked in my life. They were also the most rewarding, and despite my incessant cursing, I wouldn't trade it for anything. Why? Because look at the old site:
Versus the new website:
Holy wow.
Whenever you launch a site, everyone just sees the design change, but rarely do you see the behind the scenes – and I'm not just talking about design iterations, although there were probably 13 of those – work that goes into a new website. We're assuming you've already redid your keyword and market research.
That's A Lot of Redirects
Thankfully, the domain didn't change, but the URL structure did change to directory style. I used Ruth Burr's template for domain migrations, but made some tweaks.
First, pull every single URL that's on your root domain. I used both Screaming Frog and our database to make sure I wasn't missing anything. Drop into Excel and start analyzing what's going where on your new site.
We work in agile web development, which accounts for short sprints of work (in our case, two weeks at a time) when at the end we'd be able to launch full functionally pieces of our website. Think of it like building a house one room completely at a time.
Because this bad boy needed to be up before mid-July, the planned to launch with the Slim Fast version of our sitemap: A lot of pages weren't going to exist yet, but they would soon. That meant a lot of pages of our existing site weren't going to move yet, but they would.
So, in addition to the 301s and 404s, I added a section of what was going to be in Phase II to make our support departments' lives a little easier. I think it worked.
Analytics
I admit it: I didn't remember to install the analytics code on our new site until 24 hours before the site launched. *Facepalm*.
Seriously: Don't forget it, but also, don't settle for the basic version. There is so much more that you can see with a little customization, and you need to think about what makes most sense for you. For us, there were three big ones:
- Enhanced in-page to see where people were clicking.
- Page scrolling to see how far down people were going on our pages.
- Event tracking to see how people interacted with our video.
- Event tracking to see how often people clicked on our contact information.
Sitemaps
If your URLs are changing, so will your sitemaps. Don't forget to generate a new XML sitemap and resubmit me that GWT to speed up indexation of your new site. We went the multiple XML sitemap approach, one of our main site and one for our blog.
Holy Crap: We Aren't No. 1 For Our Name
That's every SEO professional's nightmare. We're living that right now. We decided to change our name in January. In May, we took a match to our old site and started over from scratch. Around June, someone finally said "Hey, I wonder where we'll be ranked with our new brand name."
Page 3. PAGE 3?!
Logically, it makes sense. 352 is the area code of Gainesville, Florida, our headquarters and our namesake. Sure, we've been known simply as 352 (tree-five-two) for 15+ years both by clients and internally, search engines weren't making that connection.
Why would they? All of our brand links are 352 Media Group, and all of our content was 352 Media Group. We also don't have nearly the social community that Moz does to blog, link and tweet the name change that would clued Google in sooner.
While our new brand does come with a whole new keyword targeting – Pro tip: Start your new keyword research very early – I couldn't care less about our exact-match anchor text until we're showing up No. 1 for "352." How do you do it? Pull your backlink using your favorite tool, go down and find all of the links with your brand name, and start contacting.
Trust me: Start this process very early if you're changing name, as in way before you officially launch. Start by reaching out to people who you know can queue up their change to go live on your exact launch date, for example, your author bio for any places you're a contributor. Don't forget to make sure your internal team changes any links they have on personal websites.
I'm in the thick of this now, and you never really realize how many brand links you have until you're staring at a 4-digit long Excel spreadsheet.
Keeping Momentum Post Launch
Last year, I went skydiving. There's a moment about 30 seconds into your free fall where you convince yourself that the shoot should have opened by now, and this was going to be it. Then, the chord pulls, you shoot up vertically, and you feel the biggest rush of relief because you are, in fact, going to make it through.
At 3:52 p.m. – see what we did there? – on July 16, 2013, I got that same rush from the launch of our site.
And while the honeymoon of the new brand only lasted about 24 hours until my inbox was flooded with feedback, I needed that kick to keep up the momentum our team had with post-launch iterations.
There will be things you don't think of. There will be bugs you missed. There will be internal feedback that makes more sense. There will definitelybe user feedback you didn't even know existed. You need an organized way to keep track of all of this.
My agency used TFS and work through a backlog of items based off client priority and effort to complete the task. This helps us better see the cool things we want to do and where it lies based on priority.
It's not the most intuitive, and we're searching for some something a little more user friendly, but it works well enough for now.
If you're going through a new site launch, I feel you, buddy. It's long. It's a pain in the ass. Sometimes, you just want to quit. It's extremely difficult not to get discouraged, but the end result will be worth it.
Don't get disappointed if you forget something. There's a lot to do, and we missed a few "Well, duh" things post launch, but it's OK. That's the beauty of constant iterations.
Article Post @ Search Engine Watch
This summer was a tumultuous one for Google algorithm updates. Since the beginning of May, we've gone through seven of them, each varying in severity, but the public outcry has been consistent: A group panics, some remain calm, and the Interwebz explodes with "How to Recover" posts.
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