Major Rebranding in the Digital Age

Transcription

1 Major Rebranding in the Digital Age How we survived, and thrived, a full scale website and social media restructure

2 Tino Triste Doing SEO since 2004 Senior SEO Technical SEO, Content Strategy, & Analytics

3 The Co-op - Founded in th largest groceries retailer - #1 funeral services provider - Circa 70K employees - Owned by its members - Social goals and community-led

4 3 most stressful things in life

5 ...and website migrations

6 Rebrand and One-Domain Five year programme rebrand the whole estate

7 Rebrand and One-Domain...and migrate all websites to coop.co.uk and others...

8 Rebrand and One-Domain...and social media @CoopInsurance

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10 SEOs worst nightmare?

11 Our traffic dropped 85% after migrating to a new domain. How can we get the organic traffic back?

12 Don't let this happen under your watch 2 years

13 Be involved early. Take the lead.

14 Assess risk and Give options - Assumptions - Tasks Involved - Risks / Issues - Business Impact text here

15 Make interested parties aware of the risks Executive Leadership eam IT Te ams st Sale s SEO De ve l Te opm am en t s M t n o C / s g in m t e ea k r T t n e a what s at stake

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17 A well executed website migration is an opportunity to improve your rankings.

18 3 Stages of a Website Migration

19 Discovery & Planning Launch Cleanup & Monitor

20 Discovery & Planning Dedicate most time and resources to Discovery & Planning, for a smooth successful migration.

21 Determine what is going to change? Is it just a migration to a new server? HTTP to HTTPS Content or Meta data Website layout or Frontend code Schema & Micro Data Domain name Discovery & Planning

22 Discovery & Planning Legacy environment

23 Full website crawl Discovery & Planning

24 Aggregate top pages Ensure top pages with backlinks and shares are redirected. Discovery & Planning

25 Content prioritisation Keep Improve Remove Discovery & Planning

26 Selective redirecting Take the opportunity to clean up your backlink profile. Avoid redirecting legacy URLs which have toxic links pointing to them. Discovery & Planning

27 Redirect mapping Discovery & Planning

28 Beware of redirect chains Discovery & Planning Page B Page C Page A Page B Page C Page A

29 Benchmark performance Rankings & Visibility Discovery & Planning Traffic & Engagement

30 Discovery & Planning Communicate SEO requirements for new website

31 Contribute to the wireframes Is the new design functionality SEO friendly? Is there enough body copy? Discovery & Planning

32 Make the new site architecture keyword driven Are there opportunities to maximise topical authority? How can we improve improve internal linking strategy? Discovery & Planning

33 Complete technical audit in staging environment Discovery & Planning Prevent indexation (IP whitelisting; Password protection; Robots.txt; or Noindex tag) Navigation checks & Internal linking review Content & Meta data Canonical Tags Semantic markup e.g. header tags Schema & Micro Data markup Open Graph Tags & Twitter Cards XML sitemaps and robots.txt Google Analytics & Tracking codes

34 Launch Implementation

35 On launch day Step Check 2 Step Crawl1 Test redirects Launch Page titles Meta descriptions Headings Canonical tags Ensure 404 is 404ing Step 3 Submit Fetch As Google Submit XML sitemaps Update Disavow file Change of address Launch Step 4 Remove indexing restrictions

36 Cleanup & Monitor Cleanup & Monitor keep that link juice flowing!

37 Cleanup and reclaim external links Update links from Company websites Update external links updates E.g. social profiles and Wikipedia Tech Audit (inc. Page Speed) Content Audit Run Link Juice Recovery Tool Run Link Detox Boost (upload list of legacy URLs) Cleanup & Monitor

38 Monitor rankings and indexation regularly Rankings SEO Visibility score Indexation ratio Crawl errors Server logs Cleanup & Monitor

39 11/11/2 017

40 Rollback plan If domain migration Remove redirects Block new domain from indexing If server migration Repoint domain to legacy server Resubmit legacy sitemaps Crawl legacy site

41 Can we migrate our websites without losing rankings or traffic?

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43 10 completed so far... membership.coop.co.uk jobs.coop.co.uk colleagues.coop.co.uk finder.coop.co.uk electrical.coop.co.uk benefits.coop.co.uk blog.coop.co.uk colleaguestories.coop.co.uk pensions.coop.co.uk wills.coop.co.uk

44 Visibility exceeded pre-migration levels within 4 weeks

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46 Some challenges along the way Partial content rollback The combined visibility is at around the same level as before

47 Here s what happened when SEO wasn t taken seriously... Finally realised this SEO thing is important and started co-operating. :) Took them 3 months to implement all redirects!?! Arghhh!!

48 Thank You! Take the lead. Plan thoroughly. Collaborate with teams. Keep link juice flowing. Have a #SearchmetricsSummit #SearchmetricsSummit Steal my migration checklist: bit.ly/migrationchecklist