Major Rebranding in the Digital Age How we survived, and thrived, a full scale website and social media restructure
Tino Triste Doing SEO since 2004 Senior SEO Manager @CoopDigital Technical SEO, Content Strategy, & Analytics
The Co-op - Founded in 1864-5th largest groceries retailer - #1 funeral services provider - Circa 70K employees - Owned by its members - Social goals and community-led
3 most stressful things in life
...and website migrations
Rebrand and One-Domain Five year programme rebrand the whole estate
Rebrand and One-Domain...and migrate all websites to coop.co.uk www.co-operativefood.co.uk www.co-operative.coop www.co-opinsurance.co.uk www.co-operativefuneralcare.co.uk www.coopelectricalshop.co.uk www.co-operativelegalservices.co.uk and others...
Rebrand and One-Domain...and social media handles...and emails @TheCooperative @CooperativeFood @CoopInsurance
SEOs worst nightmare?
Our traffic dropped 85% after migrating to a new domain. How can we get the organic traffic back?
Don't let this happen under your watch 2 years
Be involved early. Take the lead.
Assess risk and Give options - Assumptions - Tasks Involved - Risks / Issues - Business Impact text here
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
A well executed website migration is an opportunity to improve your rankings.
3 Stages of a Website Migration
Discovery & Planning Launch Cleanup & Monitor
Discovery & Planning Dedicate most time and resources to Discovery & Planning, for a smooth successful migration.
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
Discovery & Planning Legacy environment
Full website crawl Discovery & Planning
Aggregate top pages Ensure top pages with backlinks and shares are redirected. Discovery & Planning
Content prioritisation Keep Improve Remove Discovery & Planning
Selective redirecting Take the opportunity to clean up your backlink profile. Avoid redirecting legacy URLs which have toxic links pointing to them. Discovery & Planning
Redirect mapping Discovery & Planning
Beware of redirect chains Discovery & Planning Page B Page C Page A Page B Page C Page A
Benchmark performance Rankings & Visibility Discovery & Planning Traffic & Engagement
Discovery & Planning Communicate SEO requirements for new website
Contribute to the wireframes Is the new design functionality SEO friendly? Is there enough body copy? Discovery & Planning
Make the new site architecture keyword driven Are there opportunities to maximise topical authority? How can we improve improve internal linking strategy? Discovery & Planning
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
Launch Implementation
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
Cleanup & Monitor Cleanup & Monitor keep that link juice flowing!
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
Monitor rankings and indexation regularly Rankings SEO Visibility score Indexation ratio Crawl errors Server logs Cleanup & Monitor
11/11/2 017
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
Can we migrate our websites without losing rankings or traffic?
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
Visibility exceeded pre-migration levels within 4 weeks
Some challenges along the way Partial content rollback The combined visibility is at around the same level as before
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!!
Thank You! Take the lead. Plan thoroughly. Collaborate with teams. Keep link juice flowing. Have a rollback plan. @tinotriste @tinotriste #SearchmetricsSummit #SearchmetricsSummit Steal my migration checklist: bit.ly/migrationchecklist