GREAT! Redesigning a website can have quite a few benefits, including boosting conversion and overcoming technical constraints from the way the old website was coded. However, if your team isn’t careful when launching the redesigned website, you can lose your hard earned Google rankings overnight!

2 Must Haves for SEO When Redesigning Your Website

We often work with companies that are redesigning their website to ensure that the transition from old website to new website goes smoothly- below are 2 important things we see companies often overlook.

Redirect Your Old Webpages

If you’re doing a pretty serious redesign, there is a chance the the webpage addresses are going to change. While debating whether or not this is a good idea is a blog post for another day, let’s assume that this is what you’ve decided to do.

Make sure to “301 redirect” all of the old webpage addresses to their nearest equivalent on the new website. This will ensure that search engines move the SEO authority of the old webpage to the new webpage.

If you don’t redirect the pages, or you use a “302 redirect” or some other form of redirect, then the Google authority of your old webpages could literally disappear into thin (internet) air. This would cause your newly redesigned website to not get the same amount of traffic from Google rankings that the old website had before the redesigned version launched- that’s not good for anyone.

Keep the Redesign Away from Google Until Launch Day

In order to share the redesigned website with your team as the project is worked on, the web design team will most likely make the website accessible online. However, if the site is accessible to the public and search engines, you could run into issues with Google thinking that you now have two websites with similar content online. This could cause a drop in Google traffic for your site as Google gets confused about which site to show to searchers.

Luckily, the solution here is pretty straight forward. You can block the website behind a password, which should block everyone including search engines (although you should still do the robots.txt method below just to be safe). Or, if you want the site accessible to the anyone that visits the link, then you can simply block search engines in the robots.txt file.

To implement the robots.txt method, simply ensure there is a robots.txt file on the server you’re using to develop the website and include the following lines of code.

user-agent:*
Disallow :/

*IMPORTANT- Make sure you change this on launch day, or Google will deindex your website when they encounter the robots.txt file on your main web server!

If you’re in the middle of a redesign, check with your website design team to ensure they’ve addressed the above issues. If you’re unsure, feel free to connect with us and we’ll take a look.

By not receiving the right guidance regarding how SEO works and how to apply it to a business, many businesses simply hold off on pursuing SEO and end up leaving lots of money and opportunity on the table.

Even Fortune 500′s Make SEO Mistakes

Below are 3 huge brands that aren’t currently leveraging basic SEO on their websites. With the clout these firms have and resources that can be leveraged in an SEO campaign, it’s likely that they’re missing out on $10K’s or even $100K’s of increased revenue per month by not pursuing SEO.

Urban Outfitters

As of April 6, 2012, Urban Outfitters does not reference their XML sitemap in their robots.txt file. While this may sound like technical jargon, the sitemap is basically a map of your website that enables Google to quickly understand the overall structure of your website.

While having an XML sitemap is a good first step, listing it in your robots.txt file so that Google can quickly access it is a basic SEO best practice that would have been addressed if Urban Outfitters had conducted a quick SEO audit of their website.

Avon

Avon does not have headings (H1) on their product pages. Similar to how you scan a document and look at the title, headings, bolding, etc to gain a quick understanding of it, Google uses H1′s to quickly understand the content on a webpage.

By not using H1′s on product pages, Avon is making it more difficult for Google to quickly understand the product they’re trying to sell so that it can be presented in Google’s search results.

 LLBean

LLBean isn’t using headings (H1) for the category name on their product category pages. For example, “men’s footware” should be the heading on this category page so that Google quickly realizes this page is showcasing LLBean’s men’s footware products. However, “Men’s Footware” at the top is an H2 as of 4/6/12 and the page does not have an H1.

This could help LLBean’s rankings jump from the 2nd page (as of 4/6/12) to the 1st page of Google for men’s footwear, helping them reach the 1,000′s of prospects that search on Google for Men’s Footwear each month.

Basic SEO Is a Must Have

While not all companies are able to launch a full-scale SEO campaign to dominate their market on Google, all companies can take the basics of SEO and implement them to give themselves the best chance to achieve Google rankings in their market.

Let us know in the comments if you’re unsure if your website meets basic SEO best practices. We’d be happy to take a look at no cost.

In every project we take on, we help clients to integrate tracking that communicates how SEO and other marketing tactics are impacting the core metrics in their business. While each client situation is unique, below are a number of tracking tactics that every business should be using.

Track All Website Activity with Google Analytics

Before the explosion of the internet and web-based tools, tracking data about a business used to be extremely cost prohibitive. For example, you’d evaluate which complex anlaytics software would fulfill your needs and then hire a consultant that cost almost as much (or more) than the software so that it could be tailored to your business.

Luckily, the world has changed at least for the online side of business. It’s now possible to track everything that happens on your website, including the visitors that arrived, information about those visitors, what content they reviewed on your site, and much more. Even better, this is free if you’re using Google Analytics, a powerful website tracking system provided by Google that powers the analytics of most of the websites you visit each day.

Make sure you’ve added Google Analytics to your website, which is required to do much of the rest of the tracking we’ll be covering below…

Lead and / or Sale Conversion

Once someone comes to your website, you need to have a goal (or multiple goals) in place regarding what you want them to do. For example, if you’re an ecommerce site, you may want visitors to either (a) purchase a product or (b) signup for your email newsletter to receive future product updates.

In addition to lead and sale conversion goals, you can setup “engagement” goals such as a minimum time spent on the site or minimum number of pages viewed. While not all businesses need engagement goals at first, lead and sale conversion goals are a must.

Regardless of what your goal for website visitors is, it’s important that you track the number of people that complete these goals within Google Analytics. This will enable you to gauge the overall performance of the site as well as the effectiveness of various channels of website traffic in generating leads and sales for the business.

Creating goals in Google Analytics is a pretty straight forward process, but something that every business should do.

Segment Your Website Visitors

Not all website visitors are created equal. For example, someone that visits your website through links in your email newsletter is going to interact with content much differently than someone who finds your website on Google after searching for a product or service. Think of this like the difference between someone who shops at a certain store frequently (i.e. this is the email newsletter visitor) versus someone who is a first time visitor to your store (i.e. this is the Google visitor).

For this reason, you need to be sure that you’re not going through your Google Anlaytics website tracking data and viewing every visitor as a single group. Below are a number of segments to consider viewing separately, which can reveal powerful nuggets of insight that you can leverage to make your website more effective.

• Non-paid search engine visitors- These are visitors that found you on Google, Bing, or another search engine without you having to pay for the visit. We also recommend ensuring this segment only shows “non-brand” related traffic, which means that you filter out anyone that typed in a keyword related to your company name or company-specific products on the search engine. This will help you realize how you convert first time visitors into leads and sales.
• Paid search engine visitors- These are visitors that found you through your search engine advertising, such as Google Adwords pay per click advertising. It’s best to link your Google Adwords and Google Analytics accounts so that you can see full Adwords campaign information, such as cost per click and budget information, directly within your Google Analytics account.
•  Social media related visitors- These are visitors that found you through one of your social media channels, including tweets, Facebook status updates, or even your email newsletter (although that can be a separate segment by itself if you’d like).

Potential Insights Provided by Tracking

While each business’ situation is going to be unique, there are a number of insights that often come out of tracking your website’s activity as shown above.

• You will identify which web marketing channels are most profitable. For example, you may find that SEO visits produce leads at significantly less cost than paid search engine visits. This can help you know which online marketing campaigns to focus on scaling up.
• You will identify which pages on your website cause the most visitors to lose interest and leave your site. For example, you may find that once people click “Get a Free Consultation” and reach a page where you ask them for too much information, they decide not to take advantage of the free consultation and leave the site. This will help you know what pages to adjust to see how you can decrease the percentage of people that you “lose” at that page.

The video is being called “the most viral video of all time”…and the stats prove it.

Here’s a few remarkable stats about the Kony 2012 campaign, as of day 6 of the campaign (3/12/12):

• The video had been viewed 112 million times
• Over 860,000 comments have been posted about the video
• The campaign has received exposure through nearly every major media outlet in the world, most with multiple segments aired during prime time. This includes The New York Times, CNN, Forbes, and many more.

So How Do We Fit in To Kony 2012?

While we definitely cannot take credit for the overall success of the Kony 2012 campaign, we helped Invisible Children prepare for it so that they could reap rewards long after the exposure and online buzz slows down. While getting a ton of exposure internationally is a huge win, we would consider it a big missed opportunity if this exposure wasn’t leveraged to achieve high Google rankings for their website that will be there forever (i.e. long after the campaign is over).

Leveraging Media Exposure for Google Rankings

Specifically, we worked with Invisible Children prior to the Kony 2012 campaign to better educate their entire team in how to leverage media exposure to increase Google rankings over time.

There are many factors that influence Google rankings, but a big factor is the number of different websites that link back to your website and what keywords those websites use in the link text. Below are a few ways that we helped ensure that the Kony 2012 team could leverage the campaign’s media exposure to build SEO links to their website and secure competitive rankings for the future.

• When providing content to journalist (i.e. interviews, commentary via email, etc.), Invisible Children nearly always provides links back to InvisibleChildren.com content (i.e. webpages or blogs) so that the journalist can link back to these pages in their published article.
• When possible, they provide links to specific pages that they’re trying to grow Google rankings for and include keywords within those links (i.e. “Lords Resistance Army“) rather then generic text (i.e. “click here”).
• We’re also working with them to optimize their on-site content (i.e. videos, etc.) so that they receive links back to their website anytime someone shares the video with their social network.

The Lesson From All of This

While we can’t guarantee that your own campaign will get exposure on CNN and receive 100 million views, we can guarantee that your company will have the knowledge and technical resources in place to leverage any exposure that you do get to achieve high Google rankings long after the exposure winds down.

If your interested in learning how to integrate SEO and Google rankings in your business, contact us today.

The full post discusses ways that SEO fits in to many businesses and can be found here. Leave a comment there to receive replies directly from Jon, as he’ll be moderating the comments section for the post.

The presentation is available below and published to SlideShare.

The Traffic Ticket Attorneys (TTA) were in need of a new website in addition to development and management of an effective SEO / Google rankings strategy as part of their 2012 growth plans for the firm.

We worked with The Traffic Ticket Attorneys to launch an updated website with a professional design, integration of SEO best practices, and lead-generation focused layout. In addition, we helped TTA develop and integrate effective online traffic / lead reporting in order to ensure that the profitability of all online marketing efforts over time.

Immediately after launching the website, the rate of visitors that turn into leads (i.e. conversion rate) increased by more than 100% resulting in a higher volume of leads produced from the same amount of website traffic. In addition, we’re working with TTA to increase the traffic they receive through SEO / Google rankings over time.

These days, SEO is a must in nearly every business. With that said, there are multiple providers that your business can go to for SEO services, so it’s getting harder and harder to make a choice that you’re still happy with 6 months down the road.

When considering which SEO agency or consultant to hire, there are a number of questions that you should ask. This is important due to the nature of SEO- it’s a specialized skill set that requires years of “in the trenches” experience to know how to get results for clients.

Below are 4 questions to ask and answers to watch for when evaluating an SEO consultant…

Question- How Does Google Rank Websites?

Even if you’re already familiar with how SEO works, it’s important that you ask this question to gauge the prospective consultant’s knowledge in SEO as well as their ability to communicate this knowledge in a clear way.

We explain that there are 3 factors that determine whether your website gets ranked on Google:

1. Can Google access your website, in terms of how it’s technically structured
2. Does Google understand your content, in terms of what topics you write about
3. Does Google consider you an authority on the topic(s), in terms of how many other websites online refer to you about this topic (i.e. websites linking to your website).

Every SEO provider is going to explain Google rankings differently, but if the provider has trouble explaining this basic question then that’s a read flag…there are going to be communication problems down the road.

Question- Will You Optimize My Meta Keywords?

Meta keywords are keywords that you can input into the website code of any webpages. While they’re easy to update, they’re not influential anymore for Google rankings.

In short, meta keywords used to be a must in an SEO project but they are no longer important (see it straight from a Google employee here). If a potential SEO provider doesn’t know this, then that’s a red flag in that they’re not up on the times regarding what works in SEO (Google debunked meta keywords in 2009…).

However, a more common situation is when an SEO provider knows meta keywords don’t matter but they don’t try to explain this to you…instead, they say “yes, we’ll optimize each webpage’s meta keywords” or something along those lines. This is a red flag that shows the consultant may not be able to truly drive the project from an expertise perspective…you’re paying for SEO expertise, so make sure your consultant is willing to communicate that to you.

Question- How Will You Build Links to My Website?

In order to increase the authority and ranking of your website on search engines, you need to be sure to get links from other websites on the internet. There are numerous ways to do this, but only some are effective in increasing your search engine rankings.

A good rule of thumb is that if the link building tactic builds 10’s or 100’s of links within a matter of 5 days and can be repeated anytime, then it’s most likely not effective. This includes blog commenting, article syndication, press releases, etc. The reasoning for this is that Google knows that you and not the market are the one building links, so they diminish the authority signals that these links send.

A good link building tactic is one that leverages a unique aspect of your business (i.e. expert content creation, connections to other businesses or associations, etc.) and is baked into your business to be leveraged over time. For example, we work with clients to create multiple guest blog posts per month that are then published to influential industry blogs. This tactic has proven effective in acquiring highly competitive rankings for our clients.

If your SEO consultant talks about submitting your website to directories, syndicating online articles, or commenting on blogs or discussion forums, then this shows that they most likely do not have a strong link building strategy in place and will have difficulty increasing your rankings.

Question- What Metrics Are You Trying to Influence?

In SEO, it’s not about getting rankings…it’s about driving website traffic and leads / sales. Although rankings are a piece of that puzzle, they’re not the end all be all of a successful campaign.

The most direct metric that SEO impacts is non-brand organic search traffic. In short, this means (a) traffic that comes from non-paid search engines, such as Google (b) the keyword typed on the search engine doesn’t include brand terms.

You SEO provider should be focused on increasing non-brand organic search traffic, but also be monitoring other deeper metrics such as conversion rate of this website traffic, and more. Check out our blog post on short and long term SEO metrics for a more detailed explanation.

If your SEO provider is focused on increasing rankings, than this can show that they’re not going to connect their work all the way down to the bottom line of your company.

Any hiring decision in a company should be a careful decision, but hiring an SEO consultant is usually a bit more complex due to the nature of the industry. We hope that these questions will help you make the right decision.

And don’t forget to contact us, as we’d be happy to answer these questions and more.

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Image Credit: via @gangplankhq on Flickr.com

While IC had a website in place and (a lot of) buzz online from their network around the world, they had not integrated SEO best practices into their business. This meant they were not getting all of the exposure that was possible on Google and other search engines.

IC reached out to us to help them leverage all aspects of their organization to increase the exposure they receive online (in search engines specifically) in order to spread their cause.

Our initial work involved:

• Ensuring their website was technically accessible to Google, through conducting our extensive SEO Audit and guiding their technical team in implementing recommendations
• Identifying the types of keywords people search for online that could indicate a connection to IC’s cause, although the searcher may not already be aware of IC specifically.
• Integrating keyword targeting throughout their website to ensure that Google understood the relevance of IC content to highly searched keywords

In addition to the website SEO and keyword targeting work described above, we conducted an extensive discovery process to understand all aspects of how IC currently interacts online. Using this information, we conducted a thorough training session with multiple departments within their organization to help them integrate SEO into their day to day activities as a means of exponentially growing their website authority over time. This philosophy of integrating SEO into all aspects of the organization leads to an extremely effective SEO strategy.

By ensuring their website is accessible to Google, utilizing the keyword targeting recommendations, and integrating SEO authority building into their day to day activities, IC has been rapidly growing the exposure they receive for their cause online.

While the company was aggressively marketing their services through online pay-per-click advertising, they reached out to us as a means of growing their website traffic and sales through rankings on search engines such as Google. While online advertising traffic was profitable, it became apparent that a large amount of traffic could be acquired with a higher return-on-investment using SEO over time.

Initially, we worked with TicketKick to ensure that their website effectively targeted high volume keywords within their market. After the keyword targeting was in place, we began to build the SEO rankings of TicketKick.com over time using our unique link building services.

Over the last 6 months of 2011, the following milestones have been achieved:

• Traffic from SEO-specific efforts has increased by 35%
• $1,000’s in revenue per month directly from SEO-specific website traffic is the norm
• Achieved a 15,000 visit day with $1,000’s in sales due to PR opportunity acquired
• and the volume of “free” SEO visits is rapidly approaching the amount of paid online visits

By ensuring effective management of the ongoing SEO campaign, we look forward to continuing to be a partner in the growth of TicketKick.com.