Note: This post is the 9th in a series on Brand Building that highlights the approach that WhitePages has taken over the past 15 months to build and reposition its brand.
The following post was written by Darren Dalasta who is our Sr. Marketing Manager running the search marketing team. He’s been working making sure we maintain and improve our search ranking while we undergo our site’s upgrade. Read the full post below!
For those not familiar with SEO it stands for Search Engine Optimization. Many people, even in marketing or technology, still see SEO as that black art of marketing with a mad scientist sitting in his/her own corner spinning a web of deceit laying a trap for the search engines. Luckily, most have evolved a bit, and you will get more out of your SEO efforts by working WITH your brand and usability (and other) teams than by yourself in that corner. It is becoming evident that brand and SEO are becoming increasingly connected.
Since our WhitePages Brand Redesign is culminating in a full-on site redesign, I’m going to focus this post on what you need to do while wearing your SEO hat (just make sure it’s white or you may create a little old-fashioned SEO dustup).
A redesign can be a scary endeavor to a search engine optimizer. You spend days/weeks/months gradually adjusting your site to get the most from search engines. It’s a big thing for you to tweak a meta tag here (for a deeper crawl and better indexing) or adjust title there (to get a higher-click through when your site does show up in the search results). Then one day the “Brand” guy – we’ll call him “John” – says “I have an idea” and the next thing you know your site is in the beginning phases of a redesign. Don’t worry, this is a good thing. Here is the thought process, tug-of-war, and actions that get set into motion from an SEO’s perspective:
Happy Hour
We have a Whiskey Club here at WhitePages, but feel free to improvise.
- BEG to not do anything *too* crazy
Massive changes all at once can wreak havoc on your site’s rankings. Some of these big changes I’m referring to may be:
- Killing off the “page view” by having just 1 page and all ajax (we did see an all ajaxified version of our site – it was very cool and may make an appearance…someday).
- Decide Google is stealing your content so shut them out of the site (this would be bad for you if SEO is your sole function. If this is the case, go back to step 1)
- Change domains, change web hosts, change URLs, and change your site all at once. I recommend gradual changes where at all possible.
- Turning your site into an all-flash fiesta, moving over to an entirely different name/domain (this was discussed here)
Luckily we didn’t decide to do anything listed here. But just to be sure, I provided input on the pros and cons of each and had plenty of data to back it up.
- Isolate your ESSENTIALS – what you can and can’t live without
This involves digging into your site and your keywords. If you’re using an analytics package (you ARE using analytics aren’t you??!) segment by entry page and view referrals coming from search engines.
After finding out which pages (or groups of pages) are driving the most traffic from search engines, go to the next level and look at keywords. Come away with a list of pages and keywords vital to your continued SEO success. You’ll use these later…
- Get involved in the new site & EDUCATE
By now, the powers that be have probably decided what the new site -will look like and invited you to the party. If you didn’t get that memo, invite yourself, this is no time to start feeling sorry for yourself – you should have done that in step 1. Navigation, hierarchy, URLs, and naming conventions should be decided with your input.You know what to fight for. Stand up and let everyone know if you have a premier placement in a search engine that will be at risk if it was drastically changed (see our area code maps ) or if somebody wants to get rid of a feature that includes one of your top keywords. You should speak up if a copywriter is working in a bubble and changing language because YOU know how people are searching. Don’t withhold this information, they might not know about all the cool tools you do.The SEO is in the best position to defend a page, taxonomy, feature, image, forum…you get the idea. There is a business case for each of your keywords and landing pages – make it known. If it’s known and it still is decided against, move on to the next step.
- Be flexible and MITIGATE your losses
If you lost the battle, don’t worry, the war is far from over. There are many things you can do to mitigate SEO traffic loss. If a page goes away, a 301 redirect can use the old page’s strength and focus it on a new page – that may improve rankings for a coveted keyword(s). You can also find all links to old pages and email the owner of the site linking to yours and ask them to change that link – maybe they will even add a new link to a new feature while they’re at it.
- BUILD on it
Maybe the best way to mitigate a loss is to replace it with something new. There are probably dozens of things you haven’t gotten to before. This is your chance to fix them.
- LAUNCH
Hold your breath! We are doing split testing (which probably deserves its’ own post) and that can be tricky for how it affects SEO. We’ve opted for a cookie-based user selection for whom we give a version of the new site. Because your typical search engine spider does not accept cookies, we are not worrying about them switching between sites. A gradual roll-out of a site, requires some development. However, it is invaluable to gather knowledge of how your new site is performing; both from a user perspective and a load perspective (especially since we’re about to become the biggest Ruby on Rails site).
- Monitor and ADJUST
Just about anything that is done can be undone. You will find new keywords and notice a decline in others. Take this as an opportunity to keep the good, but remedy the bad. Within a short amount of time you’ll be back in the land of tweaking and testing. You can now feel free to go back to step 1 without a conscience of a redesign hanging over your head.
One of the best by-products of a large site redesign is that somewhere in this process you’ll figure out that the UI and brand team are actually doing things that will help you in the long-term. Remember that the redesign is really for your visitors – and with a solid usability team, graphics team, branding/messaging team, site changes will make your customers very happy people. In turn, those happy people will link and talk about you more. Maybe your brand name will even become one of your biggest search terms – it is for us (see image).
So while a redesign can send off some crisis alarms, realize that it’s really not all that bad. This is a great chance to bring your knowledge to the forefront as well as educate others on the importance THEY have to your SEO success or failure.
On that crisis note, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from John F. Kennedy.
“When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters – one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”
Go with Opportunity.
Questions, comments, criticisms? Feel free to reach out via our comment section below or call me at 206-812-9213.
Darren
Other Brand Series Posts:
The Series Introduction: WhitePages Site Redesign
Explaining Branding to Employees
Launching the new WhitePages Site!
Making Money on WhitePages website
Related posts:
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Thanks for sharing the link of SEO Book and I found, there are some good points which are useful. I think Branding is quickly becoming the new search engine marketing.
thanks for the comment Paul. I definitely agree with you that branding is creeping into search marketing pretty quickly, guess it’s time to dust off our old marketing textbooks and put down the coding ones
Thanks for sharing this link as well as the information. We all need to pay closer attention to branding since it may be the search engine for marketing.