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Usability is in the eyes of the beholder. That which is easy to us isn't always obvious to our customers. Today, we explore that topic and offer a little advice.
MarketingSherpa Blog
Posted on 19 April 2018.
Usability is in the eyes of the beholder. That which is easy to us isn't always obvious to our customers. Today, we explore that topic and offer a little advice.
MarketingSherpa Blog
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 29 March 2018.
Posted by efgreg
We all work hard building our businesses.
We put in the sweat equity and all the tears that can come with it to build something truly great. After another day hustling at the office or typing furiously on your keyboard, you might be wondering… what is the end game here?
What are you really going for? Is there a glowing neon sign with the word "Exit" marking the path to your ultimate goal?
For the majority of businesses, the end goal is to eventually sell that business to another entrepreneur who wants to take the reins and simply enjoy the profits from the sale. Alas, most of us don't even know what our business is worth, much less how to go about selling it — or if it's even sellable to begin with.
That's where Empire Flippers comes in. We've been brokering deals for years in the online business space, serving a quiet but hungry group of investors who are looking to acquire digital assets. The demand for profitable digital assets has been growing so much that our brokerage was able to get on the Inc. 5000 list two years in a row, both times under the 500 mark.
We can say with confidence that, yes, there is indeed an exit for your business.
By the end of this article you're going to know more about how online businesses are valued, what buyers are looking for, and how you can get the absolute top dollar for your content website, software as a service (SaaS), or e-commerce store.
(You might have noticed I didn't include the word "agency" in the last paragraph. Digital agencies are incredibly hard to sell; to do so, you need to have streamlined your process as much as possible. Even though having clients is great, other digital assets are far easier to sell.)
If you've built a digital asset you're looking to exit from, the first question you likely have is, "This sounds fantastic, but how do I go about putting an actual price tag on what I've created?"
We'll dive into those answers below, but first let's talk about why you're already in a great position just by being a reader of the Moz Blog.
SEO is by far the most attractive traffic source for people looking at purchasing online businesses.
The beauty of SEO is that once you've put in the work to achieve the rankings, they can maintain and bring in traffic for sometimes months without significant upkeep. That's in stark contrast with pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, such as Facebook ads, which require daily monitoring to make sure nothing strange is happening with your conversions or that you're not overspending.
For someone who has no experience with traffic generation but wants to purchase a profitable online business, an SEO-fueled website just makes sense. They can earn while they learn. When they purchase the asset (typically a content website for people just starting out), they can play around with adding new high-quality pieces of content and learn about more complicated SEO techniques down the road.
Even someone who is a master at paid traffic loves SEO. They might buy an e-commerce store that has some real potential with Facebook ads that's currently driving the majority of its traffic through SEO, and treat the SEO as gravy on top of the paid traffic they plan to drive toward that e-commerce store.
Whether the buyer is a newbie or a veteran, SEO as a traffic method has one of the widest appeals of any other traffic strategy. While SEO itself does not increase the value of the business in most cases, it does attract more buyers than other forms of traffic.
Now, let's get down to what your business is worth.
How businesses are valued is such a common question we get at our brokerage that we created an automated valuation tool that gives a free estimate of your business's value, which our audience uses with all of their different projects.
At the heart of any valuation is a fairly basic formula:
You look at your rolling 12-month net profit average and then times that by a multiple. Typically, a multiple will range between 20–50x of the 12-month average net profit for healthy, profitable online businesses. As you get closer to 50x you have to be able to show your business is growing in a BIG way month over month and that your business is truly defensible (something we'll talk about later in this article).
You might see some brokers using a 2x or 3x EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization.
When you see this formula, they're using an annual multiple, whereas at Empire Flippers we use a monthly multiple. There's really not much of a difference between the two formulas; it mainly depends on your preference, but if you're brand new to buying and selling online businesses, then it's helpful to know how different brokers price businesses.
We prefer the monthly multiple since it shows a more granular picture of the business and where it's trending.
Just like you can influence Google SERPs with SEO knowledge, so can you manipulate this formula to give you a better valuation as long as you know what you're looking at.
There are various things you can do to get a higher multiple. A lot of it comes down to just common sense and really putting yourself in the buyer's shoes.
A useful thing to ask: "Would I ever buy my business? Why? Why not?"
This exercise can lead you to change a lot of things about your business for the better.
The two areas that most affect the multiple come down to your actual average net profit and how long the business has been around making money.
The higher your average net profit, the higher your multiple will tend to be because it's a bigger cash-flowing asset. It makes sense then to look at various ways you can increase that net profit and decrease your total amount of expenses.
Every digital asset is a little different in where their expenses are coming from. For content sites, content creation costs are typically the lion's share of expenses. As you approach the time of sale, you might want to scale back your content. In other cases, you may want to move to an agency solution where you can scale or minimize your content expenses at will rather than having in-house writers on the payroll.
There are also expenses that you might be applying to the business but aren't really "needed" in operating the business, known as add-backs.
Add-backs are where you add certain expenses BACK into the net profit. These are items that you might've charged on the business account but aren't really relevant to running the business.
These could be drinks, meals, or vacations put on the business account, and sometimes even business conferences. For example, going to a conference about email marketing might not be considered a "required" expense to running a health content site, whereas going to a sourcing conference like the Canton Fair would be a harder add-back to justify when it comes to running an e-commerce store.
Other things, such as SEO tools you're using on a monthly basis, can likely be added back to the business. Most people won't need them constantly to run and grow their business. They might subscribe for a month, get all the keyword data they need for a while, cancel, and then come back when they're ready to do more keyword research.
Most of your expenses won't be add-backs, but it is good to keep these in mind as they can definitely increase the ultimate sales price of your business.
While there's usually a lot of fat you can cut from your business, you need to be reasonable about it. Cutting some things might improve your overall net profit, but vastly decrease the attractability of your business.
One common thing we see in the e-commerce space is solopreneurs starting to package and ship all of the items themselves to their customers. The thinking goes that they're saving money by doing it themselves. While this may be true, it's not an attractive solution to a potential buyer.
It's far more attractive to spend money on a third-party solution that can store and ship the product for you as orders come in. After all, many buyers are busy traveling the world while having an online business. Forcing them to settle down just so they can ship products versus hanging out on the beaches of Bali for a few months during winter is a tough ask.
When selling a business, you don't want to worry only about expenses, but also how easy it is to plug into and start running that business for a buyer.
Even if the systems you create to do that add extra expenses, like using a third party to handle fulfillment, they're often more than worth keeping around because they make the business look more attractive to buyers.
The more history you can show, the more attractive your business will be, as long as it's holding at a steady profit level or showing an upward trend.
The more your business is trending upward, the higher multiple you're going to get.
While you can't do much in terms of lengthening the business's history, you can prepare yourself for the eventual sale by investing in needed items early on in your business. For example, if you know your website needs a big makeover and you're 24 months out from selling, it's better to do that big website redesign now instead of during the 12-month average your business will be priced on.
Showing year-over-year growth is also beneficial in getting a better multiple, because it shows your business can weather growing pains. This ability to weather business challenges is especially true in a business whose primary traffic is Google-organic. It shows that the site has done quality SEO by surviving several big updates over the course of a few years.
On the flipside, a trending downward business is going to get a much worse multiple, likely in the 12–18x range. A business in decline can still be sold, though. There are specific buyers that only want distressed assets because they can get them at deep discounts and often have the skill sets needed to fix the site.
You just have to be willing to take a lower sales price due to the decline, and since a buyer pool on distressed assets is smaller, you'll likely have a longer sales cycle before you find someone willing to acquire the asset.
While profit and length of history are the two main factors, there are a bunch of smaller factors that can add up to a significant increase in your multiple and ultimate valuation price.
You'll have a fair amount of control with a lot of these, so they're worth maximizing as much as possible in the 12–24 month window where you are preparing your online business for sale.
Critical points of failure are anything in your business that has the power to be a total deal breaker. It's not rare to sell a business that has one or two critical points, but even so you want to try to minimize this as much as possible.
An example of a critical point of failure could be where all of your website traffic is purely Google-organic. If the site gets penalized by a Google algorithm update, it could kill all of your traffic and revenue overnight.
Likewise, if you're an Amazon affiliate and Amazon suddenly changes their Terms of Service, you could get banned for reasons you don't understand or even have time to react to, ending up with a highly trafficked site that makes zero money.
In the e-commerce space, we see situations where the entrepreneur only has one supplier that can make their product. What happens if that supplier wants to jack up the prices or suddenly goes out of business completely?
It's worth your while to diversify your traffic sources, have multiple monetization strategies for a content site, or investigate having backup or even competing suppliers for your e-commerce products.
Every business has some kind of weakness; your job is to minimize those weaknesses as much as possible to get the most value out of your business from a potential buyer.
Higher traffic tends to correlate with higher revenue, which ultimately should increase your net profit. That all goes without saying; however, high traffic also can be an added bonus to your multiple on top of helping create a solid net profit.
Many buyers look for businesses they can optimize to the extreme at every point of the marketing funnel. When you have a high amount of traffic, you give them a lot of room to play with different conversion rate optimization factors like increasing email options, creating or crafting a better abandoned cart sequence, and changing the various calls to action on the site.
While many sellers might be fantastic at driving traffic, they might not exactly be the biggest pro at copywriting or CRO in general; this is where a big opportunity lies for the right buyer who might be able to increase conversions with their own copywriting or CRO skill.
It's almost a cliche in the Internet marketing space to say "the money is in the list." Email has often been one of the biggest drivers of revenue for companies, but there's a weird paradigm we've discovered after selling hundreds of online businesses.
Telling someone they should use an email list is pretty similar to telling someone to go to the gym: they agree it's useful and they should do it, but often they do nothing about it. Then there are those who do build an email list because they understand its power, but then never do anything useful with it.
This results in email lists being a hit-or-miss on whether they actually add any value to your business's final valuation.
If you can prove the email list is adding value to your business, then your email list CAN improve your overall multiple. If you use good email automation sequences to up-sell your traffic and routinely email the list with new offers and pieces of high-quality content, then your email list has real value associated with it, which will reflect on your final valuation.
Social media has become more and more important as time goes on, but it can also be an incredibly fickle beast.
It's best to think of your social media following as a "soft" email list. The reach of your social media following compared to your email list will tend to be lower, especially as social organic reach keeps declining on bigger social platforms like Facebook. In addition, you don't own the platform that following is built off of, meaning it can be taken away from you anytime for reasons outside of your control.
Plus, it's just too easy to fake followers and likes.
However, if you can wade through all that and prove that your social following and social media promotion are driving real traffic and sales to your business, it will definitely help in increasing your multiple.
Earning everything from a single product is somewhat risky.
What happens if that product goes out of style? Or gets discontinued?
Whether you're running an e-commerce store or a content site monetizing through affiliate links, you want to have several different product offerings.
When you have several products earning good money through your website, then a buyer will find the business ultimately more attractive and value it more because you won't be hurt in a big way if one of the "flavors of the month" disappears on you.
Remember, the majority of buyers are not looking at acquiring a job. They want a leveraged cash-flowing investment they can ideally scale up.
While there's nothing wrong with working 40–50+ hours per week on a business that is really special, it will narrow your overall buyer pool and make the business less attractive. The truth is, most of the digital assets we're creating don't really require this amount of work from the owner.
What we typically see is that there are a lot of areas for improvement that the seller can use to minimize their weekly hour allotment to the business. We recommend that everyone looking to sell their business first consider how they can minimize their actual involvement.
The three most effective ways to cut down on your time spent are:
You should always be in a position where you're working ON your business and not IN.
At Empire Flippers, we're always asking people if they built a deep enough moat around their business. A deep moat means your business is harder to copy. A copycat can't just go buy a domain and some hosting and copy your business in an afternoon.
A drop-shipping store that can be copied in a single day is not going to be nearly as attractive as one that has built up a real following and a community around their brand, even if they sell the same products.
This fact becomes more and more important as your business valuation goes into the multiple six-figure and seven-figure valuation ranges because buyers are looking to buy a real brand at this point, not just a niche site.
Here are a few actions you can take to deepen this moat:
The harder it is to copy what you've built, the higher the multiple you'll get.
You're now well-equipped with knowledge on how to increase your business's ultimate value, but why would you actually sell it?
The reasons are vast and numerous — too many to list in this post. However, there are a few common reasons you might resonate with.
Here are a few business reasons why people sell their businesses:
Just as there are a ton of business reasons to sell, there are also a ton of personal reasons why people sell their business:
When you can collect 20–50 months of your net profit upfront, you can do a lot of things that just weren't options before.
When you have a multiple six-figure or even seven-figure war chest, you can often outspend the competition, invest in infrastructure and teams you couldn't before, and in general jumpstart your next project or business idea far faster without ever having to worry about if a Google update is going tank your earnings or some other unforeseen market change.
That begs the question…
Honestly, it depends.
The answer to this question is more of an art than a science.
As a rule of thumb, you should ask yourself if you're excited by the kind of money you'll get from the successful sale of your online business.
You can use our valuation tool to get a ballpark estimate or do some back-of-the-napkin math of what you're likely to receive for the business using the basic multiple formula I outlined. I prefer to always be on the conservative side with my estimations, so your napkin math might be taking your 12-month average net profit with a multiple of 25x.
Does that number raise your eyebrows? Is it even interesting?
If it is, then you might want to start asking yourself if you really are ready to part with your business to focus on other things. Remember, you should always set a MINIMUM sales price that you'd be willing to walk away from the business with, something that would still make you happy if you went through with it.
Most of us Internet marketers are always working on multiple projects at once. Sadly, some projects just don't get the love they deserve or used to get from us.
Instead of letting those projects just die off in the background, consider selling your online business instead to a very hungry market of investors starting to flood our digital realm.
Selling a business, even if it's a side project that you're winding down, is always going to be an intimate process. When you're ready to pull the trigger, we'll be there to help you every step of the way.
Have you thought about selling your online business, or gone through a sale in the past? Let us know your advice, questions, or anecdotes in the comments.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 21 March 2018.
Posted by AlliBerry3
One of the advantages of working for an agency is the volume of websites we get to evaluate. The majority of clients who sign up for ongoing SEO and/or content services will receive a content audit. Similar to a technical SEO audit, the results of the content audit should drive the strategies and priorities of the next stages of content work. Without the audit, you can't create an effective strategy because you first need to know what types of content you've got, what content you're missing, and what content you've got too much of.
While there are many posts out there about how to perform a content audit (and I encourage you to check out these posts: How to Do a Content Audit and 5 Lessons Learned from a Content Audit), I am going to be focusing on what my common findings have been from recently conducting 15 content audits. My aim is to give you more of a framework on how you can talk to clients about their content or, if you are the client, ways you can improve your website content to keep users on the site longer and, ultimately, convert.
I have yet to complete a content audit where creating clearer calls-to-action wasn't a focus. The goal of a page should be obvious to any visitor (or content auditor). What is it that you want a visitor who lands on this page to do next? Many of our clients are not e-commerce, so it may feel less obvious; however, assuming you want someone to stay on your website, what's next?
Even if answer is "I want them to visit my store," make it easy for them. Add a prominent "Visit Our Store" button. If it's a simple blog page, what are the next blog articles someone should read based on what they just read? Or do you have a relevant e-book you'd like them to download? You got them to the end of your post — don't lose the visitor because they aren't sure what to do next!
One thing we often do when conducting content audits is track where in the sales funnel each page is aimed (awareness, consideration, purchase, or retention). What we sometimes find is that clients tend to have a disproportionate amount of content aimed at driving a purchase, but not enough for awareness, consideration, and retention. This isn't always the case, particularly if they have a blog or resources hub; however, the consideration and retention stages are often overlooked. While the buyer cycle is going to be different for every product, it's still important to have content that addresses each stage, no matter how brief the stage is.
Retention is a big deal too! It is way more cost-efficient and easier to upsell and cross-sell current customers than bring in new. Your customers are also less price-sensitive because they know your brand is worth it. You definitely want to provide content for this audience too to keep them engaged with the brand and find new uses for your products. Plus, you've already got their contact information, so delivering content to them is much easier than a prospect.
Here are some examples of content for each stage:
Awareness: Blog posts (explainers, how-tos, etc), e-books, educational webinars, infographics
Consideration: Product comparisons, case studies, videos
Purchase: Product pages, trial offers, demos, coupons
Retention: Blog posts (product applications, success stories, etc), newsletters, social media content
There are so many pages dedicated solely to testimonials out there on the Interwebs. It's painful. Who trusts a testimonials page over reviews on third-party sites like Yelp, Google My Business, or Tripadvisor? No one. That being said, there is a place for testimonials. It's just not on a testimonials page.
The best way to use a testimonial is to pair it with the appropriate copy. If it's a testimonial about how easy and fast a customer received their product, use that on a shipping page. If it's a testimonial about how a product solved a problem they had, use it on that product page. This will enhance your copy and help to alleviate any anxieties a prospective customer has with their decision to purchase.
Testimonials can also help you improve your local relevance in search. If you have a storefront that is targeting particular cities, ask for a customer's city and state when you gather testimonials. Then, include relevant testimonials along with their city and state on the appropriate location page(s). Even if your store is in Lakewood, Colorado, collecting testimonials from customers who live in Denver and including them on your location page will help both search engines and users recognize that Denver people shop there.
If location matters to your business, you should not only use testimonials to boost your local relevance, but your content in general. Take the auto dealership industry, for example. There are over 16,000 car dealerships in the United States and they all (presumably) have websites. Many of them have very similar content because they are all trying to sell the same or similar models of cars.
The best car dealership websites, however, are creating content that matters to their local communities. People who live in Denver, for example, care about what the best cars are for driving in the mountains, whereas people in the Los Angeles area are more likely to want to know which cars get the best highway gas mileage. Having your sales team take note of common questions they get asked and addressing them in your content can go a long way toward improving local relevance and gaining loyal customers.
Many companies, B2B companies in particular, do not want to list pricing on their website. It's understandable, especially when the honest answer to "how much does your service cost?" is "it depends." The problem with shying away from pricing altogether, though, is that people are searching for pricing information. It's a huge missed opportunity not to have any content related to pricing, and it annoys prospective customers who would rather know your cost range before giving you a call or submitting a form for follow up.
It's mutually beneficial to have pricing information (or at least information on how you determine pricing) on your website because it'll help qualify leads. If a prospect knows your price range and they still reach out for more information, they're going to be a much better lead than someone who is reaching out to get pricing information. This saves your sales team the trouble of wasting their time on bad leads.
Having pricing information on your website also helps establish trust with the prospect. If you aren't transparent about your pricing, it looks like you charge as much as you can get away with. The more information you provide, the more trustworthy your business looks. And if all of your competitors are also hiding their pricing, you're the first one they'll likely reach out to.
There are a lot of great companies out there doing great work. And more often than not, their website does not reflect it as well as it could. It isn't uncommon for those tasked with writing web copy to be quite close to the product. What sometimes happens is jargon and technical language dominates, and the reason why a customer should care gets lost. When it comes to explaining a product or service, Joel Klettke said it best at MozCon 2017. A web page should include:
It's also important to include business results, real use cases, and customer successes with the product on your website too. This establishes more trust and supports your claims about your products. Doing this will speak to your customers in a way that jargon simply will not.
With more sites getting an SSL certificate and moving to HTTPS, it's more important than ever to make sure you have 301 redirects set up from the HTTP version to the HTTPS version to prevent unintentional duplication of your entire website. Duplicate content can impact search rankings as search engines struggle to decide which version of a page is more relevant to a particular search query. We've been seeing quite a few sites that have an entire duplicate site or some isolated pages that didn't get redirects in place in their migrations. We also keep seeing sites that have www and non-www versions of pages without 301 redirects as well. Running regular crawls will help you stay on top of this kind of duplicate content.
Here are a couple of good resources to check out when doing an HTTPS migration:
How content is organized on a site can be just as important as what the content is. Without proper organization, users can struggle to surf a website successfully and search engines have a difficult time determining which pages are considered most important. Making sure your most important pages are structured to be easy to find, by listing them in your navigation, for example, is a good user experience and will help those pages perform better.
Part of making important pages easy to find is through internal linking. Web content is often created on an ongoing basis, and being smart about internal linking requires taking the time to look holistically at the site and figuring out which pages make the most sense to link to and from. I keep encountering blog content that does not link back to a core page on the site. While you don't want product to be the focus of your blog, it should be easy for a user to get to the core pages of your site if they want to do so. As you're auditing a site, you'll find pages that relate to one another that don't link. Make notes of those as you go so you can better connect pages both in copy and with your calls to action.
What I find most interesting about content audits is how subjective they are. Defining what makes content good or bad is gray in a way that identifying whether or not a page has, say, a canonical tag, is not. For that reason, I have found that what content auditors focus most heavily on tend to be a reflection of the background of the person doing the audit. And the most common content mistakes I have touched on here reflect my background perfectly, which is a meld of SEO and content marketing.
So, I'm curious: what do you look for and find in your content audits? What would you add to my list?
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Posted in IM NewsComments Off
Posted on 08 March 2018.
Posted by Modestos
A site migration is a term broadly used by SEO professionals to describe any event whereby a website undergoes substantial changes in areas that can significantly affect search engine visibility — typically substantial changes to the site structure, content, coding, site performance, or UX.
Google's documentation on site migrations doesn't cover them in great depth and downplays the fact that so often they result in significant traffic and revenue loss, which can last from a few weeks to several months — depending on the extent search engine ranking signals have been affected, as well as how long it may take the affected business to rollout a successful recovery plan.
Site migration examples
Site migration types
Common site migration pitfalls
Site migration process
1. Scope & planning
2. Pre-launch preparation
3. Pre-launch testing
4. Launch day actions
5. Post-launch testing
6. Performance review
Site migration checklist
Appendix: Useful tools
The following section discusses how both successful and unsuccessful site migrations look and explains why it is 100% possible to come out of a site migration without suffering significant losses.
Anyone who has been involved with a site migration has probably heard the widespread theory that it will result in de facto traffic and revenue loss. Even though this assertion holds some truth for some very specific cases (i.e. moving from an established domain to a brand new one) it shouldn't be treated as gospel. It is entirely possible to migrate without losing any traffic or revenue; you can even enjoy significant growth right after launching a revamped website. However, this can only be achieved if every single step has been well-planned and executed.
The following graph illustrates a big UK retailer's botched site migration where the website lost 35% of its visibility two weeks after switching from HTTP to HTTPS. It took them about six months to fully recover, which must have had a significant impact on revenue from organic search. This is a typical example of a poor site migration, possibly caused by poor planning or implementation.
But recovery may not always be possible. The below visibility graph is from another big UK retailer, where the HTTP to HTTPS switchover resulted in a permanent 20% visibility loss.
In fact, it's is entirely possible to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS without losing so much traffic and for so such a long period, aside from the first few weeks where there is high volatility as Google discovers the new URLs and updates search results.
What does a successful site migration look like? This largely depends on the site migration type, the objectives, and the KPIs (more details later). But in most cases, a successful site migration shows at least one of the following characteristics:
The following visibility report is taken from an HTTP to HTTPS site migration, which was also accompanied by significant improvements to the site's page loading times.
The following visibility report is from a complete site overhaul, which I was fortunate to be involved with several months in advance and supported during the strategy, planning, and testing phases, all of which were equally important.
As commonly occurs on site migration projects, the launch date had to be pushed back a few times due to the risks of launching the new site prematurely and before major technical obstacles were fully addressed. But as you can see on the below visibility graph, the wait was well worth it. Organic visibility not only didn't drop (as most would normally expect) but in fact started growing from the first week.
Visibility growth one month after the migration reached 60%, whilst organic traffic growth two months post-launch exceeded 80%.
This was a rather complex migration as the new website was re-designed and built from scratch on a new platform with an improved site taxonomy that included new landing pages, an updated URL structure, lots of redirects to preserve link equity, plus a switchover from HTTP to HTTPS.
In general, introducing too many changes at the same time can be tricky because if something goes wrong, you'll struggle to figure out what exactly is at fault. But at the same time, leaving major changes for a later time isn't ideal either as it will require more resources. If you know what you're doing, making multiple positive changes at once can be very cost-effective.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of how you can turn a complex site migration project into a success, it's important to run through the main site migration types as well as explain the main reason so many site migrations fail.
There are many site migration types. It all depends on the nature of the changes that take place to the legacy website.
Google's documentation mostly covers migrations with site location changes, which are categorised as follows:
These typically occur when a site moves to a different URL due to any of the below:
A classic example is when migrating from HTTP to HTTPS.
Very common in international SEO where a business decides to move one or more ccTLDs into subdomains or subfolders. Another common example is where a mobile site that sits on a separate subdomain or subfolder becomes responsive and both desktop and mobile URLs are uniformed.
Commonly occurs when a business is rebranding and must move from one domain to another.
This is common when a business decides to launch international websites and needs to move from a ccTLD (country code top-level domain) to a gTLD (generic top-level domain) or vice versa, e.g. moving from .co.uk to .com, or moving from .com to .co.uk and so on.
These are changes to the site architecture that usually affect the site's internal linking and URL structure.
There are other types of migration which are triggered by changes to the site's content, structure, design, or platform.
This is the case when a website is moved from one platform/CMS to another, e.g. migrating from WordPress to Magento or just upgrading to the latest platform version. Replatforming can, in some cases, also result in design and URL changes because of technical limitations that often occur when changing platforms. This is why replatforming migrations rarely result in a website that looks exactly the same as the previous one.
Major content changes such as content rewrites, content consolidation, or content pruning can have a big impact on a site's organic search visibility, depending on the scale. These changes can often affect the site's taxonomy, navigation, and internal linking.
With so many options available for a site's mobile setup moving, enabling app indexing, building an AMP site, or building a PWA website can also be considered as partial site migrations, especially when an existing mobile site is being replaced by an app, AMP, or PWA.
These are often caused by major changes to the site's taxonomy that impact on the site navigation, internal linking and user journeys.
These can vary from major design changes in the look and feel to a complete website revamp that may also include significant media, code, and copy changes.
In addition to the above, there are several hybrid migration types that can be combined in practically any way possible. The more changes that get introduced at the same time the higher the complexity and the risks. Even though making too many changes at the same time increases the risks of something going wrong, it can be more cost-effective from a resources perspective if the migration is very well-planned and executed.
Even though every site migration is different there are a few common themes behind the most typical site migration disasters, with the biggest being the following:
Some site migrations are doomed to failure way before the new site is launched. A strategy that is built upon unclear and unrealistic objectives is much less likely to bring success.
Establishing measurable objectives is essential in order to measure the impact of the migration post-launch. For most site migrations, the primary objective should be the retention of the site's current traffic and revenue levels. In certain cases the bar could be raised higher, but in general anticipating or forecasting growth should be a secondary objective. This will help avoid creating unrealistic expectations.
Coming up with a detailed project plan as early as possible will help avoid delays along the way. Factor in additional time and resources to cope with any unforeseen circumstances that may arise. No matter how well thought out and detailed your plan is, it's highly unlikely everything will go as expected. Be flexible with your plan and accept the fact that there will almost certainly be delays. Map out all dependencies and make all stakeholders aware of them.
Avoid planning to launch the site near your seasonal peaks, because if anything goes wrong you won't have enough time to rectify the issues. For instance, retailers should avoid launching a site close to September/October to avoid putting the busy pre-Christmas period at risk. In this case, it would be much wiser launching during the quieter summer months.
Before committing to a site migration project, estimate the time and effort required to make it a success. If your budget is limited, make a call as to whether it is worth going ahead with a migration that is likely to fail in meeting its established objectives and cause revenue loss.
As a rule of thumb, try to include a buffer of at least 20% in additional resource than you initially think the project will require. This additional buffer will later allow you to quickly address any issues as soon as they arise, without jeopardizing success. If your resources are too tight or you start cutting corners at this early stage, the site migration will be at risk.
When changes are taking place on a website, every single decision needs to be weighted from both a UX and SEO standpoint. For instance, removing great amounts of content or links to improve UX may damage the site's ability to target business-critical keywords or result in crawling and indexing issues. In either case, such changes could damage the site's organic search visibility. On the other hand, having too much text copy and few images may have a negative impact on user engagement and damage the site's conversions.
To avoid risks, appoint experienced SEO and UX consultants so they can discuss the potential consequences of every single change with key business stakeholders who understand the business intricacies better than anyone else. The pros and cons of each option need to be weighed before making any decision.
Site migrations can span several months, require great planning and enough time for testing. Seeking professional support late is very risky because crucial steps may have been missed.
In addition to a great strategy and thoughtful plan, dedicate some time and effort for thorough testing before launching the site. It's much more preferable to delay the launch if testing has identified critical issues rather than rushing a sketchy implementation into production. It goes without saying that you should not launch a website if it hasn't been tested by both expert SEO and UX teams.
Attention to detail is also very important. Make sure that the developers are fully aware of the risks associated with poor implementation. Educating the developers about the direct impact of their work on a site's traffic (and therefore revenue) can make a big difference.
There will always be bugs to fix once the new site goes live. However, some bugs are more important than others and may need immediate attention. For instance, launching a new site only to find that search engine spiders have trouble crawling and indexing the site's content would require an immediate fix. A slow response to major technical obstacles can sometimes be catastrophic and take a long time to recover from.
Business stakeholders often do not anticipate site migrations to be so time-consuming and resource-heavy. It's not uncommon for senior stakeholders to demand that the new site launch on the planned-for day, regardless of whether it's 100% ready or not. The motto "let's launch ASAP and fix later" is a classic mistake. What most stakeholders are unaware of is that it can take just a few days for organic search visibility to tank, but recovery can take several months.
It is the responsibility of the consultant and project manager to educate clients, run them through all the different phases and scenarios, and explain what each one entails. Business stakeholders are then able to make more informed decisions and their expectations should be easier to manage.
The site migration process can be split into six main essential phases. They are all equally important and skipping any of the below tasks could hinder the migration's success to varying extents.
Regardless of the reasons behind a site migration project, you need to be crystal clear about the objectives right from the beginning because these will help to set and manage expectations. Moving a site from HTTP to HTTPS is very different from going through a complete site overhaul, hence the two should have different objectives. In the first instance, the objective should be to retain the site's traffic levels, whereas in the second you could potentially aim for growth.
A site migration is a great opportunity to address legacy issues. Including as many of these as possible in the project scope should be very cost-effective because addressing these issues post-launch will require significantly more resources.
However, in every case, identify the most critical aspects for the project to be successful. Identify all risks that could have a negative impact on the site's visibility and consider which precautions to take. Ideally, prepare a few forecasting scenarios based on the different risks and growth opportunities. It goes without saying that the forecasting scenarios should be prepared by experienced site migration consultants.
Including as many stakeholders as possible at this early stage will help you acquire a deeper understanding of the biggest challenges and opportunities across divisions. Ask for feedback from your content, SEO, UX, and Analytics teams and put together a list of the biggest issues and opportunities. You then need to work out what the potential ROI of addressing each one of these would be. Finally, choose one of the available options based on your objectives and available resources, which will form your site migration strategy.
You should now be left with a prioritized list of activities which are expected to have a positive ROI, if implemented. These should then be communicated and discussed with all stakeholders, so you set realistic targets, agree on the project, scope and set the right expectations from the outset.
Planning is equally important because site migrations can often be very complex projects that can easily span several months. During the planning phase, each task needs an owner (i.e. SEO consultant, UX consultant, content editor, web developer) and an expected delivery date. Any dependencies should be identified and included in the project plan so everyone is aware of any activities that cannot be fulfilled due to being dependent on others. For instance, the redirects cannot be tested unless the redirect mapping has been completed and the redirects have been implemented on staging.
The project plan should be shared with everyone involved as early as possible so there is enough time for discussions and clarifications. Each activity needs to be described in great detail, so that stakeholders are aware of what each task would entail. It goes without saying that flawless project management is necessary in order to organize and carry out the required activities according to the schedule.
A crucial part of the project plan is getting the anticipated launch date right. Ideally, the new site should be launched during a time when traffic is low. Again, avoid launching ahead of or during a peak period because the consequences could be devastating if things don't go as expected. One thing to bear in mind is that as site migrations never go entirely to plan, a certain degree of flexibility will be required.
These include any activities that need to be carried out while the new site is still under development. By this point, the new site's SEO requirements should have been captured already. You should be liaising with the designers and information architects, providing feedback on prototypes and wireframes well before the new site becomes available on a staging environment.
Review the new site's prototypes or wireframes before development commences. Reviewing the new site's main templates can help identify both SEO and UX issues at an early stage. For example, you may find that large portions of content have been removed from the category pages, which should be instantly flagged. Or you may discover that some high traffic-driving pages no longer appear in the main navigation. Any radical changes in the design or copy of the pages should be thoroughly reviewed for potential SEO issues.
Once the prototypes and wireframes have been reviewed, prepare a detailed technical SEO specification. The objective of this vital document is to capture all the essential SEO requirements developers need to be aware of before working out the project's scope in terms of work and costs. It's during this stage that budgets are signed off on; if the SEO requirements aren't included, it may be impossible to include them later down the line.
The technical SEO specification needs to be very detailed, yet written in such a way that developers can easily turn the requirements into actions. This isn't a document to explain why something needs to be implemented, but how it should be implemented.
Make sure to include specific requirements that cover at least the following areas:
The specification should also include areas of the CMS functionality that allows users to:
It is also important to make sure that when updating a particular attribute (e.g. an h1), other elements are not affected (i.e. the page title or any navigation menus).
One of the biggest challenges with site migrations is that the success will largely depend on the quantity and quality of pages that have been migrated. Therefore, it's very important to make sure that you focus on the pages that really matter. These are the pages that have been driving traffic to the legacy site, pages that have accrued links, pages that convert well, etc.
In order to do this, you need to:
Crawl the old website so that you have a copy of all URLs, page titles, meta data, headers, redirects, broken links etc. Regardless of the crawler application of choice (see Appendix), make sure that the crawl isn't too restrictive. Pay close attention to the crawler's settings before crawling the legacy site and consider whether you should:
Pro tip: Keep a copy of the old site's crawl data (in a file or on the cloud) for several months after the migration has been completed, just in case you ever need any of the old site's data once the new site has gone live.
Once the crawl is complete, work on identifying the legacy site's indexed pages. These are any HTML pages with the following characteristics:
The indexable pages are the only pages that have the potential to drive traffic to the site and therefore need to be prioritized for the purposes of your site migration. These are the pages worth optimizing (if they will exist on the new site) or redirecting (if they won't exist on the new site).
Once you've identified all indexable pages, you may have to carry out more work, especially if the legacy site consists of a large number of pages and optimizing or redirecting all of them is impossible due to time, resource, or technical constraints.
If this is the case, you should identify the legacy site's top performing pages. This will help with the prioritization of the pages to focus on during the later stages.
It's recommended to prepare a spreadsheet that includes the below fields:
With the above information in one place, it's now much easier to identify your most important pages: the ones that generate organic visits, convert well, contribute to revenue, have a good number of referring domains linking to them, etc. These are the pages that you must focus on for a successful site migration.
The top performing pages should ideally also exist on the new site. If for any reason they don't, they should be redirected to the most relevant page so that users requesting them do not land on 404 pages and the link equity they previously had remains on the site. If any of these pages cease to exist and aren't properly redirected, your site's rankings and traffic will negatively be affected.
Once the launch of the new website is getting close, you should benchmark the legacy site's performance. Benchmarking is essential, not only to compare the new site's performance with the previous one but also to help diagnose which areas underperform on the new site and to quickly address them.
If you don't track the site's rankings frequently, you should do so just before the new site goes live. Otherwise, you will later struggle figuring out whether the migration has gone smoothly or where exactly things went wrong. Don't leave this to the last minute in case something goes awry — a week in advance would be the ideal time.
Spend some time working out which keywords are most representative of the site's organic search visibility and track them across desktop and mobile. Because monitoring thousands of head, mid-, and long-tail keyword combinations is usually unrealistic, the bare minimum you should monitor are keywords that are driving traffic to the site (keywords ranking on page one) and have decent search volume (head/mid-tail focus)
If you do get traffic from both brand and non-brand keywords, you should also decide which type of keywords to focus on more from a tracking POV. In general, non-brand keywords tend to be more competitive and volatile. For most sites it would make sense to focus mostly on these.
Don't forget to track rankings across desktop and mobile. This will make it much easier to diagnose problems post-launch should there be performance issues on one device type. If you receive a high volume of traffic from more than one country, consider rank tracking keywords in other markets, too, because visibility and rankings can vary significantly from country to country.
The new site's page loading times can have a big impact on both traffic and sales. Several studies have shown that the longer a page takes to load, the higher the bounce rate. Unless the old site's page loading times and site performance scores have been recorded, it will be very difficult to attribute any traffic or revenue loss to site performance related issues once the new site has gone live.
It's recommended that you review all major page types using Google's PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse tools. You could use summary tables like the ones below to benchmark some of the most important performance metrics, which will be useful for comparisons once the new site goes live.
Optimization score
Category page
Subcategory page
Product page
Optimization score
Category page
Subcategory page
Product page
A few days before the new site replaces the old one, run a final crawl of the old site. Doing so could later prove invaluable, should there be any optimization issues on the new site. A final crawl will allow you to save vital information about the old site's page titles, meta descriptions, h1–h6 headings, server status, canonical tags, noindex/nofollow pages, inlinks/outlinks, level, etc. Having all this information available could save you a lot of trouble if, say, the new site isn't well optimized or suffers from technical misconfiguration issues. Try also to save a copy of the old site's robots.txt and XML sitemaps in case you need these later.
Also consider exporting as much of the old site's Search Console data as possible. These are only available for 90 days, and chances are that once the new site goes live the old site's Search Console data will disappear sooner or later. Data worth exporting includes:
The redirects implementation is one of the most crucial activities during a site migration. If the legacy site's URLs cease to exist and aren't correctly redirected, the website's rankings and visibility will simply tank.
Redirects are extremely important because they help both search engines and users find pages that may no longer exist, have been renamed, or moved to another location. From an SEO point of view, redirects help search engines discover and index a site's new URLs quicker but also understand how the old site's pages are associated with the new site's pages. This association will allow for ranking signals to pass from the old pages to the new ones, so rankings are retained without being negatively affected.
When redirects are poorly implemented, the consequences can be catastrophic. Users will either land on Not Found pages (404s) or irrelevant pages that do not meet the user intent. In either case, the site's bounce and conversion rates will be negatively affected. The consequences for search engines can be equally catastrophic: they'll be unable to associate the old site's pages with those on the new site if the URLs aren't identical. Ranking signals won't be passed over from the old to the new site, which will result in ranking drops and organic search visibility loss. In addition, it will take search engines longer to discover and index the new site's pages.
When the URLs between the old and new version of the site are different, use 301 (permanent) redirects. These will tell search engines to index the new URLs as well as forward any ranking signals from the old URLs to the new ones. Therefore, you must use 301 redirects if your site moves to/from another domain/subdomain, if you switch from HTTP to HTTPS, or if the site or parts of it have been restructured. Despite some of Google's claims that 302 redirects pass PageRank, indexing the new URLs would be slower and ranking signals could take much longer to be passed on from the old to the new page.
302 (temporary) redirects should only be used in situations where a redirect does not need to live permanently and therefore indexing the new URL isn't a priority. With 302 redirects, search engines will initially be reluctant to index the content of the redirect destination URL and pass any ranking signals to it. However, if the temporary redirects remain for a long period of time without being removed or updated, they could end up behaving similarly to permanent (301) redirects. Use 302 redirects when a redirect is likely to require updating or removal in the near future, as well as for any country-, language-, or device-specific redirects.
Meta refresh and JavaScript redirects should be avoided. Even though Google is getting better and better at crawling JavaScript, there are no guarantees these will get discovered or pass ranking signals to the new pages.
If you'd like to find out more about how Google deals with the different types of redirects, please refer to John Mueller's post.
If you are lucky enough to work on a migration that doesn't involve URL changes, you could skip this section. Otherwise, read on to find out why any legacy pages that won't be available on the same URL after the migration should be redirected.
The redirect mapping file is a spreadsheet that includes the following two columns:
When mapping (redirecting) a page from the old to the new site, always try mapping it to the most relevant corresponding page. In cases where a relevant page doesn't exist, avoid redirecting the page to the homepage. First and foremost, redirecting users to irrelevant pages results in a very poor user experience. Google has stated that redirecting pages "en masse" to irrelevant pages will be treated as soft 404s and because of this won't be passing any SEO value. If you can't find an equivalent page on the new site, try mapping it to its parent category page.
Once the mapping is complete, the file will need to be sent to the development team to create the redirects, so that these can be tested before launching the new site. The implementation of redirects is another part in the site migration cycle where things can often go wrong.
Redirect mapping requires great attention to detail and needs to be carried out by experienced SEOs. The URL mapping on small sites could in theory be done by manually mapping each URL of the legacy site to a URL on the new site. But on large sites that consist of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pages, manually mapping every single URL is practically impossible and automation needs to be introduced. Relying on certain common attributes between the legacy and new site can be a massive time-saver. Such attributes may include the page titles, H1 headings, or other unique page identifiers such as product codes, SKUs etc. Make sure the attributes you rely on for the redirect mapping are unique and not repeated across several pages; otherwise, you will end up with incorrect mapping.
Pro tip: Make sure the URL structure of the new site is 100% finalized on staging before you start working on the redirect mapping. There's nothing riskier than mapping URLs that will be updated before the new site goes live. When URLs are updated after the redirect mapping is completed, you may have to deal with undesired situations upon launch, such as broken redirects, redirect chains, and redirect loops. A content-freeze should be placed on the old site well in advance of the migration date, so there is a cut-off point for new content being published on the old site. This will make sure that no pages will be missed from the redirect mapping and guarantee that all pages on the old site get redirected.
You should get hold of the old site's existing redirects to ensure they're considered when preparing the redirect mapping for the new site. Unless you do this, it's likely that the site's current redirect file will get overwritten by the new one on the launch date. If this happens, all legacy redirects that were previously in place will cease to exist and the site may lose a decent amount of link equity, the extent of which will largely depend on the site's volume of legacy redirects. For instance, a site that has undergone a few migrations in the past should have a good number of legacy redirects in place that you don't want getting lost.
Ideally, preserve as many of the legacy redirects as possible, making sure these won't cause any issues when combined with the new site's redirects. It's strongly recommended to eliminate any potential redirect chains at this early stage, which can easily be done by checking whether the same URL appears both as a "Legacy URL" and "New site URL" in the redirect mapping spreadsheet. If this is the case, you will need to update the "New site URL" accordingly.
URL A redirects to URL B (legacy redirect)
URL B redirects to URL C (new redirect)
Which results in the following redirect chain:
To eliminate this, amend the existing legacy redirect and create a new one so that:
URL A redirects to URL C (amended legacy redirect)
URL B redirects to URL C (new redirect)
Pro tip: Check your redirect mapping spreadsheet for redirect loops. These occur when the "Legacy URL" is identical to the "new site URL." Redirect loops need to be removed because they result in infinitely loading pages that are inaccessible to users and search engines. Redirect loops must be eliminated because they are instant traffic, conversion, and ranking killers!
It's strongly recommended to try working out redirect rules that cover as many URL requests as possible. Implementing redirect rules on a web server is much more efficient than relying on numerous one-to-one redirects. If your redirect mapping document consists of a very large number of redirects that need to be implemented as one-to-one redirect rules, site performance could be negatively affected. In any case, double check with the development team the maximum number of redirects the web server can handle without issues.
In any case, there are some standard redirect rules that should be in place to avoid generating duplicate content issues:
Even if some of these standard redirect rules exist on the legacy website, do not assume they'll necessarily exist on the new site unless they're explicitly requested.
Try updating the site's internal links so they don't trigger internal redirects. Even though search engines can follow internal redirects, these are not recommended because they add additional latency to page loading times and could also have a negative impact on search engine crawl time.
If the site's images have moved to a new location, Google recommends redirecting the old image URLs to the new image URLs to help Google discover and index the new images quicker. If it's not easy to redirect all images, aim to redirect at least those image URLs that have accrued backlinks.
The earlier you can start testing, the better. Certain things need to be fully implemented to be tested, but others don't. For example, user journey issues could be identified from as early as the prototypes or wireframes design. Content-related issues between the old and new site or content inconsistencies (e.g. between the desktop and mobile site) could also be identified at an early stage. But the more technical components should only be tested once fully implemented — things like redirects, canonical tags, or XML sitemaps. The earlier issues get identified, the more likely it is that they'll be addressed before launching the new site. Identifying certain types of issues at a later stage isn't cost effective, would require more resources, and cause significant delays. Poor testing and not allowing the time required to thoroughly test all building blocks that can affect SEO and UX performance can have disastrous consequences soon after the new site has gone live.
Before making the new site available on a staging/testing environment, take some precautions that search engines do not index it. There are a few different ways to do this, each with different pros and cons.
Making the test site available only to specific (whitelisted) IP addresses is a very effective way to prevent search engines from crawling it. Anyone trying to access the test site's URL won't be able to see any content unless their IP has been whitelisted. The main advantage is that whitelisted users could easily access and crawl the site without any issues. The only downside is that third-party web-based tools (such as Google's tools) cannot be used because of the IP restrictions.
Password protecting the staging/test site is another way to keep search engine crawlers away, but this solution has two main downsides. Depending on the implementation, it may not be possible to crawl and test a password-protected website if the crawler application doesn't make it past the login screen. The other downside: password-protected websites that use forms for authentication can be crawled using third-party applications, but there is a risk of causing severe and unexpected issues. This is because the crawler clicks on every link on a page (when you're logged in) and could easily end up clicking on links that create or remove pages, install/uninstall plugins, etc.
Adding the following lines of code to the test site's robots.txt file will prevent search engines from crawling the test site's pages.
User-agent: * Disallow: /
One downside of this method is that even though the content that appears on the test server won't get indexed, the disallowed URLs may appear on Google's search results. Another downside is that if the above robots.txt file moves into the live site, it will cause severe de-indexing issues. This is something I've encountered numerous times and for this reason I wouldn't recommend using this method to block search engines.
If the site has been redesigned or restructured, chances are that the user journeys will be affected to some extent. Reviewing the user journeys as early as possible and well before the new site launches is difficult due to the lack of user data. However, an experienced UX professional will be able to flag any concerns that could have a negative impact on the site's conversion rate. Because A/B testing at this stage is hardly ever possible, it might be worth carrying out some user testing and try to get some feedback from real users. Unfortunately, user experience issues can be some of the harder ones to address because they may require sitewide changes that take a lot of time and effort.
On full site overhauls, not all UX decisions can always be backed up by data and many decisions will have to be based on best practice, past experience, and "gut feeling," hence getting UX/CRO experts involved as early as possible could pay dividends later.
A site migration is often a great opportunity to improve the site architecture. In other words, you have a great chance to reorganize your keyword targeted content and maximize its search traffic potential. Carrying out extensive keyword research will help identify the best possible category and subcategory pages so that users and search engines can get to any page on the site within a few clicks — the fewer the better, so you don't end up with a very deep taxonomy.
Identifying new keywords with decent traffic potential and mapping them into new landing pages can make a big difference to the site's organic traffic levels. On the other hand, enhancing the site architecture needs to be done thoughtfully. Itt could cause problems if, say, important pages move deeper into the new site architecture or there are too many similar pages optimized for the same keywords. Some of the most successful site migrations are the ones that allocate significant resources to enhance the site architecture.
Make sure that the site's page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and copy have been transferred from the old to the new site without issues. If you've created any new pages, make sure these are optimized and don't target keywords that have already been targeted by other pages. If you're re-platforming, be aware that the new platform may have different default values when new pages are being created. Launching the new site without properly optimized page titles or any kind of missing copy will have an immediate negative impact on your site's rankings and traffic. Do not forget to review whether any user-generated content (i.e. user reviews, comments) has also been uploaded.
Internal links are the backbone of a website. No matter how well optimized and structured the site's copy is, it won't be sufficient to succeed unless it's supported by a flawless internal linking scheme. Internal links must be reviewed throughout the entire site, including links found in:
A series of technical checks must be carried out to make sure the new site's technical setup is sound and to avoid coming across major technical glitches after the new site has gone live.
Prepare the new site's robots.txt file on the staging environment. This way you can test it for errors or omissions and avoid experiencing search engine crawl issues when the new site goes live. A classic mistake in site migrations is when the robots.txt file prevents search engine access using the following directive:
Disallow: /
If this gets accidentally carried over into the live site (and it often does), it will prevent search engines from crawling the site. And when search engines cannot crawl an indexed page, the keywords associated with the page will get demoted in the search results and eventually the page will get de-indexed.
But if the robots.txt file on staging is populated with the new site's robots.txt directives, this mishap could be avoided.
When preparing the new site's robots.txt file, make sure that:
Review the site's canonical tags. Look for pages that either do not have a canonical tag or have a canonical tag that is pointing to another URL and question whether this is intended. Don't forget to crawl the canonical tags to find out whether they return a 200 server response. If they don't you will need to update them to eliminate any 3xx, 4xx, or 5xx server responses. You should also look for pages that have a canonical tag pointing to another URL combined with a noindex directive, because these two are conflicting signals and you;'ll need to eliminate one of them.
Once you've crawled the staging site, look for pages with the meta robots properties set to "noindex" or "nofollow." If this is the case, review each one of them to make sure this is intentional and remove the "noindex" or "nofollow" directive if it isn't.
Prepare two different types of sitemaps: one that contains all the new site's indexable pages, and another that includes all the old site's indexable pages. The former will help make Google aware of the new site's indexable URLs. The latter will help Google become aware of the redirects that are in place and the fact that some of the indexed URLs have moved to new locations, so that it can discover them and update search results quicker.
You should check each XML sitemap to make sure that:
If there are more than 50K rows or the file size exceeds 50MB, you must break the sitemap down into smaller ones. This prevents the server from becoming overloaded if Google requests the sitemap too frequently.
In addition, you must crawl each XML sitemap to make sure it only includes indexable URLs. Any non-indexable URLs should be excluded from the XML sitemaps, such as:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html><head> <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> (…) </head> <body>(…)</body> </html>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2017 17:12:43 GMT (…) X-Robots-Tag: noindex (…)
Building clean XML sitemaps can help monitor the true indexing levels of the new site once it goes live. If you don't, it will be very difficult to spot any indexing issues.
Pro tip: Download and open each XML sitemap in Excel to get a detailed overview of any additional attributes, such as hreflang or image attributes.
Depending on the size and type of site that is being migrated, having an HTML sitemap can in certain cases be beneficial. An HTML sitemap that consists of URLs that aren't linked from the site's main navigation can significantly boost page discovery and indexing. However, avoid generating an HTML sitemap that includes too many URLs. If you do need to include thousands of URLs, consider building a segmented HTML sitemap.
The number of nested sitemaps as well as the maximum number of URLs you should include in each sitemap depends on the site's authority. The more authoritative a website, the higher the number of nested sitemaps and URLs it could get away with.
For example, the NYTimes.com HTML sitemap consists of three levels, where each one includes over 1,000 URLs per sitemap. These nested HTML sitemaps aid search engine crawlers in discovering articles published since 1851 that otherwise would be difficult to discover and index, as not all of them would have been internally linked.
Errors in the structured data markup need to be identified early so there's time to fix them before the new site goes live. Ideally, you should test every single page template (rather than every single page) using Google's Structured Data Testing tool.
Be sure to check the markup on both the desktop and mobile pages, especially if the mobile website isn't responsive.
The tool will only report any existing errors but not omissions. For example, if your product page template does not include the Product structured data schema, the tool won't report any errors. So, in addition to checking for errors you should also make sure that each page template includes the appropriate structured data markup for its content type.
Please refer to Google's documentation for the most up to date details on the structured data implementation and supported content types.
As Bartosz Góralewicz's tests proved, even if Google is able to crawl and index JavaScript-generated content, it does not mean that it is able to crawl JavaScript content across all major JavaScript frameworks. The following table summarizes Bartosz's findings, showing that some JavaScript frameworks are not SEO-friendly, with AngularJS currently being the most problematic of all.
Bartosz also found that other search engines (such as Bing, Yandex, and Baidu) really struggle with indexing JavaScript-generated content, which is important to know if your site's traffic relies on any of these search engines.
Hopefully, this is something that will improve over time, but with the increasing popularity of JavaScript frameworks in web development, this must be high up on your checklist.
Finally, you should check whether any external resources are being blocked. Unfortunately, this isn't something you can control 100% because many resources (such as JavaScript and CSS files) are hosted by third-party websites which may be blocking them via their own robots.txt files!
Again, the Fetch and Render tool can help diagnose this type of issue that, if left unresolved, could have a significant negative impact.
First, make sure that the robots.txt file isn't accidentally blocking any JavaScript, CSS, or image files that are essential for the mobile site's content to render. This could have a negative impact on how search engines render and index the mobile site's page content, which in turn could negatively affect the mobile site's search visibility and performance.
In order to avoid any issues associated with Google's mobile-first index, thoroughly review the mobile website and make there aren't any inconsistencies between the desktop and mobile sites in the following areas:
A responsive website should serve the same content, links, and markup across devices, and the above SEO attributes should be identical across the desktop and mobile websites.
In addition to the above, you must carry out a few further technical checks depending on the mobile site's set up.
A responsive website must serve all devices the same HTML code, which is adjusted (via the use of CSS) depending on the screen size.
Googlebot is able to automatically detect this mobile setup as long as it's allowed to crawl the page and its assets. It's therefore extremely important to make sure that Googlebot can access all essential assets, such as images, JavaScript, and CSS files.
To signal browsers that a page is responsive, a meta="viewport" tag should be in place within the <head> of each HTML page.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
If the meta viewport tag is missing, font sizes may appear in an inconsistent manner, which may cause Google to treat the page as not mobile-friendly.
If the mobile website uses separate URLs from desktop, make sure that:
Dynamic serving websites serve different code to each device, but on the same URL.
On dynamic serving websites, review whether the vary HTTP header has been correctly set up. This is necessary because dynamic serving websites alter the HTML for mobile user agents and the vary HTTP header helps Googlebot discover the mobile content.
Regardless of the mobile site set-up (responsive, separate URLs or dynamic serving), review the pages using a mobile user-agent and make sure that:
Google's mobile-friendly test tool can help diagnose most of the above issues:
If there is an AMP website and a desktop version of the site is available, make sure that:
You should also make sure that the AMPs are valid. This can be tested using Google's AMP Test Tool.
Mixed content occurs when a page that's loaded over a secure HTTPS connection requests assets over insecure HTTP connections. Most browsers either block dangerous HTTP requests or just display warnings that hinder the user experience.
There are many ways to identify mixed content errors, including the use of crawler applications, Google's Lighthouse, etc.
Google crawls images less frequently than HTML pages. If migrating a site's images from one location to another (e.g. from your domain to a CDN), there are ways to aid Google in discovering the migrated images quicker. Building an image XML sitemap will help, but you also need to make sure that Googlebot can reach the site's images when crawling the site. The tricky part with image indexing is that both the web page where an image appears on as well as the image file itself have to get indexed.
Last but not least, measure the old site's page loading times and see how these compare with the new site's when this becomes available on staging. At this stage, focus on the network-independent aspects of performance such as the use of external resources (images, JavaScript, and CSS), the HTML code, and the web server's configuration. More information about how to do this is available further down.
Make sure that analytics tracking is properly set up. This review should ideally be carried out by specialist analytics consultants who will look beyond the implementation of the tracking code. Make sure that Goals and Events are properly set up, e-commerce tracking is implemented, enhanced e-commerce tracking is enabled, etc. There's nothing more frustrating than having no analytics data after your new site is launched.
Testing the redirects before the new site goes live is critical and can save you a lot of trouble later. There are many ways to check the redirects on a staging/test server, but the bottom line is that you should not launch the new website without having tested the redirects.
Once the redirects become available on the staging/testing environment, crawl the entire list of redirects and check for the following issues:
Pro tip: Make sure one of the old site's URLs redirects to the correct URL on the new site. At this stage, because the new site doesn't exist yet, you can only test whether the redirect destination URL is the intended one, but it's definitely worth it. The fact that a URL redirects does not mean it redirects to the right page.
While the new site is replacing the old one, chances are that the live site is going to be temporarily down. The downtime should be kept to a minimum, but while this happens the web server should respond to any URL request with a 503 (service unavailable) server response. This will tell search engine crawlers that the site is temporarily down for maintenance so they come back to crawl the site later.
If the site is down for too long without serving a 503 server response and search engines crawl the website, organic search visibility will be negatively affected and recovery won't be instant once the site is back up. In addition, while the website is temporarily down it should also serve an informative holding page notifying users that the website is temporarily down for maintenance.
As soon as the new site has gone live, take a quick look at:
The spot checks need to be carried out across both the mobile and desktop sites, unless the site is fully responsive.
The following activities should take place as soon as the new website has gone live:
Pro tip: Use the "Fetch as Google" feature for each different type of page (e.g. the homepage, a category, a subcategory, a product page) to make sure Googlebot can render the pages without any issues. Review any reported blocked resources and do not forget to use Fetch and Render for desktop and mobile, especially if the mobile website isn't responsive.
Once the new site has gone live, a new round of in-depth checks should be carried out. These are largely the same ones as those mentioned in the "Phase 3: Pre-launch Testing" section.
However, the main difference during this phase is that you now have access to a lot more data and tools. Don't underestimate the amount of effort you'll need to put in during this phase, because any issues you encounter now directly impacts the site's performance in the SERPs. On the other hand, the sooner an issue gets identified, the quicker it will get resolved.
In addition to repeating the same testing tasks that were outlined in the Phase 3 section, in certain areas things can be tested more thoroughly, accurately, and in greater detail. You can now take full advantage of the Search Console features.
Keep an eye on the crawl stats available in the Search Console, to make sure Google is crawling the new site's pages. In general, when Googlebot comes across new pages it tends to accelerate the average number of pages it crawls per day. But if you can't spot a spike around the time of the launch date, something may be negatively affecting Googlebot's ability to crawl the site.
Reviewing the server log files is by far the most effective way to spot any crawl issues or inefficiencies. Tools like Botify and On Crawl can be extremely useful because they combine crawls with server log data and can highlight pages search engines do not crawl, pages that are not linked to internally (orphan pages), low-value pages that are heavily internally linked, and a lot more.
Keep an eye on the reported crawl errors, ideally daily during the first few weeks. Downloading these errors daily, crawling the reported URLs, and taking the necessary actions (i.e. implement additional 301 redirects, fix soft 404 errors) will aid a quicker recovery. It's highly unlikely you will need to redirect every single 404 that is reported, but you should add redirects for the most important ones.
Pro tip: In Google Analytics you can easily find out which are the most commonly requested 404 URLs and fix these first!
Other Search Console features worth checking include the Blocked Resources, Structured Data errors, Mobile Usability errors, HTML Improvements, and International Targeting (to check for hreflang reported errors).
Pro tip: Keep a close eye on the URL parameters in case they're causing duplicate content issues. If this is the case, consider taking some urgent remedial action.
Once the new site is live, measure site speed to make sure the site's pages are loading fast enough on both desktop and mobile devices. With site speed being a ranking signal across devices and becauseslow pages lose users and customers, comparing the new site's speed with the old site's is extremely important. If the new site's page loading times appear to be higher you should take some immediate action, otherwise your site's traffic and conversions will almost certainly take a hit.
Two tools that can help with this are Google's Lighthouse and Pagespeed Insights.
ThePagespeed Insights Tool measures page performance on both mobile and desktop devices and shows real-world page speed data based on user data Google collects from Chrome. It also checks to see if a page has applied common performance best practices and provides an optimization score. The tool includes the following main categories:
Google's Lighthouse is very handy for mobile performance, accessibility, and Progressive Web Apps audits. It provides various useful metrics that can be used to measure page performance on mobile devices, such as:
Both tools provide recommendations to help improve any reported site performance issues.
You can also use this Google tool to get a rough estimate on the percentage of users you may be losing from your mobile site's pages due to slow page loading times.
The same tool also provides an industry comparison so you get an idea of how far you are from the top performing sites in your industry.
Once the site has gone live, you can start evaluating site speed based on the users visiting your site. If you have Google Analytics, you can easily compare the new site's average load time with the previous one.
In addition, if you have access to a Real User Monitoring tool such as Pingdom, you can evaluate site speed based on the users visiting your website. The below map illustrates how different visitors experience very different loading times depending on their geographic location. In the below example, the page loading times appear to be satisfactory to visitors from the UK, US, and Germany, but to users residing in other countries they are much higher.
Has the site migration been successful? This is the million-dollar question everyone involved would like to know the answer to as soon as the new site goes live. In reality, the longer you wait the clearer the answer becomes, as visibility during the first few weeks or even months can be very volatile depending on the size and authority of your site. For smaller sites, a 4–6 week period should be sufficient before comparing the new site's visibility with the old site's. For large websites you may have to wait for at least 2–3 months before measuring.
In addition, if the new site is significantly different from the previous one, users will need some time to get used to the new look and feel and acclimatize themselves with the new taxonomy, user journeys, etc. Such changes initially have a significant negative impact on the site's conversion rate, which should improve after a few weeks as returning visitors are getting more and more used to the new site. In any case, making data-driven conclusions about the new site's UX can be risky.
But these are just general rules of thumb and need to be taken into consideration along with other factors. For instance, if a few days or weeks after the new site launch significant additional changes were made (e.g. to address a technical issue), the migration's evaluation should be pushed further back.
Performance measurement is very important and even though business stakeholders would only be interested to hear about the revenue and traffic impact, there are a whole lot of other metrics you should pay attention to. For example, there can be several reasons for revenue going down following a site migration, including seasonal trends, lower brand interest, UX issues that have significantly lowered the site's conversion rate, poor mobile performance, poor page loading times, etc. So, in addition to the organic traffic and revenue figures, also pay attention to the following:
Reviewing the below could also be very handy, especially from a technical troubleshooting perspective:
It's only after you've looked into all the above areas that you could safely conclude whether your migration has been successful or not.
Good luck and if you need any consultation or assistance with your site migration, please get in touch!
An up-to-date site migration checklist is available to download from our site. Please note that the checklist is regularly updated to include all critical areas for a successful site migration.
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Posted on 10 February 2018.
Is your current website design working for your business as well as it could be? You might know that it's not, but don't know where to start when it comes to a redesign. We understand that. Choosing a WordPress theme for your website can be a little overwhelming and leave you with lots of further
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Posted on 17 November 2017.
Posted by lkolowich
Thanks to the buzz around website hacking and personal data theft in recent years, most Internet users are aware that their sensitive information is at risk every time they surf the web.
And yet, although the personal data of their visitors and customers is at risk, many businesses still aren't making website security a priority.
Enter Google.
The folks over at Google are known for paving the way for Internet behavior. Last month, they took a monumental step forward in helping protect people from getting their personal data hacked. The update they released to their popular Chrome browser now warns users if a website is not secure – right inside that user's browser.
While this change is meant to help protect users' personal data, it's also a big kick in the pants for businesses to get moving on making their websites more secure.
On October 17, 2017, Google's latest Chrome update (version 62) began flagging websites and webpages that contain a form but don't have a basic security feature called SSL. SSL, which stands for "Secure Sockets Layer," is the standard technology that ensures all the data that passes between a web server and a browser – passwords, credit card information, and other personal data – stays private and ensures protection against hackers.
In Chrome, sites lacking SSL are now marked with the warning "Not Secure" in eye-catching red, right inside the URL bar:
Google started doing this back in January 2017 for pages that asked for sensitive information, like credit cards. The update released in October expands the warning to all websites that have a form, even if it's just one field that asks for something like an email address.
Because Chrome has 47% of market share, this change is likely noticed by millions of people using Chrome. And get this: 82% of respondents to a recent consumer survey said they would leave a site that is not secure, according to HubSpot Research.
In other words, if your business' website isn't secured with SSL, then more than 8 out of 10 Chrome users said they would leave your website.
What's more, Google has publically stated that SSL is now a ranking signal in Google's search algorithm. This means that a website with SSL enabled may outrank another site without SSL.
That's exactly why anyone who owns or operates a website should start taking the steps to secure their website with an SSL certificate, in addition to a few other security measures. Businesses that don't take care to protect visitors' information might see significant issues, garner unwanted attention, and dilute customer trust.
"In my opinion, I think security is undervalued by a lot of marketers," says Jeffrey Vocell, my colleague at HubSpot and go-to website guru. "Almost daily, we hear news about a new hacking incident or about personal data that has been compromised. The saying 'there's no such thing as bad press' clearly isn't true here; or, at the very least, the marketer that believes it has never had to live with the fallout of a data breach."
With Google's Chrome update, those visitors will see a warning right inside their browsers – even before they've entered any information. This means businesses face the potential of losing website visitors' trust, regardless of whether a cybersecurity incident has actually occurred.
If you're ready to join the movement toward a more secure web, the first step is to see whether your website currently has an SSL certificate.
There are a few ways to tell whether your website (or any website) has SSL.
All you have to do is look at a website's URL once you've entered it into the URL bar. Does it contain "https://" with that added "s," or does it contain "http://" without an "s"? Websites that have SSL contain that extra "s." You can also enter any URL into this SSL Checker from HubSpot and it'll tell you whether it's secure without having to actually visit that site.
It's easy to see whether a website is secured with an SSL certificate, thanks to the recent update. After entering a URL into the URL bar, you'll see the red "Not Secure" warning next to websites that aren't certified with SSL:
For websites that are certified with SSL, you'll see "Secure" in green, alongside a padlock icon:
You can click on the padlock to read more about the website and the company that provided the SSL certificate.
Using one of the methods above, go ahead and check to see if your business' website is secure.
Your site visitors already feel better about browsing and entering sensitive information into your website. You're not quite done, though – there's still more you can do to make your website even more secure. We'll get to that in a second.
You're not alone – even a few well-known sites, like IMDB and StarWars.com, weren't ready for Google's update. But it's time to knock on your webmasters' doors and have them follow the steps outlined below.
Ready to protect your visitors from data theft and get rid of that big, red warning signal staring every Chrome user in the face in the process? Below, you'll find instructions and resources to help you secure your website and reduce the chances of getting hacked.
The first step is to determine which type of certificate you need – and how many. You might need different SSL certificates if you host content on multiple platforms, such as separate domains or subdomains.
As for cost, an SSL certificate will cost you anywhere from nothing (Let's Encrypt offers free SSL certificates) to a few hundred dollars per month. It usually averages around $ 50 per month per domain. Some CMS providers (like HubSpot) have SSL included, so check with them before making any moves.
(Read this post for more detailed instructions and considerations for SSL.)
Even if you already have SSL, there are four other things you can do to make your website significantly more secure, according to Vocell.
Hackers look for security vulnerabilities in old versions of plugins, so it's better to take on the challenges of keeping your plugins updated than make yourself an easy target.
One trick hackers use to take down websites is through a DDoS attack. A DDoS attack is when a hacker floods your server with traffic until it stops responding altogether, at which point the hacker can gain access to sensitive data stored in your CMS. A CDN will detect traffic increases and scale up to handle it, preventing a DDoS attack from debilitating your site.
That way, if something goes awry with one server, your website won't stop working all of a sudden, leaving it vulnerable to attack.
One simple way of protecting against cyberattacks is by using a password manager – or, at the very least, using a secure password. A secure password contains upper and lowercase letters, special characters, and numbers.
Suffering a hack is a frustrating experience for users and businesses alike. I hope this article inspires you to double down on your website security. With SSL and the other security measures outlined in this post, you'll help protect your visitors and your business, and make visitors feel safe browsing and entering information on your site.
Does your website have SSL enabled? What tips do you have for making your website more secure? Tell us about your experiences and ideas in the comments.
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Posted on 14 October 2017.
Posted by randfish
Have your headlines been doing some heavy lifting? If you've been using one headline to serve multiple audiences, you're missing out on some key optimization opportunities. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives you a process for writing headlines for SEO, for social media, and for your website visitors — each custom-tailored to its audience and optimized to meet different goals.
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about writing headlines. One of the big problems that headlines have is that they need to serve multiple audiences. So it's not just ranking and search engines. Even if it was, the issue is that we need to do well on social media. We need to serve our website visitors well in order to rank in the search engines. So this gets very challenging.
I've tried to illustrate this with a Venn diagram here. So you can see, basically…
In the SEO world of headline writing, what I'm trying to do is rank well, earn high click-through rate, because I want a lot of those visitors to the search results to choose my result, not somebody else's. I want low pogo-sticking. I don't want anyone clicking the back button and choosing someone else's result because I didn't fulfill their needs. I need to earn links, and I've got to have engagement.
On the social media side, it's pretty different actually. I'm trying to earn amplification, which can often mean the headline tells as much of the story as possible. Even if you don't read the piece, you amplify it, you retweet it, and you re-share it. I'm looking for clicks, and I'm looking for comments and engagement on the post. I'm not necessarily too worried about that back button and the selection of another item. In fact, time on site might not even be a concern at all.
For website visitors, both of these are channels that drive traffic. But for the site itself, I'm trying to drive right visitors, the ones who are going to be loyal, who are going to come back, hopefully who are going to convert. I want to not confuse anyone. I want to deliver on my promise so that I don't create a bad brand reputation and detract from people wanting to click on me in the future. For those of you have visited a site like Forbes or maybe even a BuzzFeed and you have an association of, "Oh, man, this is going to be that clickbait stuff. I don't want to click on their stuff. I'm going to choose somebody else in the results instead of this brand that I remember having a bad experience with."
There are some notable direct conflicts in here.
So how do we resolve this? Well, it's not actually a terribly hard process. In 2017 and beyond, what's nice is that search engines and social and visitors all have enough shared stuff that, most of the time, we can get to a good, happy resolution.
You might say, "Hey, this piece is really targeted at search. If it does well on social, that's fine, but this is going to be our primary traffic driver." Or you might say, "This is really for internal website visitors who are browsing around our site. If it happens to drive some traffic from search or social, well that's fine, but that's not our intent."
For those non-conflicting elements, so this could be the page title that you use for SEO, it doesn't always have to perfectly match the headline. If it's a not-even-close match, that's a real problem, but an imperfect match can still be okay.
So what's nice in social is you have things like Twitter cards and the Facebook markup, graph markup. That Open Graph markup means that you can have slightly different content there than what you might be using for your snippet, your meta description in search engines. So you can separate those out or choose to keep those distinct, and that can help you as well.
I'm going to ask you author the most straightforward version of the headline first.
Is to write the opposite of that, the most social-friendly or click-likely/click-worthy version. It doesn't necessarily have to worry about keywords. It doesn't have to worry about accuracy or telling the whole story without any of these other considerations.
We're going to take three and four and just merge them into something that will work for both, that compromises in the right way, compromises based on your primary audience, your primary goals, and then add in the critical keywords that you're going to need.
I've tried to illustrate this a bit with an example. Nest, which Google bought them years ago and then they became part of the Alphabet Corporation that Google evolved into. So Nest is separately owned by Alphabet, Google's parent company. Nest came out with this new alarm system. In fact, the day we're filming this Whiteboard Friday, they came out with a new alarm system. So they're no longer just a provider of thermostats inside of houses. They now have something else.
Step one: So if I'm a tech news site and I'm writing about this, I know that I'm trying to target gadget and news readers. My primary channel is going to be social first, but secondarily search engines. The goal that I'm trying to reach, that's engagement followed by visits and then hopefully some newsletter sign-ups to my tech site.
Step two: My title and headline in this case probably need to match very closely. So the social callouts, the social cards and the Open Graph, that can be unique from the meta description if need be or from the search snippet if need be.
Step three: I'm going to do step three, author the straightforward headline. That for me is going to be "Nest Has a New Alarm System, Video Doorbell, and Outdoor Camera." A little boring, probably not going to tremendously well on social, but it probably would do decently well in search.
Step four: My social click-likely version is going to be something more like "Nest is No Longer Just a Thermostat. Their New Security System Will Blow You Away." That's not the best headline in the universe, but I'm not a great headline writer. However, you get the idea. This is the click-likely social version, the one that you see the headline and you go, "Ooh, they have a new security system. I wonder what's involved in that." You create some mystery. You don't know that it includes a video doorbell, an outdoor camera, and an alarm. You just hear, "They've got a new security system. Well, I better look at it."
Step five: Then I can try and compromise and say, "Hey, I know that I need to have video doorbell, camera, alarm, and Nest." Those are my keywords. Those are the important ones. That's what people are going to be searching for around this announcement, so I've got to have them in there. I want to have them close to the front. So "Nest's New Alarm, Video Doorbell and Camera Are About to Be on Every Home's Must-Have List." All right, resolved in there.
So this process of writing headlines to serve these multiple different, sometimes competing priorities is totally possible with nearly everything you're going to do in SEO and social and for your website visitors. This resolution process is something hopefully you can leverage to get better results.
All right, everyone, we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Posted on 26 September 2017.
With the release of the Outfitter Pro Premium WordPress theme, Rafal Tomal and I have been talking a lot about ecommerce websites. Naturally, Rafal has great ideas about designing a t-shirt store, while I'm interested in how I can market an ecommerce store with, yes, geeky merchandise, but also robot kits and other nerdery for
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The post How Blogging Boosts the Profitability of Your Ecommerce Website (and 8 Ways to Get Started) appeared first on Copyblogger.
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Posted on 09 September 2017.
Posted by randfish
Without a solid base of links, your site won't be competitive in the SERPs — even if you do everything else right. But building your first few links can be difficult and discouraging, especially for new websites. Never fear — Rand is here to share three relatively quick, easy, and tool-free (read: actually free) methods to build that solid base and earn yourself links.
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to get those first few links that every website needs to be able to compete. Many folks I know when you get started with link building, it can seem daunting and overwhelming.
So let me walk you through what is essentially a half a day of work, maybe three or four hours of work to try these three tactics that will almost certainly get your business or your organization the first handful, let's say 50 links that you need to start being able to compete. Content can you take you a long way. Keywords can take you a long way. Engagement and interaction can take you a long way. But you've got to have a base of links. So let's get started here.
The first one is basically looking for links that come from your own name, your brand name, your domain name potentially, and the names of the founders or people who run your company.
So if it was me and Moz, you'd be searching for "Rand Fishkin" or "Moz.com" in quotes, not the domain name in the URL field. But in the Google search bar, I'd be searching for "Moz.com" in quotes or "Moz + SEO." Moz also has other meanings, including the singer Morrissey, which makes for confusing types of things. If you have that, you'll need to use your brand name plus some sort of signifier or identifier. It's very rare that Morrissey gets mentioned along with search engine optimization. It's very often that Moz gets mentioned along with SEO, and so I can combine those to search for it. So any of these searches will result in a big list of tons of Google results.
So this is essentially saying we're going to…
This is a process that you can go through on your own to identify, well, these are the 5 or 10 that we see on the web very frequently for searches that we wish we competed for, or we see them mentioned in the press a ton, whatever it is.
For example, if I were making a new whiteboard pen company, I would look for the existing ones, like Pilot and Expo and Quartet and PandaBoard. I might search for Pilot and PandaBoard first. Then I might search for Pilot and Expo. Then I might search for PandaBoard and Quartet and all these various combinations of these different ones.
Then in each of those cases, I would submit or I would try and contact or get in touch with whoever runs that list and say, "Hey, my company, my organization also belongs on here because, like these other ones you've listed, we do the same thing." So if it's here's whiteboard pen brands, Expo, PandaBoard, Quartet, and your site, which should now link to YourSite.com.
This is a little more challenging. You won't have as high a hit rate as you will with your own brand names. But again, great way to expand your link portfolio. You can usually almost always get 20 or 30 different sites that are listing people in your field and get on those lists.
This is sites that list people or organizations in a particular field, a particular region, with particular attributes, or some combination of those three. So they're saying here are European-based whiteboard pen manufacturers or European-based manufacturers who were founded by women.
So you can say, "Aha, that's a unique attribute, that's a geography, and that's my field. I'm in manufacturing. I make whiteboard pens. Our cofounder was a woman, and we are in Europe. So therefore we count in all three of those. We should be on that list." You're looking for lists like these, which might not list your competitors, but are high-quality opportunities to get good links.
For example, Washington state venture-backed companies. Moz is a venture-backed company, so I could potentially get on that list. Or the EU-based manufacturing companies started by women, and I could get on that list with my whiteboard pen company based there. You can find lots and lots of these if you sort of take from your list, start searching Google and discover those results. You'll use the same process you did here.
You know what the great thing about all three of these is? No tools required. You don't have to pay for a single tool. You don't have to worry about Domain Authority. You don't have to worry about any sort of link qualification process or paying for something expensive. You can do this manually by yourself with Google as your only tool, and that will get you some of those first early links.
If you've got additional suggestions, please leave them down in the comments. I look forward to chatting with you there. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Posted on 30 August 2017.
Google local results is aware of the content on the local business website and may even show the matching keyword in the local pack snippets.
The post Google local pack tests displaying website mentions matching your query appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
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