We hosted a webinar on how you can maintain and maximize your digital marketing success when you’re going through a website redesign. This blog post outlines the SEO and PPC considerations you must make, taken from our webinar.
Keys to SEO Success
A migration can lead to a significant drop in organic search performance. But it is possible to make any reductions in performance temporary and short.
- Plan – Understand everything that you want your site to do after launch and plan for its implementation.
- Know – Inventory everything that you want to protect and determine where you want to improve.
- Test – Understand how search engines are going to see your site before it launches – no surprises!
Keys to Paid Search Success
Leveraging paid search is an extremely effective way to maintain search engine visibility during the slight drop in organic traffic.
- Customize – Create a campaign structure with keyword and ad copy appearing on the devices most relevant to your audience.
- Optimize – Leverage the highest-converting keywords and ad copy by focusing spend efficiently.
- Test – Implement A/B Landing pages and test ad copy without campaign disruption.
To build your SEO and PPC plan, start by asking yourself some of these questions:
- Do I have a shareable list of fundamentals for on-page optimization?
- How deep do I want search engines to index my site?
- Will my site be available in a number of languages? Geographies?
- How will functions like faceted navigation be handled?
- Where will product data or content come from?
- What does my site lack today that should be included?
- Will there be any limit on the number of redirects I can put in place?
- Will the new site be made mobile-friendly? Responsive?
- Will any JavaScript frameworks be used that could impact search engines results?
To inventory everything you want to protect:
- Begin with an inventory of all URLs.
- Gather data for each URL from multiple sources.
- Focus your efforts on maintaining revenue, then traffic, then rankings.
- Sort by what matters most to you.
- Understand that a small, temporary drop is likely.
- Use all of this information to build your plan.
To determine what you want to improve:
- Find your greatest opportunities for improvement.
- Understand what you’re working with.
- Evaluate what enhancements you can make at this time.
- Explore any new areas or markets that you should attempt to target.
Tips for Testing
Make sure you take all possible actions to understand how search engines are going to see your site once it is live.
- Build solid review plans and documents for each phase of the build.
- Use all tools at your disposal to evaluate things as they near completion.
- Make sure that you fetch and render in both Google and Bing to see what they see.
- Crawl your site regularly and save them to keep a record of changes.
There are several steps to achieving success through your website redesign. In addition to maintaining search engine visibility and increasing SEO results, you’ll also want to:
- Establish goals and KPIs that will guide your digital tracking strategy
- Ensure visitors are engaging with your site’s content
- Validate new user interfaces
- Deliver the optimal user experience and increase conversions
- Use a data-driven approach to customer-centric web design
- Track digital campaigns to measure success
- Extend your online presence across social media
To learn more about each of these steps, listen to the webinar replay from our experts.
