Search, Content and Getting Found - Digital Strategy Conference

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Barbara Coll CEO, WebMama.com Inc. @webmama Content, Search and Getting Found

description

In this dynamic session, search marketing leader Barbara ’WebMama’ Coll will update you on how search engines find your content, how to identify gaps and assess whether you have the right content on your site as well as on the distributed web content you control. She’ll walk through examples of site redesigns and domain name changes; focusing on how to ensure findability and visibility during and afterwards.

Transcript of Search, Content and Getting Found - Digital Strategy Conference

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Barbara CollCEO,

WebMama.com Inc.@webmama

Content, Search and Getting Found

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Title of Talk: Content, Search and Getting Found

Getting Found for What?

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Getting Found for What?

Quality Traffic

Job Seekers

Qualified Potential Customers

Customers

People familiar with your brand

Could be all of the above

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Getting Found for What?

Quality Traffic

Job Seekers

Qualified Potential Customers

Customers

People familiar with your brand

Could be all of the above

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Goals of a Keyword Discovery/Optimization Project

Specifically looking for 5-20 words/phrases that are highly relevant that can be used for content and source code optimization

First step to increasing/maintaining visibility in search engine results for specific words and phrases relevant to what the external audience is looking for

Appear in top 3 organic search results for chosen keywords/phrases (*)

Get leads from organic search traffic

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Indentifying Gaps

Google Webmaster Tools – content scrape (www.google.com/webmasters/tools*)

Ranking Reports (moz.com*, Brightedge*)

Competitive analysis – what are they optimized for – are you?

Paid Search Keywords (ispionage.com*)

Hard one – review industry papers – see where you are left out – see words they use – do you?

Call Your Mother

*Requires an account for detailed information

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Filling the gaps

Paid search is a partner

Content development with internal linking

Content development outside the site (new policies about guest blogging)

Focus on what you can control

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Brand domination - required

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And …. More Domination

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How did they find you anyways?

Following external links and finding your new content

Following your internal links - if you link to a page from the home page then since you think it is important so will the engines

You told them through the Webmaster Tools

The press release you put out

The blog you wrote

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Story: New Site Design Launched Mar 7. Draft/Beta/Test site had noindex/nofollow meta tags. Weren’t removed until March 27.

Visitor Traffic from Google Organic

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Domination

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Maintaining Visibility

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Case Study - VMware

Full L&F and site architecture redesign

36 languages

2M pages

Search Visibility Guidelines in Style guide

Web Producers and Content Owners Trained on Guidelines

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Keyword Category Domination

Company = VMware

Keyword = virtualization

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@webmama

Instances of Keyword/Content

http://www.vmware.com/products/

http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/ *

http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/virtualization-basics/what-is-virtualization.html *

http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop-virtualization.html *

* URLs/Filenames the same as pre-redesign

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Internal Content Links Maintained

Footers

Imagery

Main Nav

Video

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Right about Now Spot check for redirect errors – click on organic

search results

Home page change? 3 hours

Sitelinks? 1-3 days

Old and new URLs at same time – yup – some overlap

DNS propagation – 4-5 days across world

Major ranking changes – 2 weeks

Launch

2-weeks

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VisualSearch

Turns UpLots of Things

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VMware Case Study -

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4/25/14

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Tidemark

Domain Change Tidemark.net to www.tidemark.com

NO other changes were made during domain change

Situation .net had 3400 external links into the

site .com had 3 links that were relevant Had to gain Google’s trust

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Switch Occurred 11/14 5:30pm

Prior to switch internal links were tested by lots of people

Once switched over redirects from .net to .com were tested by a number of people. 404 page was also tested.

Once comfortable that site was stable (about 9am next morning) the following steps were taken: Google was informed of switch from .net to .com in 3 ways

From .net webmaster tools account we through the switch to tell them we had changed the company domain

We asked the engines to ‘fetch’ the .com pages (a way of getting them to look at the pages sooner)

We submitted an automatically generated sitemap which was crawled on 11/18.

All actions were also taken with Bing (therefore also Yahoo)

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External Link Update (moz.com opensiteexplorer)

^86

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Domain Authority

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Ranking and Traffic Growth

Trend line shows keyphrase/words above 51 organic results

Organic traffic

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How Do People Mess Up?

Keep old test site rules/code in place Robots.txt excluding important directories or engines

themselves Meta Tags that tell the engines what to do

No 301 redirects from old pages to new pages

Have an error page in place that insults the visitor (or even have no error page in place)

Forget to turn on the analytics for tracking the new site

Forget to update all content controlled by company – especially need to update Google+

They only look at rankings and not at the actual, visible to searchers, results

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Paid Search – using assets instead of just text ads

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With the addition of white papers the CPL went from over $400 to $180. CTR increased 47% and conversion rate increased 218%.

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Thank you.

@[email protected]

Reach For Domination