Video Transcript – SEO Site Upgrade: 7 questions for your webmaster

SEO Site Upgrade: 7 questions for your webmaster – original post here

Hi. Welcome back, Rankers! Having a good week? I am; my team won another final. One more to win and we’re in the Grand Final, which is like the big game, in case you’re not from here. I want to talk to you today about site migration. Whether you’re just doing a facelift on your site. I’ve had a couple of instances this week where I was working on the bloggers’ SEO product. One of the bloggers whose site that I’m using, the Healthy Thermomix one, she went and pushed new logos live, new theme live and she didn’t tell me. Hi, Nicki. I was away on holidays, I came back, and of course, I talked about this one last week.

The rankings are all dropped because she blew away all the SEO. I fixed it on Friday, she’s back at number…she’s just off front page, number 11, 12, something like that. The other one that we did back in July, well, we started it in June. I don’t want to tell you who the company is or who the brand is because everyone will know the brand but basically, it’s a big national transport franchise-type company. They already had a lot of number ones, and I just met one of the owners casually at the PeSA Conference up in Brisbane, actually. He told me, oh, yeah, we’re about to go on a site migration. I’ve been thinking about doing SEO and I said, “But you’ve got all these number ones, what’s your procedure for protecting all those number ones when you go to site migration?”

He said, “What?” So, we did the site migration for them. I just want to show a few things about what we did. His particular site was typical of a lot of sites that we see before we do a site migration, but the index was just a mess. But he still had a lot of number ones, because an old site brand that had been around a while, a brand that people knew and a lot of great back links, consequently. When we took over the site and this is his rankings before we took over. This was his top phrase and I’m showing you here, I’m not showing you what the phrase is, I’m just showing you the rankings of it.

It was ranked number four, as you can see there. For those of you on Periscope, if you want to join us on Periscope for the live recording of this show, it’s Australian Eastern Standard Time. On a Tuesday, you just need to follow me on Twitter, and you’ll get the alert when we’re about to go live. It can vary a little bit, I try to kick it out at midday, but we had meetings this morning and it didn’t happen. Before we started doing the work, we were ranking at number four, and there were a bunch of other number ones across the board. We went live with the new site here, and you can see there, straight away, we went from number four to number one; the day after the new site went live.

Typically, for most of you, or if you’ve ever done a site migration, you push a site live and your rankings drop. That’s because no one’s held your hand during that process, and I’m surprised the number of businesses out there that will go live with a new site without having an SEO have a look at it. And Darren, if you’re watching, I’m talking to you. We need to do that before you push a new site live. This site had not only duplication of content, for those of you who want to know what platform it was on, this was on Joomla!, and it’s still on Joomla!. But they’re upgrading to the new version of Joomla!, and doing a new theme and restructuring and all that sort of stuff. The work that you need to do before you go live with a new site, you need to clean up that index first before you push live. You need to get rid of…and in their case, they had sub-domains, they had plug-ins creating duplicate content. They had areas for members, all sorts of things, to be able to log in. We had to get rid of all these sub-domains that shouldn’t even be there, they were just duplications of the main site that just over the years, people have published off there, and they were just left there.

We cleaned up the index and on the new site; we also changed the directory structure or the par structure of the site. Not to what they wanted to change it to, incidentally, because they had that old school SEO from 2004, where you used to have this deep structure of directories as if you would in – I was going to say Linux, but it doesn’t matter. They had deep directory structures, and the theory back in the early 2000s was that it shows all this long depth of content that you would have for a search engine, to see that. That doesn’t work anymore. What we try to do, and if you are going to a new site, you are going to a new migration, try to get the content as close to the start of the domain as possible.

If it’s logical to have categories and subdirectories, do that, but don’t have two or three subdirectories, because it takes theoretically longer for people to get there, unless you’ve got a link off the front page directly to it, and if you’ve got a link off the front page directly to it, why would you have all those subdirectories, anyway? We try to get things as close to the start of the domain as possible. This happened for a number of phrases. You can see here, the entire ranking distribution now is pretty cool. We’re pretty happy with that, we got 31 phrases on the home page and that’s pretty much all of their phrases. We could now start tracking other ones, and look for some more low hanging fruit now that they’re all on the front page.

The majority of those phrases are around number one. What happened in Google and Linux, what actually happened to the traffic is that we got new phrases to go to number one by pushing this new site live. And you can see here, I’m comparing the 1st of June to the 21st of September, to the same period last year. This is where we went live, here with the new site. You can see as soon as we went live, the traffic increased there by 15 percent on top of what it was last year. The reason I’m tracking year-on-year, and not previous period is because this is a seasonal business. I’m looking to make sure I capture that seasonality when I do this comparison.

Now you can see right up here where we are in the last couple of weeks, where our traffic is about 40% over what it was for the same time last year, which has increased our actual goal completions by 20 percent. In their case, that represents a significant…what’s that, 21 plus 36, so it’s 57,000…no 150, sorry, 157,000. No, I’ve got that completely wrong. I’ll let you do the sums, 21,000, plus 36, yeah. I was right the first time, 57,000 new goal completions and an extra 100,000 actual visits to the site during that time frame, compared to the same time last year. That’s a significant chunk of change.

Even if you are ranking really, really high, there are still improvements that you can get across the board. Because a lot of the stuff that’s driving traffic here, these phrases that we’re not even tracking because we’re only tracking 31. They’re our test phrases if you like; we’re going to have test phrases. Our phrases that are giving us a temperature check. They’re our sensors, if you like. Your key words, I look at them as sensors, I like that. I’m going to keep using that.

The reason for that is that if two or three of those drop, you can go have a look and you can guarantee that there’s a bunch of other phrases that would have dropped around that, as well. The things that you need to watch when you push live, I’ll just bring up Google search console, is you need to watch this index. Here is the new site going live. What tends to happen is, is that Google comes along and everything’s tracking pretty much flat because they didn’t have a content strategy, and then we go live. Google finds all the new pages and goes, “Oh, new pages.”

Then it goes, “Oh, hang on, all these old pages are gone,” and the index drops. Initially, the index will go up and then, it’ll drop down again. You can see it’s dropped down here and then, it’s come back up again here. This is it finding even more new content; I would expect it to drop down again in the next couple of days. The other thing that you need to watch is your crawl errors. Once you’ve cleaned up that index, you need to make sure that you have a process in place for redirecting the old addresses of every page to the new equivalent address, don’t just redirect them all to the homepage.

You need to redirect them to all their equivalent address, and then on top of that, what we’re looking at is what is giving you that current ranking? You need to replicate those elements on the new site. Don’t think you can just go, “Okay, let’s get a new groovy template and new theme, let’s change our menu structure, and we’ll just redirect all the other pages and we’re live!” No, because the internal linking structure of your menu structures actually impacts the ranking of various pages throughout the site and various keywords. If you just go and do things like change your menu structure without understanding first why those pages are ranking, how many other pages inside the site are actually linking to every other page.

You can get that information with a tool like Screaming Frog, or even in Google search console. You can just go to Google search console and go into Search Traffic, and look at Internal Links section. It will tell you what Google thinks is the pages on your site that are most linked to. You need to consider all that information before you push the new site live. You need to look at the internal linking structures, the menus, and then things like current page titles, current heading tag structures. If your current heading tag structure is garbage, it’s not going to hurt to fix it up before you go live. You won’t damage your rankings doing that.

Similarly, if your page titles are rubbish, like they’ve got 15 or 20 words in them, what you need to do is narrow it down to the things that page is ranking for, and make sure that you encapsulate that in any new page titles that you’re doing. Also, if your current images on the old site aren’t optimized – you don’t have key words in your file names, things like that – it is not going to hurt to go and put your key words in your file names of your images, in your alt tags. And if you’ve got captions, all those sorts of things, that’s not going to hurt.

What will hurt though, is that if you ignore those ranking elements, and what a lot of web developers do…love them to bits, love you web developers. You know I love you; I’ve got several watching live right now. What a lot of web developers do who aren’t familiar with SEO is they will just go and put generic page titles in, or not worry too much about the page titles. We can fix those when they’re live, the user doesn’t really look at them, all that sort of stuff. That will kill your SEO. Depending what size business that you have, if you drop out of the rankings for a period of 48 hours, what does that do to your revenue?

If you don’t do this migration right, you can spend years in the wilderness of Google. You might go from page one to page three and then, it’s a hell of a thing to try to get back. They’re the things that you got to keep in mind, when migrating to a new site. If you do it properly and also, make sure you’re also following all your site errors in Google. Once you’ve pushed live, you’ve got to look at that on a daily basis, making sure nothing pops up, and fix them when it does. If you do all those things right, you’ll get this nice, steady, increasing traffic and hopefully, rank higher and also maintain anything that you were ranking for. They’re the things to watch out for. Hopefully, that’s helpful. Join us next week on Periscope, and we’ll see you then. Thanks very much. Bye. Go, Roos!