Video Transcript – SEO For A New Site – 7 Steps

SEO For A New Site – 7 Steps – original post here

Hey, welcome back, rankers. Back in the office again. Now look. We were at the conference a couple of weeks ago at PeSA, and one of the questions that we got asked a lot was… well, we weren’t even asked actually. We just heard a lot, “Oh, yeah, I’m about to launch a new site.” We go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What?” “Yeah, I’m about to launch a new site. The old one’s a bit crappy and old, and time for a facelift. Thought I’d launch a new site.” It’s like, “Great, great idea. Love it, stay up with fashion, all that sort of stuff.” However none of them knew, that we spoke to, that if you’re just going to go and do that without the necessary precautions or preparations in place for Google, you will actually disappear from Google.

Many of you know the story of the Melbourne Storm rugby team that we were put in contact with by Sean Callanan of Beers, Blokes and Business. They had a problem. They disappeared from Google for a period of time – this was a few years ago – and so had a bunch of other NRL teams. When we were typing the brand, they were gone. No site. I’m not exaggerating here. That’s what happened. The reason for it was they had new sites that were pushed live without any of this necessary preparation that I’m about to show you now. So if you do these things when you are about to go live with a new site, you should be okay but I make no promises if I’m not doing the work.

Now for instance, there is a client who’s been with us for about a year, just over a year actually, about 14 months. You can see their traffic from Google organic goes up 486%, which is nice. But let’s just say we wanted to go to a new site. Well, there are a few things you need to do before you even get to the new site itself. We’ll tell clients that we need anything from two to four weeks. And depending on your website, the size of your company, your business, and your developer, your new site might take anything from two weeks to two years. We’ve all been down that path before. Depending on how many people are involved, it can have an exponential effect on how long it takes to get these things done. But these things I’m about to talk about now, you don’t want to skip on these. You must do these things.

So first of all you need to know what’s driving traffic, so that 500% improvement or thereabouts. What are the phrases that have been driving the traffic? Now Google Analytics unfortunately isn’t going to tell you. You may already have some idea that you might have targeted certain phrases. You might say, “Oh, well, we’re ranking really well for that phrase. It’s probably that phrase.” Well, the best thing to do is go and have a look at Search Console. Oh, yeah, I hate that name – Search Console, but Google Webmasters is also now called Search Console. Those could be worse. They could have called it Webmaster My Business or something equally inane. Anyway it’s called Search Console. I don’t know why they changed the name, but wow.

Anyway so I suggest you would go into your Search Traffic, Search Analytics, and just click the Impressions box. And what you’re looking for and I’ll just take off this… What I’m looking for is just the queries. I don’t want any of the other stuff. Okay, just reset that to top queries. I’m not going to show you what the queries are. I’m not going to show you what the keywords are.

So I’ve got clicks and impressions here. I’m not that worried about the clicks, because I find the clicks… This is interesting. When I match up the clicks from Google Webmaster tools or Search Console with Google Analytics, they don’t match up. Analytics is always showing a lot of highs. So don’t worry too much about the clicks in Search Console. So if you’re going to have a look at impressions here, we can see with this phrase we’ve got 3535 impressions per month. So it’s important to know what that word is or what that group of phrases is, and start writing them down.

The next step you want to do is you want to make sure you’ve got some ranking reports set up, because half the time a lot of people won’t have ranking reports set up for long-tail phrases, your stemming off phrases or really obscure phrases but might be driving a bit of traffic. So make sure you have some ranking reports set up. And the reason you want to do that is because you want to have that set up for at least a week. So you can see some stability of rankings in that week. Check it every day like we did here. We checked everyone’s every day. You have to.

And then when you do go live, what you’re watching for is essentially a drop. You’re not trying to improve rankings with this new site change. I want to make that clear. You’re not trying to improve it. At the first stage, you’re just trying to maintain those rankings. Think about improving down the track. You don’t want to complicate matters by thinking, “Yeah, that page, how about if I did this to it before we go live with the new site?” No, don’t do that. What you should do is try to replicate the ranking elements on the existing ranking pages that you’ve established and what they are with the keywords that you’re monitoring. Have a look at those pages and ask why those pages are ranking. Have a look at their backlinks, have a look at their heading tags, have a look at the title elements, all those sorts of things: the page titles, the image file names, all those things. Get an idea of why those pages are ranking and make sure to replicate it in the new site. Then what you’ve got to look at is Google’s index to the site. Make sure that your index is nice and clean. So all those other videos I’ve done of cleaning out the index and all that sort of stuff, make sure that index is clean. And of course what you then want to do is go and map all your URLs. My favourite crawler for this is, of course, as you know, Screaming Frog. The Spider will go and map all the URLs and you’ve got a nice file to be exported as an .xls file or .csv, whatever you want. And then you’ve got that ready, so when your new site does go live, you can do your redirects.

Now the other thing you have to do here is, once you are live, you not only have to redirect all the old URLs to the new URLs. You also have to make sure that the new site has a site map. Some people forget to do that. The old site, once the new site is indexed, should actually be fully redirected, so you don’t have to log it with robot.txt. But what you’re waiting for is for all the old URLs to get hit by Google and Google then sees the redirect and goes to the new URL. And then over a period of time, you’ve just got to watch it really, really carefully and understand phrase drops. Is it worth rolling this back? You’ve got to be able to make that decision. You need to understand what is driving traffic, how much traffic it’s driving and what the value of that traffic is. How much of that traffic is converting into sales?

And that’s it for this week. If you’ve got any questions, send them through. Please give us a thumbs up, leave a comment, whatever you want, and also share with your friends. We love new viewers and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.