Dental Web Marketing Case Study

Inbound Marketing for Dentists

Dr. Nishita Gandhi

Bronx, NY, USA

www.bronxdds.com

Dr. Nishita Gandhi started her own dental practice in an area with a lot of competition. But opening a dental practice is expensive and Dr. Gandhi needed to grow her practice. She had worked with a company that made websites for dental practices, but her website looked generic. Even worse, it wasn’t showing up on Google searches. She signed on with IBIS Technologies’ Custom Package to kick off her Dental Practice.

BUSINESS NAME: FORDHAM DENTAL OFFICE

GOAL OF PROJECT

• Show up in Local Search Engine Results
• Drive Patients to the Practice.
• Increase New Business
• Improve Visitors Experience with Interaction
• Feedback from Existing Patients

STRATEGY

Dr. Gandhi needed a new website that was optimized for SEO in order to rank higher in an area concentrated with dentists. IBIS Technologies’ Custom Package included an SEO optimized Responsive Website, Customized Marketing Plan and Social Media Optimization. Dr. Gandhi also added an AdWords Boost Campaign to increase her traffic while her organic results improved. Dr. Gandhi learned how to blog and increased her presence on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. She also received good amount of Satisfied Patients Reviews from her ZOCDOC account.

SUCCESS

The AdWords Campaign brought in new leads and once her organic results were good enough, Dr. Gandhi was able to stop the campaign. Her practice is now on the 1st page of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other major search engines and the average number of new patients each month has increase.

Read our dental case study on how Dr. Gandhi turned her new practice into a booming business!

If you have any questions, please contact us.

SEO is an Excellent Investment for your Business to Grow in 2016

Over the past few years many misunderstandings have come forward concerning Search Engine Optimization. But which are some of the most false thoughts we have heard about SEO during the last year or so that we going to see for an instance?

“Google will bring my website on top of the result not companies like you.”

“I don’t want SEO. I just want a good looking website similar to my competitor’s one.”

“Just built it and they will come.”

“SEO is very much costly and there is no requirement to our website.”

“I have local business so I don’t require SEO for my website.”

Such false impressions still reside inside the heads of small medium scale entrepreneurs, business owners and business executives as a part of an overall digital mindset.

While I don’t feel repentant for the Marketing Gurus that are just parroting the latest buzz words, tactics and amplify the above plus 100 more delusions, I do feel strong about my job; My responsibility to inform the well-intended business owners that SEO still stands in 2016 at the forefront of investments for businesses that wish to increase not only their online presence but overall company branding and sales.

Search Engine Optimization must needed Investment for Your Business Growth

Many business owners don’t feel like SEO is an investment but they treated this as an expense to their business. But we can definitely define SEO as an investment as it takes time and money to draw quality organic traffic to their website through various search engines and social media platforms. If money and time are appropriately invested then SEO will increase ROI due to the following few critical factors:

1) Growth

If you are developing a new website for your business from scratch the initial organic traffic means your presence in search engines will be zero. Even with many websites that have been in existence for years, the organic traffic can stay behind quite low if no or improper SEO approach has been implemented.

And even though this may sound very disappointing, in realism it is a very positive thing for small businesses that are willing to implement a long term SEO line of attack for their business growth.

The motivation for this is the multiple rate result and how it relates to SEO Strategy. For the websites of small businesses like dentist, plumber, retail shop, doctors or law firm it is not uncommon to experience a 25%, 60% or even 100% growth in their organic traffic every year.

So if your target market is local business only and you need some professional expertise in generating prospective clients to your website than we can develop such customized SEO campaign to promote your websites in top of the search results in Google, yahoo, Bing than we offers SEO Package for Local Business across the world at competitive rates.

So, visualize that even if the website that you are working on has only 100 - 150 unique visitors from organic (SEO) traffic per month, it is quite realistic to anticipate that in 3-5 years down the line this same website can have 500, 700 or even over 1.000 visitors per month. This can be accomplished with the implementation of continuous “white-hat” SEO strategy due to the compound rate effect that helps websites build up increasingly higher ranks of organic traffic over time with the same amount of SEO efforts.

2) Development

As clients we tend to carry out our research through search engines by using many diverse keyword grouping so as to fulfill our requirements.

While there is no certain-fire way to know in advance the exact queries (search terms, keywords) that each searcher will enter into a search engine for his requirement; what you can do is take benefit of the multiplier effect and fundamentally rank your website for thousands of search terms or keywords while targeting only a much smaller division of these phrases.

If as a company you need some professional expertise in managing your SEO campaign and want to put your websites in top of the search results in Google, yahoo, Bing than we offers Best SEO services for Local Businessacross the world at competitive rates.

In order to accomplish that you have to develop search engine algorithms to your advantage that it brings organic traffic to your website. While this sounds quite prohibited and black-hat all it actually means is to invest in a long term“white-hat” SEO plan.

A well SEO optimized website for a positive subset of keyword terms that are appropriate to the website’s niche is going to automatically replicate 100s of different keyword terms that your website will rank for.

3) Long Life

Anyone that has active Paid Adwords Campaigns, like a Google Adwords campaign or Bing Adwords Campaing, knows that in the instant that the campaigns are off, the paid traffic that flows to the website drops as well.

In difference, an investment on SEO constructs long term traffic that can be maintained, after it has been built, even with minimal efforts in certain niches for starter and not focusing more on Competitive market.

Even in aggressive niches the most difficult part is to raise the SEO traffic for early stage websites or for websites that haven’t performed any SEO procedures for years.

On the other hand well optimized websites with active SEO running can rule the SERPs rankings much easier for the long time with a certain level of SEO strategies.

Summarize SEO as an Investment to Business Growth

In conclusion, the Growth Factor through the multiple rate effect will allow organic (SEO) traffic to heap up as the time progresses. The Development Factor will allow the keyword terms to multiple automatically and as a result your website’s “keyword terms crowd” will grow and dominate the SERPs as time unfolds. Finally, the Long Life Factor will enable SEO traffic to create (pay) bonuses in the form of future – long term – organic traffic.

So this Trieffect gives your business the much needed ROI for the Source you have putting into as Money. If you are looking for some professional company to handle your SEO campaign, that will benefit your business growth for longer period of time than you can Request for the Quote here.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) significance In An SEO Campaign – Guide for SEO Specialist

Click-through rate (CTR) is clearly an imperative metric to consider in diverse facets of your digital online marketing strategy.

The higher your CTR is, the more chances for people to visit your website, so of course it’s valuable to improve it as mentioned in my earlier blog.

The CTR of your social media posts in various social media platforms like facebook, twitter, google+ or linkedin could determine how much visibility future posts will received; the CTR of your advertisements could specify their relevance to your target audience; and the CTR of your organic search results speaks to the value suggestion of your page titles and descriptions as we discussed in last blog.

Additionally, CTR has long been considered to have another advantage: increased rankings. In other words, many believe that pages with higher CTR for certain search queries tend to rank higher for those search queries results. Essentially, CTR has been measured a significant cause that influences organic search rankings.

Background Scenario

There is broad foundation for the idea of CTR influencing organic search rankings results. As recently as 2014, it’s been regarded as a vital determining factor in a website’s health and supposed authority. Search Metrics even included it in their SEO rank correlations report in 2014.

The big dilemma with these reports — and with many examples of potential ranking factors — is that correlation affiliations do not necessarily imply a causal relationship.

Let’s discuss one example, if a website boosts the quality of its content and develops its brand visibility, it may earn a higher domain authority and rise up in the ranks while at the same time engaging to more customers and earning a higher CTR. In this case, CTR and rank increase proportionally, but neither has a direct result on the other.

Present Scenario

In an attempt to determine how much of an impact CTRs had on search rankings results as a direct causal influence need to cautiously constructed a sequence of clicks (to avoid Google’s traffic spam filters) to a closely observed website. Using a variety of different keywords and subjects, the experiment sent thousands of visits to the site in question, synthetically (but measurably) increasing its CTR to more than 80%.

With such a considerable increase, if CTRs were a ranking aspect, one would expect to see at least a understated shift upward in the search rankings results. The results were the opposite — search rankings for the website remained sluggish for a few weeks, only to fall a short while later.

This recommends that click-through rate (CTR) is not a ranking factor — a conclusion almost in direct opposition to that experiment back in 2014. Both tests tried to establish a “baseline” for their respective subjects, with the only difference being CTR; one increased in rank almost immediately, while another barely moved at all.

There are few possible clarifications for this data disagreement:

1.  CTR stopped being a ranking factor in 2015
2. One of the trials was set up incorrectly (resulting in skewed results) or
3. There were other aspects that affected the rankings that were not known or included in the trials.

Conclusion: Is CTR A Ranking Factor For SEO Campaign?

You can perhaps by now guess my answer to this question, but I want to also make clear the implication of the question. Conflicting data is normal for almost any authority, even in far more structured scientific researches. It’s neither irregular nor particularly troublesome. But in the SEO world, with so many vagueness and so few clear details about how Google’s search algorithms work, we have to go with what we be familiar with. And because things in SEO change so fast, we have to go with what we make out today.

We don’t know for sure that CTR ever had a fundamental affiliation with organic search ranking improvement. We do know that it doesn’t guarantee rank improvement. These two details lead us to a safe best guess that click-through rate is not a dependable ranking factor — so even if it does have a fundamental influence on website rank, it’s inconsistent and unpredictable.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is not an Important Factor to Consider in SEO Campaign?

Extremely not. It’s vital to pay attention to your CTR — on search engine results pages, as well as any other occasions where your prospective customers click on your website content. It’s the final doorway that stands between your potential visitors and your actual visitors.

If you discover that your CTR is extremely low, it’s your accountability to work to improve it for your SEO Campaign:

i.Be as to the point as possible by using less words to carry your message.

ii.Describe your website as precisely — and as interestingly — as possible with value propositions and explicit wording.

iii.Stay state-of-the-art so your descriptions fall exactly in line with your vision.

iv.Imply a sense of importance without resorting to petty click-bait style campaigns.

v.Use the power of headlines to anchor user interest.

Click-through rate (CTR) is not an important factor to consider in SEO Campaign — improving the CTRs of your search engine entries, ads and posts is exceptionally valuable in earning you more traffic. However, it probably won’t increase your search engine rankings directly. Understanding this difference will allow you to approach CTR correctly and avoid wasting time pursuing a ranking tactic that simply doesn’t work.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

7 Steps to Make SEO Friendly Source Code Optimized Website

Every search engine marketing professional knows how significant SEO is in the age of digital technology in today’s world. But if you’re on a sales and marketing team with learner to intermediary knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), what do you need to be familiar with to launch your first winning SEO campaign for your company?

In this blog, we attempt to share everything you need to know about the fundamentals of SEO for your first winning SEO campaign. We discuss things like how to optimize your site, create content, and bring traffic to your site.

There are a few stuffs to keep in mind when planning about SEO:

• Don’t depend on SEO to be the key factor for your business.
• You can’t direct Google, but you can manage what goes on your website.

Know Thy Source Code!

This is what source code looks like:

If you observe the source code on any web page, you’ll see something in this fashion. Source code isn’t creepy. It’s basically the code that web browsers “read” to figure out how to demonstrate a webpage’s contents. Google and other search engines read your source code to find out what your website or web application is about.

If you don’t know how to view source code, you go to a web page for which you want to see the source code and do one of the following (depending on your browser):

Now we go through some of the components which are there in any website source code as below:

1. Title Tag

The title tag is the most imperative component on any web page. If you do a ‘Ctrl + U’ on any page, you’ll see the title tag in source code. It will be representing between “<title> … </title>”  

You want to make sure you only have one title tag per page. What you put in the title tag is basically how Google decides what’s going to be in search engine results.

Google has been testing with changing this a little bit, but for most of the time, they repeat accurately what’s in your web page title tag into the search engine web page, so it’s really significant that you craft your title tag so that it reads well and people will click on the link when they see your website result in search engines. A lot of discussions will tell you to put your most important keywords into this title tag, but be cautious about that. You don’t want to be preoccupied with keywords. You want it to come naturally. Describe what the web page is about and write it like you’re a copywriter for that page. One thing to keep in mind is: how would you write this if you were going to write it as an ad in a brochure? The more naturally, the better chance people will click on your web page. Generally you should put maximum 77 characters in your title tag for better result.

1. Meta Description

The next component we have in any web page is the “meta description”, you’ll see the meta description in source code. It will be represent as “<meta name=”description” content=” … ” />”  which looks like this:

This is another section of code that you have in the head tag of a page. You only have one of these. This indicates description of that web page. You can elaborate on what the page is about in more detail. A lot of companies skip over this component and end up duplicating their home page Meta description content on every single page in their website. In Google Webmaster tools, they tell these companies that there are a lot of duplicate descriptions available in your website. It doesn’t influence your search ranking and isn’t a large problem, but you’re ruining your opportunity at taking advantage of free advertising with such different Meta description in all the pages of your website.

As you can see, the Meta description is the second section of content or text underneath your title tag. This is some free ad that Google gives you that you should take advantage of on every single web page of your website. People read it and this is how they conclude whether they’ll click on your website link to check out your content. Take time to imagine about what you want to put in your Meta descriptions. Generally you should put maximum 156 characters in your Meta description for better result.

1. H1 Heading Tag

Next component of code you have is the H1 Heading tag. It will be representing between “<h1> … </h1>” which looks like this:

H1 Heading is the main heading on a web page. What you want to do here is write copy that’s warm and attractive once people click through and read your web page content. This is another stride in bringing people into the rest of the content. The idea of the H1 Heading is to have people believe: “Wow, I’d really be keen on to read the rest of this page content.” Some people used to just copy paste the title tag content into the H1 and that’s okay. But you might actually desire to have something a little more engaging, more precise for that page and makes more logic once users get there. This is important, as Google looks as these, so don’t try to keyword stuff in this webpage. Just make it natural and appealing. Generally you should put maximum 20 characters in your H1 Heading for better result.

1. Internal Links and Anchor Text

One more important component is how internal links and anchor texts work in your website. On any web page, you’ll have links to any content which are interlinked. This is what the code looks like for any link.

This can go to a link on your site or a link to another website whatever you have linked to in the source code. Another significant thing is that the content nested by this tag is the anchor text. As you can see in the example above, “IBIS Technologies” is the anchor text. The words in the anchor text are very essential thing that search engines pay attention to. It helps them figure out what that webpage is going to be about and they use it in their algorithm to understand what your entire website is about and what web pages they should supply to their users. A lot of people used keyword-stuffing this to manipulate it. This is black-hat techniques and Google can penalize you for using this technique. For more information about this update Read Here. Remember to make the internal links and anchor text natural and usable.

1. Nofollow Links

The “Nofollow” Attribute goes inside an anchor link:

This anchor link is actually a bit more complex, because it has some JavaScript in it, but don’t be too besieged by it. As you can see, I have outlined rel=’external no follow’. You can in reality just do rel=”nofollow”. The “Nofollow” attribute informs Google and other search engines not to follow the link to the next page and not count it as link juice. You’re keeping your page with no follows if you use them. You’re saying that you don’t want Google to focus on the next page. You want to direct Google towards things that you think are more important.

You should really only use this for comments in blogs to keep blog comment spam down, because oftentimes people leave links to other sites while commenting on your blog. The “Nofollow” tag was created to keep these spammy users at bay. In the past, people used to like the “Nofollow” tag to page sculpt, which means you try to direct your link juice to certain parts of the site that they really want you to focus on. You should withdraw from doing this practice and just use it for editorial purposes and in your blog comments.

1. Image Alt Tags

The Image Alt tag is another tag that is extremely imperative, especially if you’re running an eCommerce website.

What this does is that it tells a search engine what an image is all about. As you can see in the example, the image is about website development service. This is how Google Spider knows what your image is about and it helps your image become higher in the image search results.

Don’t use ‘Image Alt’ tags for decorative images. Use them for:

• Images of merchandise
• Diagrams
• Infographics
• Your website logo
• Screenshots
• Photos of team members
• and other places where it’s an appropriate usage.

Think of your ‘Image Alt’ tag this way: For an example if you had to portray your image to a blind person, how would you portray it?

1. Canonical Tag

The Canonical Tag is one more very significant tag that came out relatively recently:

It’s important because if you have a lot of web pages that have similar substance, you can tell Google Spider that the only page they should give attention to is a certain page. This is a good way to stop duplicate content in your website. This is also imperative to syndicate your content, as you can have people who syndicate your content use this tag in their head of their page that they’re taking from you and pointing back to you as the original source. In real meaning, canonical tags are useful for setting a preferred URL for your web page content.

Now that you know the different tags and how they are important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your website and you need some professional experts to work for your website than as a leading search engine optimization company we can help you to make your website source code Search Engine Friendly.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

How to Get Your ‘Not Provided’ Keywords in Google Analytics Account - Part IV

Hey Friends as we gone through various techniques to get result from ‘not provided’ keyword list in Google Analytics Account so in this series today we going to cover last method that can help you to generate result from your ‘not provided’ keyword list.

P.S.: Before getting started through this third method if you have missed my first two method I recommend taking theMethod – 1 first Method – 2 second  & Method – 3 before starting this method.

Method 4: Use Webmaster Tools

You all must be aware of Google’s Webmaster Tool when you try to submit your website link into Google Search Engine. Google’s Webmaster Tool’s dashboard is nowhere near as comprehensive as Google Analytics Data Generation ability, but in this condition, the metrics it gathers does add some value. Specifically, you can see a very basic overview of keywords that lead visitors to your site in the Traffic menu, under Search Queries.

Underneath this graph you’ll find a pretty comprehensive list of your website’s keyword performance:

A nice treat that Google Webmaster Tools does give you: It will tell you the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of your keywords from Google Search Results. Sometimes a little more polishing up on your title tags and meta-descriptions can help increase the Click-Through-Rate of your keywords.

Finally, Google Webmaster Tools also tells you an approximate amount of search impressions your keywords are attracting. If you know that a certain keyword is attracting a large number of impressions, it might be in your best interest to put a little more effort towards ranking for that keyword to obtain more traffic. One way to do this is to simply expand your content related to this keyword.

Final Verdict

Google’s ‘not provided’ data is a contentious topic, and there’s no foolproof way to access the data that hidden in Google Analytics Report. However, if you’re losing a important amount of statistical data to ‘not provided’, it’s certainly worth investing some time to overcome the problem. If you having any problem while implementing any workarounds in such data than you can contact us as we are the leading search engine optimization companylocated in India, USA and Canada. And we are also Google Analytics and Google Adwords Certified Company so we can help you in implementing one or more workarounds to help you to improve your understanding of organic keywords and get a better insight into your missing statistics.

For more tips and tricks on how to do search engine optimization of your website and various other methods on promotion and marketing you can sign up for free newsletter so that it will directly deliver to your Inbox.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

How to Get Your ‘Not Provided’ Keywords in Google Analytics Account - Part III

Hello Friends welcome back. Hope you are looking forward to try this next method for getting your Google Keywords‘not provided’ data for generating better marketing strategies for such keywords as these are the keywords through which people are visiting your site and if you get right insight of these keywords you can make your website more informative friendly and if you work more towards it you get chance to convert visitors to lead to prospect.

P.S.: Before getting started through this third method if you have missed my first two method I recommend taking theMethod – 1 first Method – 2 second before starting this method.

Method 3: Examine AdWords Data

As mentioned in this series of articles, ‘not provided’ is only an issue for organic search queries. Paid (Google Adwords) search isn’t affected with this. That means you can dodge the problems caused by ‘not provided’ results by paying for Adwords and measuring the response rates to keywords via PPC. These are shown in Google Analytics as Matched Search Queries.

P.S.: Remember one thing again, this isn’t an entirely precise solution; the data shown in Adwords is only related to traffic that you’ve paid for – not the organic traffic. However, if you are willing to pay the cash to spend on keyword research, it’s another way to boost your understanding of user behavior and make your SEO research more meaningful.

If you are not willing for Google Adwords or PPC Management still I can help you with one more method where you can dig into Keywords List of ‘not provided’ report. And as you know you can find that in my next part.

For more tips and tricks on how to do search engine optimization of your website and various other methods on promotion and marketing you can sign up for free newsletter so that it will directly deliver to your Inbox.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

How to Get Your ‘Not Provided’ Keywords in Google Analytics Account - Part II

Hello Friends hope you are looking forward to try this next method for getting your Google Keywords ‘not provided’data for generating better marketing strategies for such keywords as these are the keywords through which people are visiting your site and if you get right insight of these keywords you can make your website more informative friendly and if you work more towards it you get chance to convert visitors to lead to prospect.

P.S.: Before getting started through this second method if you have missed my first method I recommend taking theMethod – 1 first

Method 2: Use Traffic Sources Data

Within Google Universal Analytics, there’s a second set of metrics that can help you to decode your most popular keywords. The Search Engine Optimization report is designed specifically for this purpose – specifically the Queries report.

Data in this report is generally two days out of date, and it’s fair to say that the metrics here are partial in scope. If you’re managing a busy website, Traffic Sources simply won’t give you the detail you need to properly analyze your Queries and Landing Pages; the number of results it can show is partial, for example.

However, for smaller business sites, this report is worth a look for a very basic overview of what’s happening with organic search on your website.

Don’t worry readers if you running with busy website and facing such problems I have so many other methods in my knowledge so keep reading this blog post as still there are other ways through which you can get your ‘not provided’keywords list. 

If you have any questions, please contact us.

How to Get Your ‘Not Provided’ Keywords in Google Analytics

Google Universal Analytics is a incredible resource tool for any website owner or search engine optimizer. From small personal sites to big corporate website, from small bloging to full e-commerce website, Google Analytics is a “goldmine” of useful information and statistics about visitor trends and behavior though out journey of a visitor to lead, lead to prospect, prospect to client.

However, there is little area where Google Universal Analytics frustrates its users: “The Organic Search Query Report.” An increasing number of results in this part of Analytics are listed as ‘not provided’ – not much use when you’re trying to find out what people are searching for when they comes to your website, which is most important inside for you to start working on.

P.S.: the ‘not provided’ is lifted for paid search results. It’s just the organic search results that are often hidden from view.

So everyone who is working on this Universal Google Analytics has this common question in their mind:

 “Why Is Data Hidden and ‘Not Provided’?”

Before 4 years in October 2011, Google changed the way it produces data from search to protect users’ privacy.

If a user is logged into any of the Google product (such as Gmail or Youtube) when searching, their search is conducted over SSL. As such, the referral data relating to that search is hidden.

Referral data includes some constructive information such as the keywords used to perform that search. Google can still see this information, but website owners – and Analytics account holders – can’t access it. This missing data leaves a gaping hole in our analytics reports, making it difficult for us to know the ROI of specific keywords we rank for in organic search.

Luckily, there are a few workarounds that can reveal the data behind these figures.

So here in this blog I am helping everyone who has this common question in their mind:

“How to Unlock ‘Not Provided’ Results in Google Analytics Report?”

Before we get into this guide, first thing first it’s a good idea to verify just how many of your organic search keywords are listed as ‘not provided’, and whether this is increasing with time or not. You’ll need to assess whether it’s worth investing time into decoding these results before you continue with this guide, since none of these techniques provides a single, foolproof solution.

Here in this I am going to cover different methods one at a time. So don’t forget to follow me on this for complete solutions with your Google Analytics problem in your reporting.

Method 1: Recognize the User’s Behavior with Landing Page Reports

The first and most important way to get around the ‘not provided’ result is to mine Google Universal Analytics for other information that will reveal more about those visitors and what they were doing on your site during their visit.

1. In your Analytics account, head to Admin, then Profiles.
2. Click the name of the profile you want to work with, and select the Filters tab.
3. Create a new filter in your Analytics account:

The purpose of this filter is to extract the ‘not provided’ terms. To do this, extract the URL and rewrite the two in place of the original ‘not provided’ text. Although this doesn’t reveal the exact keyword, it can help you to understand where that traffic is going and whether you need to dig deeper with other techniques. (The important part – the rewrite – is highlighted in BLUE in our screenshot.)

P.S.: Here you need to understand one thing that this filter can’t be applied to historical data; you’ll only see it in action for new visits.

Don't Forget to Next Method on this Blog.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

Domain Relocation Guidelines To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

Re-branding your company name is one of the most common and toughest marketing initiatives for businesses across world, and can occur at any time for variety of reasons. Whether it is an effort to dissociate with the performance of the past or to simplify the brand name of your company for future, this marketing tactic can be very successful if approached properly.

Some notable brands have undergone this process including Hutchison’s rebranding to Vodafone, and the Federal Express rebranding to FedEx. In the digital world, Google rebranded from their original name, BackRub.

SEO Ranking Preservation

SEO Ranking Preservation can be a broad term that may include a variety of performance indicators including page-rank, traffic, ranking keywords, online purchases, bookings, and many more. When SEO Ranking preservation is not a key factor throughout domain migration or the URL restructuring process, there are some key lessons that can be learned. As search engine optimizers, we understand that often other factors like time-resources, budget, other marketing efforts, or even client buy-in to the SEO process may inhibit the preservation process. Brands that have failed at this process chose to focus on other priorities during their website migration process, and unfortunately, as a result they have seen dramatic dips in their site performance.

Another “frightening scenario” for SEO is to have domain migration occur so that both domains remain live for some time and links connect the old and new sites back and forth. To avoid this, coordinate the shift all at once because the existence of two live domains with substantial amounts of duplicate content and partial implementation of redirects will send conflicting signals to search engines about which site should rank. Consequently, the domain authority is then split instead of shifted from the old domain to the new one. In some cases we’ve seen domain authority drops for both the old and the new domain.

Re-brandings with SEO Ranking Preservation in Mind

What are the precautions do you need to plan ahead for, in order to minimize the chance of these re-branding drops impacting your business?

There are 6 significant components to maintaining domain authority, digital presence, and accurate tracking of the domain migration. Some of which impact how the domain is perceived and some are related to how the migration is tracked. Keep in mind these significant elements if you are planning for a re-branding:

1)Redirects

The most apparent first step is to put in place redirects which automatically route a user from the old domain and page to the new one. There are a range of types of redirects that are available, but for these types of redirects, a 301 is best. A 301 status communicates to search engines and web browsers that the page has been permanently relocated and redirects the user to the correct page. A 301 redirect also transfers ranking power (sometimes called “link juice”) that the legacy page had built up to the new page.

In order to identify every page on the site that needs to be redirected, several tools, including Screaming Frog, Integrity for Mac, are available to “crawl” the legacy site. Pay special consideration to URLs that have the most in-bound links, or receive the highest volume of inbound traffic from other sites. These pages are home to most of the site’s “link juice” and must be maintained. Tools such as Google Search Console, MozOpenSite Explorer and Majestic SEO, can be used to compare and make sure that nothing gets skipped or overlooked.

Once the list of legacy pages is complete they must be mapped to pages on the new site and redirected. A simple way to help you do this is to create an excel file listing the old URL’s in one column and the new ones in another. It also helps for verification purposes later.

It’s important to be prepared to make all of the changes at once instead of drifting a handful of pages at a time. Leaving both domains live sends conflicting signals to search engines and can damage the domain authority of both the legacy and new domains.

2)Resubmit Sitemap

Once the redirects have been implemented it’s vital to notify Google and Bing Webmaster Tools that a change of address is happening. Leave the old site’s XML sitemap live for about a week after the migration because crawling never happen immediately to your sitemap so crawlers can still access it, follow the links therein through the 301 redirects, and start working the old URLs out of their indexes.

Create a XML sitemap for the new domain and submit it to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools/Search Console. Typically, it can take a day or two before the new crawl takes effect and you can compare the number of indexed pages once the crawling happen. You can access crawling information from your webmaster tool.

3)Directory Listings

Along with inbound links, one more significant factor to consider is directory listings are one of top sources used by both search engines and users to find a website or domain. It’s considered best SEO practice to make certain that listings in online and print directories are current and accurate. A domain migration requires returning to all of the directories that list the legacy domain and updating them to reflect the new address. These directories may include (most generically) Yep, FourSquare, InfoGroup, Localeze, Yellowpages, and DMOZ. An aggregation tool like MozLocal can help bring all of these directories into alignment.

In addition to the generic directories most businesses have an opportunity to be listed in industry-specific directories. From real estate-agents to Dentists or home maintenance professionals, you’ll likely find a set of available directories. The longer a legacy domain has been in existence, the more directories that will subsequently need to be updated.

4)Social Media

Now as we are into this Digital world there is a strong correlation between social media engagement and web traffic. Announcing and publicizing the domain name change to provide important social signals and promote the re-branding in its own right. This will generate higher than usual volumes of traffic to the new domain in order to compensate for the potential drop in organic traffic while Google is indexing the new domain. While it isn’t critical to update all legacy posts with a new domain, it’s crucial to make sure that any pages that have social media links to them are correctly redirected. Update social media profiles, especially Twitter, Facebook and Google +, but don’t neglect LinkedIn, Instagram, Blogger, Pinterest,  Stumblr, YouTube and any others that are connected to the website.

5)Analytics and Search Console Profiles

The profiles in an analytics package, whether it is Google Analytics or a third party fee-for-service provider, will track the traffic to a specific domain, and if it’s set up correctly should not be tracking activity on other domains. In the Admin tab of Google Analytics, the property name and default URL should be updated to reflect the new domain. This is also the time to annotate Google Analytics in order to track the date of the migration.

In addition to Google Analytics it's important to update settings in Google Search Console, only AFTER the migration has occurred.

6)Audit Redirects

Once everything is complete, it’s important to verify that everything is working as expected. The Screaming Frog web spider tool can help run an audit of the old and new site to examine the results.

A). Upload: The legacy URL’s

Switch the SEO Spider to ‘List Mode,” select the file with all the old URLs to audit and upload.

B). Select: The ‘Always Follow Redirects’ box

Navigate to the ‘Advanced’ tab inside the ‘Spider Configuration’ and select the ‘Always Follow Redirects‘ option.

As default ‘List Mode’ works at a 0 crawl depth, meaning it just crawls the URLs included in the upload. With this feature selected, it ignores depth and will follow redirects until the final destination (a no response, 2XX, 4XX or 5XX etc.).

C). Start the crawl

Now hit the ‘Start’ button let the SEO Spider crawl the site, reach 100%, and come to a stop.

D). Click on ‘Reports’ & ‘Redirect Chains’

This report does not just include URLs which have redirect chains, it includes every URL in the original upload and the response in a single export. If a URL has multiple redirects in a chain, this export will map out each hop along the way, redirect 1, to redirect 2, to redirect 3, and all the responses along the way until the final target. It will also show how many hops there are (remember 5+ Google might give up and treat as a 404) and identify any pesky redirect loops.

This report provides a comprehensive method to audit all redirects in a site migration in a nice, easy, single export.

Effective Domain Migration To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

While there are a lot of steps in this process and many intricate details to pay attention to, we at IBIS can defiantly help you out with this preparation and a clearly outlined plan. Sometimes it can be possible to identify unexpected behavior or disparities before they have a notable impact on traffic and visitors. So for that expert services of professional can guide you well. Following the steps to update analytic packages and audit redirects will help identify opportunities to make changes before they become problems.

If you have any questions, please contact us.