Visibility

We’ve all heard the stories: re-launching a site and dropping dramatically in search engine results. Drops can last for weeks, and can be quite dramatic. Making sure this doesn’t happen is on the top of many company’s lists of concerns, especially if website changes are not just cosmetic, but involve changing platforms – for instance, adopting a new CMS. Basics such as 301 redirects will prevent most drops related to poor baseline content migration practices. But technical tactics are only part of an effective strategy for keeping a new website from losing rankings. The key to not dropping in rankings is a solid content migration strategy. 

Simply migrating all your content over and calling it a day misses the big picture. So, too, does creating mostly new content, doing 301 redirects and considering the problem solved. For one thing, no matter how well optimized the content on your site is, some pages are doing more for your rankings than others. It’s essential to identify those pages that are making the most difference to your rankings, and ensuring that they’re migrated over. Second, although losing rankings is bad, so too is losing your audience’s loyalty by creating confusion when reliable bookmarked pages are gone, or have entirely new content, so you need to consider the user in any content migration strategy, or you’ll lose traffic. Finally, a site relaunch is usually part of an overall rebranding, a new marketing strategy, or even a shift to a new product line. It presents an ideal opportunity to take a strategic look at your content, and decide what’s performing, what’s not, and what supports your current business goals.

An effective content migration strategy that preserves search rankings takes into account the goals for your website, and maps out the content to migrate over accordingly. Such a strategy is also grounded in metrics. Migrating over poorly-performing content, whether from an SEO standpoint or a conversion standpoint, makes no sense. Measuring the performance of content assets is the first step to defining a great content migration strategy, one that makes sure you not only stay high in the rankings, but also stay there with search terms and content that make sense for your business.

Fortunately, once metrics are in place, it’s easy to identify the four types of content that you need to mark for migration:

1.    Content That Ranks Well for Your Top Keywords-OK, so this is a no-brainer on the surface, since you would of course keep content that’s ranking #1 for your most important keywords. But the key here is to verify that the keywords a page ranks on, are, in fact, essential to driving quality traffic, raising awareness, or creating PR opportunities. Make sure you’ve defined importance as it relates to your keywords in a way that connects them to real results. A long-tail keyword often searched on by customers ready to buy, a frequently-searched short-tail term that creates high visibility and PR opportunities—these are keywords that can certainly be classified as “important.” When you evaluate the content you’d like to migrate, re-evaluate your organic keywords to be sure they’re actually all top-priority terms.
2.    Content That Accounts for More Than 10% of Your Overall Traffic-Clearly, this is content that your visitors are reading. Again, though, one caveat remains: make sure it’s content that’s current and drives business results before deciding what to do with it. If it’s outdated, update it before migrating.
3.    Content That’s Attracting Great Backlinks-You may have some content on your site that isn’t attracting a lot of traffic, or garnering a lot of conversions. You may think to ditch this content, but before deciding that, analyze the links to the page. If links from high quality sites point to that page, migrate the page. Again, if content needs updating, do so, but don’t eliminate a page with good backlinks.
4.    High-Converting Pages-Some pages get little traffic, have few backlinks, and may seem like a backwater of your site. Yet, they could be attracting a loyal and important group of niche customers, and eliminating this type of page, even though it gets little traffic, could alienate some of your most vocal customers. Such is often the case with pages for consumer products that have a cult following, topics within an online community that have a small but strong group of advocates, or unique enterprise products. Look at the conversion rate for an “unpopular” page and compare it to average conversion rates for your site. If it’s higher than average, than you may have a strong niche product—or something about the page’s creative is resonating strongly with your audience. Keep the page. And identify what it is about the page that’s leading to high conversions.