Ask Moz. Or iAcquire. Apparently, 2013 is the year of rebranding marketing agencies, and I am happy to announce that we are part of that list, too: Last week, 352 Media Group became 352.
They spent 2 ½ months building our new website and our new brand were the hardest I've ever worked in my life. They were also the most rewarding, and despite my incessant cursing, not trade it for anything. Why? Because look at the ancient site.
Versus the new website
Holy wow .
Each time you launch a site, everyone sees the design change , but rarely do you see the behind the scenes - and I'm not just talking about design iterations About but probably had 13 of them - work that goes into a new website . Assuming that got you redid your keyword and market research .
That's a lot of redirects
Fortunately , the domain has not changed, but the structure of the URL has changed the style directory . I used the Ruth Burr template for domain migrations , but I made some adjustments.
First, pull each unique URL that is in the root domain . I Used Both Screaming Frog and our database to make sure nothing was missing. Falling in Excel and start analyzing what is happening on the new site .
We work in agile web development , I realize working short sprints (in our case, two weeks at a time) at the end we would be able to launch full functionally parts of our website . Think of it like building a house of one room at full time .
Because of this bad boy had to be before mid - july plans to launch quickly with the Slim version of our site map : A lot of pages would not exist yet , but soon . That meant a lot of pages on our existing site is not going to move yet, but they would.
Thus, in addition to the 301s and 404s , I added a section of what was to be in Phase II for our support departments ' lives a little easier . I think it worked .
Analytics
I admit it: I do not remember to install the Google Analytics code on our new site up to 24 hours before the launch site . * Facepalm * .
Seriously : Do not forget about him, but also , do not settle for the basic version . There is much more you can do with a little customization , and there are more acerca think what makes sense for you. For us , there were three :
Enhanced page to see where people are clicking.
Scroll Down to see how people were now on our pages.
Event Tracking to see how people interacted with our video.
Event tracing to see how often people click on our contact information .
sitemaps
If your URLs are changing, so will your sitemaps. Do not forget to create a new XML sitemap and resubmit GWT me to speed up the indexing of your new site. We focus multiple XML sitemap, one of our main one for our blog.
Holy crap : We are number 1 in Our Name
That's the nightmare of every professional SEO ' s . That is living right now. We decided to change our name in January. In May , we had a party at our old site and started from scratch . Around June , finally someone said " Hey , I wonder where we will be matched with our new brand name . "
Logically , it makes sense . 352 is the area code of Gainesville , Florida , our home and our name . Sure, we've been known simply as 352 (from 3:00 to 5:02 ) for 15 + years by both customers and internally , so that the search engines were not That connection .
Why would they? All our links are 352 Media Group brand , and all of our content was 352 Media Group. Also there is almost social community makes Moz blog , linking and renaming Twitter Google That would be clued in sooner .
While eating our new brand with a brand new word alignment - Pro tip: Start your new keyword research very early - I could not care less acerca our anchor text exact match to appear until we are No. 1 for " 352 " . How do you do ? Pull your backlink using your favorite tool , go down and find all links with its brand name , and start contact .
Trust me : Start this process early if you are changing your name, and on the road before it officially starts . To start, reach the people you know can queue up your change to go live in their exact release date , for example , the biography of the author of any place that you are a contributor . Do not forget to make sure your internal team doing much changes links on personal websites .
I'm in the middle of this now, and never really makes Realize the number of links you have until you 're looking at 4 - long Excel spreadsheet digits.
Maintaining the momentum of the release announcement
Last year, I went skydiving. There is a moment acerca 30 seconds in free fall, where he convinces himself that the session should be open by now, and this would be it. Then the strip line is fired vertically , and feels the biggest wave of relief Because You are , in fact, will succeed.
At 3:52 p.m. - see what he did there ? - On July 16, 2013 , I got the very tip of the launch of our site.
And while the honeymoon lasted acerca brand new only 24 hours until my inbox was filled with comments , I needed that kick to keep the momentum our team had with post -launch iterations.
There will be things that will not happen. There will be mistakes that you missed . There will be internal voting makes more sense . Comments will definitelybe users did not even know existed . You need an organized way to keep track of it all.
My agency uses TFS and work through a backlog of items based on customer priority and effort to complete the task . This helps us better see the interesting things we want to do and where is the basis of priority .
Not the most intuitive, and we are looking for a little something a little easier to use, but it works pretty well for now.
If you go through a new site launch, I'm sorry, man. It is long. It's a pain in the ass. Sometimes, you just want to quit. It's very hard not to get discouraged, but the end result will be worth it.
Do not be disappointed if you forget something. So much to do, and we missed a few "Well, duh" after launch things, but okay. That's the beauty of iterations constant.
Source :- http://searchenginewatch.com