Posted by EricaMcGillivray

Considering coming to MozCon, July 13-15 in Seattle this year? Maybe you’re on the fence because you’re not sure what’s going on, and most importantly, what our amazing speakers are talking about? I hear you, MozCon fans! While the agenda is still being finalized, we wanted to give you a sneak preview.

If you’re like “oh, shit, I forgot to buy my MozCon ticket!,” do so now:

Buy your ticket!

We’re still finalizing a couple more speakers and topics, and of course, community speakers submissions are fast approaching. Keep your eye out here on April 2nd for more info!

---

Adam Singer Analytics Advocate at Google @AdamSinger Adam Singer is Analytics Advocate at Google, startup adviser, investor, and blogger. He previously was director for a global consulting team and has provided digital strategy for brands in a variety of industries including marketing, technology, healthcare, and more. Topic: Digital Analytics: People, Process, Platform In a data-driven world, Adam will pull you back to think again about your analytics, best practices, and how you report.
Cindy Krum Founder and CEO at MobileMoxie LLC. Twitter: @Suzzicks Cindy Krum is the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events. Topic: Become a Mobile SEO Superhero With Google’s algorithm mobile change, Cindy will walk you through the changes, what they mean for your site and its rankings, and what you should be focusing on going forward.
Courtney Seiter Head of Content Marketing at Buffer Twitter: @courtneyseiter Courtney Seiter examines social media and workplace culture at Buffer, and her writing has been published at TIME, Fast Company, Lifehacker, Inc., and more. She lives in Nashville, where she is a founder of Girls to the Moon, a leadership camp for girls. Topic: The Psychology of Social Media Courtney dives into the science of why people post, share, and build relationships on social media and how to create an even more irresistible social media experience for your audience.
Dana DiTomaso Partner at Kick Point Inc Twitter: @danaditomaso Whether at a conference, on the radio, or in a meeting, Dana DiTomaso likes to impart wisdom to help you turn a lot of marketing bullshit into real strategies to grow your business. Dana is also a fan of the random fact. Kick Point often celebrates “Watershed Wednesday” because of her diverse work and education background. In her spare time, Dana drinks tea and yells at the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Topic: How to Make Your Marketing Match Your Reality Too often, the tone and promises of marketing don’t match those of the business itself. Dana will help you bring your brand identity together, both in-store and online.
David Mihm Director of Local Search Strategy at Moz Twitter: @davidmihm David Mihm has created and promoted search-friendly websites for clients of all sizes since the early 2000’s. David co-founded GetListed.org, which he sold to Moz in November 2012. He now serves as Moz’s Director of Local Search Strategy. Topic: Astoundingly Useful Applications of Facebook Search for Marketers Facebook has long neglected its potential as a local search giant, and as a result, its Graph Search product is an afterthought for too many marketers. David showcases Graph-powered insights for small-business marketers—with utility well beyond Facebook.
Joanna Wiebe Creator at Copy Hackers Twitter: @copyhackers The original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe is the cofounder of Snap and Copy Hackers, where startups learn to convert like mofos. She is a natural-born thief who steals messages from the mouths of customers and turns their words into higher-converting copy. Topic: Sinners Are Winners: How Messaging Your Prospect’s Darkest Desires Can Boost Engagement Playing it too safe? Joanna will show you how to tap into your prospects’ secret wishes in your copy—and use bold messages your competitors wouldn’t dare use.
Kristina Halvorson Founder at Brain Traffic Twitter: @halvorson Kristina Halvorson is widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy. She is the founder of Brain Traffic, the coauthor of Content Strategy for the Web, and the founder of the Confab content strategy conferences. Topic: How To Do Content Strategy (Probably) Put 10 people in a room and ask them to define “content strategy,” and you’ll likely get 10 different answers. Kristina will share her own tried-and-true approach!
Lexi Mills Head of Digital at Dynamo PR Twitter: @leximills Lexi Mills is a PR SEO specialist, with over eight years experience working with both small firms and big brands. She has designed and implemented integrated PR, SEO, content, and social campaigns in the UK, Europe, and USA for B2B and B2C clients. Topic: Marketing Innovations: Creative PR, Content, and SEO Strategies Lexi shows you how to apply strategies used in emerging markets to grow the success of your PR, SEO, and content work from bathrooms to rock bands.
Marshall Simmonds Founder and CEO at Define Media Group, Inc. Twitter: @mdsimmonds Marshall Simmonds is the Founder of Define Media Group, the enterprise audience development company specializing in strategic search and social marketing. Define works with many of the most influential brands and networks in the world. Topic: Dark Search and Social—Run Rabbit Run! With data from 112 publishers with 164+ billion page views, Marshall will dive into the challenges of tracking social and search campaigns. He’ll focus on history’s lessons and what’s happening with direct and mobile traffic in an app-heavy world.
Marta Turek Senior Digital Marketing Programs Manager at ROI·DNA Twitter: @MTurek Marta holds seven years of experience in digital advertising, specializing in lead generation, and paid search marketing. Developing digital strategies and telling stories through data is what rocks her boat. Topic: Too Busy to Do Good Work Don’t let your work suffer from being busy. Instead, let Marta show you the tactics to clean up your PPC processes to finally get more strategic.
Matthew Brown Head of Special Projects at Moz Twitter: @MatthewJBrown Matthew runs Special Projects at Moz. This has been going on for two years, and we’re still not totally sure what that means. Topic: An SEO’s Guide to the Insane World of Content Find yourself arguing whether or not SEO is just great content? Matthew will talk through a strategic and tactical journey of content strategy from an SEO’s viewpoint and leave you with new tools and tactics.
Mig Reyes Designer at Basecamp Twitter: @migreyes Mig Reyes is a traditionally trained graphic designer who escaped advertising agency life, cut his teeth at the T-shirt powerhouse known as Threadless, and now helps lead branding, marketing and even a bit of product work at Basecamp. Topic title TBD, but Mig will be focusing on putting your creative energies into your marketing.
Pete Meyers Marketing Scientist at Moz Twitter: @dr_pete Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Moz, where he works on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past three years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project, and he curates the Google Algorithm History. Topic: Surviving Google: SEO in 2020 Organic results are disappearing, replaced by Knowledge Graph, direct answers, new ad hybrids, and more. How can SEOs be ready for Google in five years?
Purna Virji Founder and CEO of  Purview Marketing Twitter:  @purnavirji Purna is the founder and CEO of Purview Marketing, a boutique consulting firm helping companies of all sizes grow via search and content marketing. Purna is an avid traveler and speaks six languages (and can swear in 17!). Topic: How to Better Sell SEO to the C-Suite Whether you need more resources, trust, or buy-in, Purna will share practical tips for focusing on Profit & Loss and better communicating SEO planning, forecasting, and strategizing.
Rand Fishkin Founder at Moz Twitter: @randfish Husband of Geraldine. Founder of Moz. Presenter of Whiteboard Friday. Writer of blog posts. Sender of tweets. Topic: Onsite SEO in 2015: An Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Marketer SEO has come full circle as on-page SEO has returned to the forefront. Rand will share how and why on-site SEO is so important and show off uncommon tactics with powerful potential.
Richard Millington Founder at FeverBee Twitter: @RichMillington Richard is the Founder of FeverBee, a community consultancy, and the author of Buzzing Communities. Topic: Reaching Critical Mass: 150 Active Members Imagine you could create and rejuvenate a successful community whenever you like? Richard Millington will take you through a step by step action plan to reach critical mass.
Wil Reynolds Director of Strategy at Seer Interactive Twitter: @wilreynolds Wil Reynolds founded Seer with a focus on doing great things for its clients, team, and the community. His passion for driving and analyzing the impact that a site’s traffic has on the company’s bottom line has shaped SEO and digital marketing industries. Wil also actively supports the Covenant House. Topic: The Time to Do the Web Right Is Incredibly Short In “web time,” competitive advantage can be lost in an instant, speed matters. Wil shares how keep on the pulse of competitor agility and how to get things done to stay ahead of them.

---

In addition to fabulous days full of great content from extraordinary minds, we’re also cooking up three nights of great fun, networking, and MozCon love. Monday night, our partners will be hosting a pub crawl in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood with special prizes for those who hit every spot. Tuesday night, we’re doing a networking event, featuring you, the community, and your passions besides marketing. Details to come as they’re finalized! And finally, Wednesday night, we’ll say ‘see you next year’ with our traditional party at the Garage: karaoke, bowling, pool, and chilling with friends.

Questions about MozCon? I’m happy to answer them in the comments.

See you at MozCon, friends!

Buy your ticket!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Posted by Jeffalytics

We analyze the performance of our content every day. Sometimes it’s subconscious, like when we check the number of tweets we get from a new blog post. Other times, we make more conscious efforts, like reviewing performance metrics in Google Analytics. 

This feedback—both formal and anecdotal—informs what we do next. It influences future blog posts and validates our strategies. Reviewing content performance on a regular basis has been key to the growth of many online publishers. We should all be taking note of these successes as we build our own content marketing efforts. 

Paying attention to which of your content efforts are working well is the cornerstone to data-driven marketing. The companies that make these investments can produce tremendous results. For an in-depth analysis on the importance of being data driven, here are two recent articles that inspired me:

• How A Real Estate Blog Went From 2,000 To 18,000,000 Visits Per Month In Two Years
• Quantifying the Clickbait and Linkbait in BuzzFeed Article Titles

These articles show how taking data-driven approach to producing content can produce great results. Exponential traffic and revenue in these cases. 

I don’t know about you, but exponential traffic sounds pretty great to me! 

But we will never get there without taking a methodical and data-driven approach to our efforts. We will never get there if we are only counting page views. 

It’s time to take things to the next level!

Using Google Analytics Content Groupings and Dimensions to inform our content strategy

For many of us, Google Analytics is the tool of choice for analyzing website performance. It’s free, easy to use, and extremely powerful. But because of the free and easy nature, most users do not explore the more advanced features of the product. 

One of the more advanced features that you have at your disposal is content grouping. Content grouping allows you to gather your content into common themes to create a more meaningful analysis of your data. 

For example, you can group your blog posts by the type of content that they represent. This grouping is helpful if you cover many topics on your website or sell many products. 

This is something that I have been doing for years on my own site. It helps me understand which topics resonate the most with readers. It also helps understand which topics drive organic search visitors. 

In the past, I would have to do this in a manual fashion. It involved exporting data into Excel and grouping content by the presence of certain words in the page URL. This was an ugly manual process that I would not wish on anyone. 

With content grouping in Google Analytics, we can get a view of this data with little effort involved. Here is a screenshot of traffic performance by content groups, based on common topics that I cover on my blog.

This simple screenshot is quite revealing. It shows which topics resonate the most, as well as content deficiencies. And these reports get even more valuable once you start to segment your data. More on this shortly.

Configuring content groupings in Google Analytics

Before we can get into deep analysis of our content, it makes sense for us to talk about how we can configure this report in Google Analytics. 

There are three ways to set up this feature. The easiest way to do it is by creating rules to define your groups. Rules work like advanced segments in Google Analytics. Set the criteria for your groupings and Google Analytics will do the rest of the work. 

Note that these rules work only on the page URL, page title or screen name (for apps). 

Here is an example of how to configure groupings matching words found in your page URLs. 

The definitions work as a waterfall. If a page url/title fits in your first definition, we exclude it from each future definition. For this reason, we want to be specific with our first rules and then leave the more general and “catch all” rules for the end. 

Notice how I used a regular expression to define what makes up a PPC Page. The pipe (|) symbol serving as an “or” statement in the expression. You can also use the “or” statement on the right, but this can get unwieldy fast. 

For long regular expressions, use the extraction method for content grouping. This works wonders for complex regular expressions with several criteria to classify posts.

Using code to define your content groupings

The above options use the data that you already send to Google Analytics with each page view (page URL and page title). While this works well if we have search friendly URLs and titles, it is also limiting in our ability to perform analysis. 

If you would like to analyze beyond words in your content, then you will need to use code to push this data into Google Analytics. 

While this sounds daunting, it is not too bad. I was able to get this code working in less than 30 minutes to provide a proof of concept. 

What are some groupings that you might want to use for measuring content performance? 

How about the length of your content? Many of us have seen studies on the importance of the length of our content. Is it worthwhile to write longer articles, or is that just a “best practice” that does not apply to your site? 

Let’s measure it! 

How about the date that you published your content? If you put the date of your post in the URL, you can use rules to build these content groupings. I don’t include the publishing year in my URL, so I would need code to get this done. 

Here is how I configured Google Analytics to track word counts and publishing year of articles. 

First, you set a new definition for your content grouping in the admin section. I selected indexes 4 & 5 to avoid any potential conflicts.

As soon as you have defined your grouping, Google will give you code snippets to use for tracking in Google Analytics. There is code for Classic and Universal Analytics. 

I use Google Tag Manager on my website, so I pushed data into the system using the data layer functionality.

My code looked like this for tracking word count, word count range and year published:

 

We trigger this code on every page of my website using native functions from WordPress. If you are using Google Tag Manager and WordPress, I would be more than happy to provide you with the code that I used to build this data layer. 

Next, I created a macro in Tag Manager to recognize these variables. I gave a default value of 0-200—in the event that a word count is unavailable from WordPress, it will list 0-200 words. Then in my Universal Analytics tag, I set content groups in the tag configuration options. My indexes correspond to the groups we set in the Google Analytics interface. The words in the {{}} brackets represent the macros we defined above. After publishing, every page load will send content grouping data into Google Analytics. Pretty awesome! 

Once your definitions are in place, you will see your groups listed in the admin section of Google Analytics. You can define up to 5 unique content groups per view. For even more on the topic of setting up content groupings, here is an awesome article by Michael King on content groupings for the user journey.

Viewing this data in Google Analytics

Once your definitions are in place, Google Analytics will start to push this data into your account. Note that these definitions do not work retroactively—only on data moving forward. Unfortunately that means that you will need to wait a few days for meaningful analysis of this data. 

But when the data starts to come in, it’s beautiful! 

Let’s start with the content grouping definitions for post topic type. I have had these in place for a while, so this data is already providing meaningful insights. Here is what we start to see when looking at website visits by topic type. 

While WordPress pages drive the most traffic, they have relatively low value per page view. This does not count any affiliate revenue, but it is indicative of the traffic brought in by this topic. High traffic volume/low value. 

This high traffic volume, low page value metric helps me draw two conclusions:

1. I need a better call to action and offer for WordPress content. I can’t write about this topic without having an action for visitors to take. I may need to invest in some sort of premium content for this topic.
2. As I plan my content strategy, it may not make a lot of sense to focus on WordPress if I cannot find a way to get more value out of the visits. It is clear that Google Analytics content is more valuable for me.

By grouping my content into themes, I now have a fresh perspective on the effectiveness of my content. Instead of choosing the topic on my mind on any given day, I may benefit by only writing about Google Analytics. 

This level of insight is not possible without content grouping. Content grouping is incredible when you have this data tied into the goals you have already set up with Google Analytics.

Checking in on our code-driven content groupings

As you can see, content grouping provides excellent insights into your content strategy performance. If you have thousands of articles on your website, content groupings will help you sift through the noise and go right to the signal. 

You can gain insight into other aspects of your content strategy through this same method. Let’s check in on the groupings that we set up through code earlier in this article. Please note that this is a proof of concept with only a small amount of data to support the groupings. Over time, your picture will start to become more valuable as you see conversions rolling into your account. 

How many page views are we getting for the content we produced over the past 4 years? This is easy to view with our content groupings. This is a traffic pattern that I had assumed in my mind (I wrote much more in 2013 than 2014). Now, I have the numbers to prove it. 

What about by word count? 

Not surprising, lower word count pages (like the homepage) are getting the most traffic.

This data will get even more interesting over time.

Applying segmentation to our content groupings

We have grouped our content by length of the article and when it was published. Now we can measure how these factors impact our organic search traffic. We can do this a few ways. My preferred method is to look at the medium of organic search and then use a secondary dimension of content group. 

Again, we see that our shorter articles are driving the most search traffic. This is for two reasons. 1) The default content range is 0-200, so this includes articles with no word count defined by WordPress. 2) It includes our home page, which often ranks for branded search results. 

If granular keyword data were still available in Google Analytics, we would be able to segment brand/non brand traffic. But alas. 

We can do this same analysis by year as well.

Notice that the current year is receiving the most organic traffic. I can only assume that this is again due to branded traffic. 

Content grouping makes everything better!

Where else does content grouping make Google Analytics data shine?

Many of your favorite Google Analytics reports get better with content groupings. The behavior flow report comes to life with your content groupings.

 

We no longer need to look at this report with several branches of data hidden from view. Now you can see how people visit your site based on your pre-defined content groupings.

Custom Reports 

You can also use custom reports to combine several fields together. For example, try to view organic visits by the year you wrote the content and the topics into a single report. 

You can also start to add your conversion data in place and understand the value of the content that you have produced over the years. 

Several years ago I wrote a post about investing in SEO for YouMoz. The basic premise is that SEO investment does not fit into normal budget constraints. For example, you may budget for all your SEO efforts in 2015, but there is a revenue impact of these efforts for years to come. 

A custom report by post year can help you better understand the continued return on your SEO investment over the years.

What other content groupings make sense to explore?

Once we start grouping our content for analysis, many possibilities become available. Here are a few more ideas for what we can measure for content groupings:

• Grouping by social share counts. How do share counts affect traffic and conversions? I have done a proof of concept with social shares in the past and the data is revealing.
• Grouping by external links using the Mozscape API. Push this into your data layer and you can start to analyze how links may be impacting your content performance.
• Grouping by any on page metadata for your post. We included word count here, but we can also include title length, keyword usage, etc.
• Grouping by targeted keyword. Use a custom field from WordPress (or your CMS) to push this into your data layer for content grouping.
• More specific date based grouping. Instead of grouping by year, group by month or week to see how strategies take hold more quickly.
• Grouping by author of content. Which authors drive the most traffic and revenue?
• Grouping by department of company. Are certain departments producing better content? 

You can measure pretty much anything with content grouping. The only real limitation being your imagination AND Google’s current limit of 5 content groups in each view. You can even get around that by using multiple views if you want.

What type of questions can we answer with content groupings?

With content groupings in place, we can answer more business questions than standard content reports. Here are a few business questions I can start to answer with the content groupings we have already discussed.

• Is our content marketing hitting the mark?
• Are we making progress toward our goals with our recent content marketing?
• Did our SEO investment mature like we thought it would?
• Has our new focus on converting visitors affected overall revenue significantly?

Through content grouping, we can find answers within our pre-defined points of analysis. We no longer have to look at individual posts and pages to find answers. 

We provide the taxonomy that works for our business. Then we use this taxonomy to show how visitors reached our website through acquisition reports. We see how they performed on the site through conversion reports. 

Now Google Analytics starts to think a lot more like our business. It uses our own words to describe content within a structure we define. Plus, we have the tremendous processing power of Google Analytics to handle our queries.

Bonus: Use custom dimensions to make these reports even more useful

If you were paying close attention to the data layer variables I showed earlier in the post, you will see a third variable. This third variable is the exact word count for each page. This variable was added to the data layer as I was starting to do analysis on the content groupings. I found that some analysis may become easier if I have the exact word count available in Google Analytics. 

In Google Tag Manager, I set a custom dimension of Word Count using my third data layer variable. Now, I can view post topic by word count of the article in Google Analytics. 

Useful? Definitely! There are many times when you need an exact number available to conduct analysis. 

You can add up to 20 custom dimensions per web property in Google Analytics. It only works with the Universal Analytics version.

What type of content analysis are you going to do now?

Groupings are like a cheat-code for content marketers to take their analysis to the next level. You get to push your own data into Google Analytics. You get to use your own definitions within the tool. 

There are really no limits to what you can measure. What is it going to be? I would love to hear your ideas in the comments section.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Posted by Casey_Meraz Let’s face it: Local link building is hard. Even if you have the budget and resources needed to earn or build links it will take time. Having a strong link profile is essential to your website’s success in search engines.  … Continue reading →

Posted by Dr-Pete

People often ask me if they should change domain names, and I always shudder just a little. Changing domains is a huge, risky undertaking, and too many people rush into it seeing only the imaginary upside. The success of the change also depends wildly on the details, and it’s not the kind of question anyone should be asking casually on social media.

Recently, I decided that it was time to find a new permanent home for my personal and professional blogs, which had gradually spread out over 5 domains. I also felt my main domain was no longer relevant to my current situation, and it was time for a change. So, ultimately I ended up with a scenario that looked like this:

The top three sites were active, with UserEffect.com being my former consulting site and blog (and relatively well-trafficked). The bottom two sites were both inactive and were both essentially gag sites. My one-pager, AreYouARealDoctor.com, did previously rank well for “are you a real doctor”, so I wanted to try to recapture that.

I started migrating the 5 sites in mid-January, and I’ve been tracking the results. I thought it would be useful to see how this kind of change plays out, in all of the gory details. As it turns out, nothing is ever quite “textbook” when it comes to technical SEO.

Why Change Domains at All?

The rationale for picking a new domain could fill a month’s worth of posts, but I want to make one critical point – changing domains should be about your business goals first, and SEO second. I did not change domains to try to rank better for “Dr. Pete” – that’s a crap shoot at best. I changed domains because my old consulting brand (“User Effect”) no longer represented the kind of work I do and I’m much more known by my personal brand.

That business case was strong enough that I was willing to accept some losses. We went through a similar transition here from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com. That was a difficult transition that cost us some SEO ground, especially short-term, but our core rationale was grounded in the business and where it’s headed. Don’t let an SEO pipe dream lead you into a risky decision.

Why did I pick a .co domain? I did it for the usual reason – the .com was taken. For a project of this type, where revenue wasn’t on the line, I didn’t have any particular concerns about .co. The evidence on how top-level domains (TLDs) impact ranking is tough to tease apart (so many other factors correlate with .com’s), and Google’s attitude tends to change over time, especially if new TLDs are abused. Anecdotally, though, I’ve seen plenty of .co’s rank, and I wasn’t concerned.

Step 1 – The Boring Stuff

It is absolutely shocking how many people build a new site, slap up some 301s, pull the switch, and hope for the best. It’s less shocking how many of those people end up in Q&A a week later, desperate and bleeding money.

Planning is hard work, and it’s boring – get over it.

You need to be intimately familiar with every page on your existing site(s), and, ideally, you should make a list. Not only do you have to plan for what will happen to each of these pages, but you’ll need that list to make sure everything works smoothly later.

In my case, I decided it might be time to do some housekeeping – the User Effect blog had hundreds of posts, many outdated and quite a few just not very good. So, I started with the easy data – recent traffic. I’m sure you’ve seen this Google Analytics report (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages):

Since I wanted to focus on recent activity, and none of the sites had much new content, I restricted myself to a 3-month window (Q4 of 2014). Of course, I looked much deeper than the top 10, but the principle was simple – I wanted to make sure the data matched my intuition and that I wasn’t cutting off anything important. This helped me prioritize the list.

Of course, from an SEO standpoint, I also didn’t want to lose content that had limited traffic but solid inbound links. So, I checked my “Top Pages” report in Open Site Explorer:

Since the bulk of my main site was a blog, the top trafficked and top linked-to pages fortunately correlated pretty well. Again, this is only a way to prioritize. If you’re dealing with sites with thousands of pages, you need to work methodically through the site architecture.

I’m going to say something that makes some SEOs itchy – it’s ok not to move some pages to the new site. It’s even ok to let some pages 404. In Q4, UserEffect.com had traffic to 237 URLs. The top 10 pages accounted for 91.9% of that traffic. I strongly believe that moving domains is a good time to refocus a site and concentrate your visitors and link equity on your best content. More is not better in 2015.

Letting go of some pages also means that you’re not 301-redirecting a massive number of old URLs to a new home-page. This can look like a low-quality attempt to consolidate link-equity, and at large scale it can raise red flags with Google. Content worth keeping should exist on the new site, and your 301s should have well-matched targets.

In one case, I had a blog post that had a decent trickle of traffic due to ranking for “50,000 push-ups,” but the post itself was weak and the bounce rate was very high:

The post was basically just a placeholder announcing that I’d be attempting this challenge, but I never recapped anything after finishing it. So, in this case, I rewrote the post.

Of course, this process was repeated across the 3 active sites. The 2 inactive sites only constituted a handful of total pages. In the case of AreYouARealDoctor.com, I decided to turn the previous one-pager into a new page on the new site. That way, I had a very well-matched target for the 301-redirect, instead of simply mapping the old site to my new home-page.

I’m trying to prove a point – this is the amount of work I did for a handful of sites that were mostly inactive and producing no current business value. I don’t need consulting gigs and these sites produce no direct revenue, and yet I still considered this process worth the effort.

Step 2 – The Big Day

Eventually, you’re going to have to make the move, and in most cases, I prefer ripping off the bandage. Of course, doing something all at once doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful.

The biggest problem I see with domain switches (even if they’re 1-to-1) is that people rely on data that can take weeks to evaluate, like rankings and traffic, or directly checking Google’s index. By then, a lot of damage is already done. Here are some ways to find out quickly if you’ve got problems…

(1) Manually Check Pages

Remember that list you were supposed to make? It’s time to check it, or at least spot-check it. Someone needs to physically go to a browser and make sure that each major section of the site and each important individual page is resolving properly. It doesn’t matter how confident your IT department/guy/gal is – things go wrong.

(2) Manually Check Headers

Just because a page resolves, it doesn’t mean that your 301-redirects are working properly, or that you’re not firing some kind of 17-step redirect chain. Check your headers. There are tons of free tools, but lately I’m fond of URI Valet. Guess what – I screwed up my primary 301-redirects. One of my registrar transfers wasn’t working, so I had to have a setting changed by customer service, and I inadvertently ended up with 302s (Pro tip: Don’t change registrars and domains in one step):

Don’t think that because you’re an “expert”, your plan is foolproof. Mistakes happen, and because I caught this one I was able to correct it fairly quickly.

(3) Submit Your New Site

You don’t need to submit your site to Google in 2015, but now that Google Webmaster Tools allows it, why not do it? The primary argument I hear is “well, it’s not necessary.” True, but direct submission has one advantage – it’s fast.

To be precise, Google Webmaster Tools separates the process into “Fetch” and “Submit to index” (you’ll find this under “Crawl” > “Fetch as Google”). Fetching will quickly tell you if Google can resolve a URL and retrieve the page contents, which alone is pretty useful. Once a page is fetched, you can submit it, and you should see something like this:

This isn’t really about getting indexed – it’s about getting nearly instantaneous feedback. If Google has any major problems with crawling your site, you’ll know quickly, at least at the macro level.

(4) Submit New XML Sitemaps

Finally, submit a new set of XML sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools, and preferably tiered sitemaps. While it’s a few years old now, Rob Ousbey has a great post on the subject of XML sitemap structure. The basic idea is that, if you divide your sitemap into logical sections, it’s going to be much easier to diagnosis what kinds of pages Google is indexing and where you’re running into trouble.

A couple of pro tips on sitemaps – first, keep your old sitemaps active temporarily. This is counterintuitive to some people, but unless Google can crawl your old URLs, they won’t see and process the 301-redirects and other signals. Let the old accounts stay open for a couple of months, and don’t cut off access to the domains you’re moving.

Second (I learned this one the hard way), make sure that your Google Webmaster Tools site verification still works. If you use file uploads or meta tags and don’t move those files/tags to the new site, GWT verification will fail and you won’t have access to your old accounts. I’d recommend using a more domain-independent solution, like verifying with Google Analytics. If you lose verification, don’t panic – your data won’t be instantly lost.

Step 3 – The Waiting Game

Once you’ve made the switch, the waiting begins, and this is where many people start to panic. Even executed perfectly, it can take Google weeks or even months to process all of your 301-redirects and reevaluate a new domain’s capacity to rank. You have to expect short term fluctuations in ranking and traffic.

During this period, you’ll want to watch a few things – your traffic, your rankings, your indexed pages (via GWT and the site: operator), and your errors (such as unexpected 404s). Traffic will recover the fastest, since direct traffic is immediately carried through redirects, but ranking and indexation will lag, and errors may take time to appear.

(1) Monitor Traffic

I’m hoping you know how to check your traffic, but actually trying to determine what your new levels should be and comparing any two days can be easier said than done. If you launch on a Friday, and then Saturday your traffic goes down on the new site, that’s hardly cause for panic – your traffic probably always goes down on Saturday.

In this case, I redirected the individual sites over about a week, but I’m going to focus on UserEffect.com, as that was the major traffic generator. That site was redirected, in full on January 21st, and the Google Analytics data for January for the old site looked like this:

So far, so good – traffic bottomed out almost immediately. Of course, losing traffic is easy – the real question is what’s going on with the new domain. Here’s the graph for January for DrPete.co:

This one’s a bit trickier – the first spike, on January 16th, is when I redirected the first domain. The second spike, on January 22nd, is when I redirected UserEffect.com. Both spikes are meaningless – I announced these re-launches on social media and got a short-term traffic burst. What we really want to know is where traffic is leveling out.

Of course, there isn’t a lot of history here, but a typical day for UserEffect.com in January was about 1,000 pageviews. The traffic to DrPete.co after it leveled out was about half that (500 pageviews). It’s not a complete crisis, but we’re definitely looking at a short-term loss.

Obviously, I’m simplifying the process here – for a large, ecommerce site you’d want to track a wide range of metrics, including conversion metrics. Hopefully, though, this illustrates the core approach. So, what am I missing out on? In this day of [not provided], tracking down a loss can be tricky. Let’s look for clues in our other three areas…

(2) Monitor Indexation

You can get a broad sense of your indexed pages from Google Webmaster Tools, but this data often lags real-time and isn’t very granular. Despite its shortcomings, I still prefer the site: operator. Generally, I monitor a domain daily – any one measurement has a lot of noise, but what you’re looking for is the trend over time. Here’s the indexed page count for DrPete.co:

The first set of pages was indexed fairly quickly, and then the second set started being indexed soon after UserEffect.com was redirected. All in all, we’re seeing a fairly steady upward trend, and that’s what we’re hoping to see. The number is also in the ballpark of sanity (compared to the actual page count) and roughly matched GWT data once it started being reported.

So, what happened to UserEffect.com’s index after the switch?

The timeframe here is shorter, since UserEffect.com was redirected last, but we see a gradual decline in indexation, as expected. Note that the index size plateaus around 60 pages – about 1/4 of the original size. This isn’t abnormal – low-traffic and unlinked pages (or those with deep links) are going to take a while to clear out. This is a long-term process. Don’t panic over the absolute numbers – what you want here is a downward trend on the old domain accompanied by a roughly equal upward trend on the new domain.

The fact that UserEffect.com didn’t bottom out is definitely worth monitoring, but this timespan is too short for the plateau to be a major concern. The next step would be to dig into these specific pages and look for a pattern.

(3) Monitor Rankings

The old domain is dropping out of the index, and the new domain is taking its place, but we still don’t know why the new site is taking a traffic hit. It’s time to dig into our core keyword rankings.

Historically, UserEffect.com had ranked well for keywords related to “split test calculator” (near #1) and “usability checklist” (in the top 3). While [not provided] makes keyword-level traffic analysis tricky, we also know that the split-test calculator is one of the top trafficked pages on the site, so let’s dig into that one. Here’s the ranking data from Moz Analytics for “split test calculator”:

The new site took over the #1 position from the old site at first, but then quickly dropped down to the #3/#4 ranking. That may not sound like a lot, but given this general keyword category was one of the site’s top traffic drivers, the CTR drop from #1 to #3/#4 could definitely be causing problems.

When you have a specific keyword you can diagnose, it’s worth taking a look at the live SERP, just to get some context. The day after relaunch, I captured this result for “dr. pete”:

Here, the new domain is ranking, but it’s showing the old title tag. This may not be cause for alarm – weird things often happen in the very short term – but in this case we know that I accidentally set up a 302-redirect. There’s some reason to believe that Google didn’t pass full link equity during that period when 301s weren’t implemented.

Let’s look at a domain where the 301s behaved properly. Before the site was inactive, AreYouARealDoctor.com ranked #1 for “are you a real doctor”. Since there was an inactive period, and I dropped the exact-match domain, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a corresponding ranking drop.

In reality, the new site was ranking #1 for “are you a real doctor” within 2 weeks of 301-redirecting the old domain. The graph is just a horizontal line at #1, so I’m not going to bother you with it, but here’s a current screenshot (incognito):

Early on, I also spot-checked this result, and it wasn’t showing the strange title tag crossover that UserEffect.com pages exhibited. So, it’s very likely that the 302-redirects caused some problems.

Of course, these are just a couple of keywords, but I hope it provides a starting point for you to understand how to methodically approach this problem. There’s no use crying over spilled milk, and I’m not going to fire myself, so let’s move on to checking any other errors that I might have missed.

(4) Check Errors (404s, etc.)

A good first stop for unexpected errors is the “Crawl Errors” report in Google Webmaster Tools (Crawl > Crawl Errors). This is going to take some digging, especially if you’ve deliberately 404’ed some content. Over the couple of weeks after re-launch, I spotted the following problems:

The old site had a “/blog” directory, but the new site put the blog right on the home-page and had no corresponding directory. Doh. Hey, do as I say, not as I do, ok? Obviously, this was a big blunder, as the old blog home-page was well-trafficked.

The other two errors here are smaller but easy to correct. MinimalTalent.com had a “/free” directory that housed downloads (mostly PDFs). I missed it, since my other sites used a different format. Luckily, this was easy to remap.

The last error is a weird looking URL, and there are other similar URLs in the 404 list. This is where site knowledge is critical. I custom-designed a URL shortener for UserEffect.com and, in some cases, people linked to those URLs. Since those URLs didn’t exist in the site architecture, I missed them. This is where digging deep into historical traffic reports and your top-linked pages is critical. In this case, the fix isn’t easy, and I have to decide whether the loss is worth the time.

What About the New EMD?

My goal here wasn’t to rank better for “Dr. Pete,” and finally unseat Dr. Pete’s Marinades, Dr. Pete the Sodastream flavor (yes, it’s hilarious – you can stop sending me your grocery store photos), and 172 dentists. Ok, it mostly wasn’t my goal. Of course, you might be wondering how switching to an EMD worked out.

In the short term, I’m afraid the answer is “not very well.” I didn’t track ranking for “Dr. Pete” and related phrases very often before the switch, but it appears that ranking actually fell in the short-term. Current estimates have me sitting around page 4, even though my combined link profile suggests a much stronger position. Here’s a look at the ranking history for “dr pete” since relaunch (from Moz Analytics):

There was an initial drop, after which the site evened out a bit. This less-than-impressive plateau could be due to the bad 302s during transition. It could be Google evaluating a new EMD and multiple redirects to that EMD. It could be that the prevalence of natural anchor text with “Dr. Pete” pointing to my site suddenly looked unnatural when my domain name switched to DrPete.co. It could just be that this is going to take time to shake out.

If there’s a lesson here (and, admittedly, it’s too soon to tell), it’s that you shouldn’t rush to buy an EMD in 2015 in the wild hope of instantly ranking for that target phrase. There are so many factors involved in ranking for even a moderately competitive term, and your domain is just one small part of the mix.

So, What Did We Learn?

I hope you learned that I should’ve taken my own advice and planned a bit more carefully. I admit that this was a side project and it didn’t get the attention it deserved. The problem is that, even when real money is at stake, people rush these things and hope for the best. There’s a real cheerleading mentality when it comes to change – people want to take action and only see the upside.

Ultimately, in a corporate or agency environment, you can’t be the one sour note among the cheering. You’ll be ignored, and possibly even fired. That’s not fair, but it’s reality. What you need to do is make sure the work gets done right and people go into the process with eyes wide open. There’s no room for shortcuts when you’re moving to a new domain.

That said, a domain change isn’t a death sentence, either. Done right, and with sensible goals in mind – balancing not just SEO but broader marketing and business objectives – a domain migration can be successful, even across multiple sites.

To sum up: Plan, plan, plan, monitor, monitor, monitor, and try not to panic.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Posted by randfish When writing headlines and title tags, we’re often conflicted in what we’re trying to say and (more to the point) how we’re trying to say it. Do we want it to help the page rank in SERPs? Do we want people to be intrigued enough to … Continue reading →