How to achieve a successful website relaunch - tips to get it right

Relaunching, redesigning or updating a website is always tricky for businesses as it carries a certain element of risk for both customers and search engines.
While it is possible to fix broken elements after launch, it is always best to try and get it right first time, so here are a few tips to ensure a smooth transition from your current website to your new shiny one.

• Plan, plan, plan
  While this may seem obvious to some of you, good planning is probably about 80% of the success of any update. if you know what needs to be done, by whom and in which time frame, the chances of getting it wrong are drastically reduced. So invest in a good project management tool like Microsoft Project and start documenting each step of the process. If you lead a team, make sure they are all aware of the tasks
• Content
  When writing copy for your site, think about users first. Whatever you write needs to make sense to them, so keep it clear, concise and web friendly (write around 300 words per page, use bullet points). For SEO purposes, avoid duplicate content as it could be considered as spam and get you banned from search engine results pages. Remember, for users and search engines alike, content is king.
• Know your keywords
  Make sure you do some keyword research to target the most relevant keywords for your market. Once you have them, integrate them within your content, titles, descriptions and keyword tags, in your URLs, ALT text, H Tags and anchor links (links within the content to other pages of your site). Again, one basic principle is to use keywords cleverly so that your page is not only built for search engines but also for visitors.
  Doing some keyword mapping can help you focus the content of your site by matching unique keywords to unique pages.
• Technical requirements
  List all of your technical requirements for the build as early as possible during the process so that your web developer or technical team can start the work. Communication is key here if you want to deliver your project on time.
  Keep your javascript and css files clean and outside of the code for each page and limit page load time as search engines are likely to take it into consideration in their algorithms this year.
• Navigation / Site map
  Having a clear idea of the structure of your site and the navigation early on will allow you to focus your efforts in the right areas. Draw your sitemap and basic navigation to ensure that things are as clear and easy as possible. Try and keep navigation to a maximum of 3 levels so that visitors can find the content they want within a few clicks.
• Usability / accessibility
  In competitive environments, websites need to be as usable as possible as you only have a few seconds to impress your visitors. As mentioned above, good navigation will help you achieve good usability. Think about your design elements, position of your calls to action, words you use.
  Don't forget to think about accessibility too for visually impaired users by allowing your site's fonts to resize properly and by making the code as clean as possible. Complying to W3C standards is a good starting point for accessibility.
• 301 redirects
  Search engines like consistency, so when relaunching, make it as easy as possible for them to understand what's going on. To ensure your new pages benefit from your current site's history and link popularity, implement page by page 301 redirects. This simply means permanently redirecting each page of your site to a new page on the new site.
• Domain name, site URL
  If your current domain has been in use for a few years, make sure to continue using it as search engines consider domain history for rankings. If using a new domain, it may take you longer to achieve good rankings again.
• Testing, testing, testing
  Finally, test your site at every step of the build to make sure it matches your requirements. organise some usability testing sessions and analyse results carefully to refine everything.
  once live, continue testing so that you get the best performance on an ongoing basis.

There are a lot of elements to consider when updating a website, but the items above should be a good starting point and will hoepfully put you on the right tracks.

The weird and wonderful world of website testing

Since it's still January, happy new web year!
I was thinking about posting SEO new year resolutions today, but I think a lot of other blogs have already done that in a very good way, so let's tackle another very important (and sometimes neglected) element of a good online marketing strategy; website testing and particularly split testing.

What is website testing?
Website testing can take many forms, such as usability testing, UI/UX (user interface, user experience), technical tests or content tests such as A/B testing and multivariate testing.
Testing is a way to ensure that everything on your website is as it should be and that visitors can find what they're looking for.
While it should be logical for any business to do regular tests, assumptions and views of business employees are very often relied upon instead of looking at visitors and potential customers' opinions and needs.

Why implement split testing?
In difficult economic times, ecommerce businesses need to make sure they get the best ROI (return on investment) from their marketing and overall spend, and it is therefore crucial to ensure the highest level of conversion on your website. Many sites experience bottlenecks in their sales funnel on specific pages and changes in content, calls to action and offers can often have a dramatic impact on conversions.

Which methods to use?
I've recently been more exposed to the different tools available for testing, so here is a quick overview of the 2 main content testing methods:

• A/B testing - with this method 2 pages are used concurrently and displayed to different users in equal numbers. The 2 pages are matched with a common conversion point (payment confirmation page, sign up page....) and conversion results are compared to decide which page is performing better than the other. This method is very useful when testing new designs as it will very quickly highlight what works best for your visitors.
• Multivariate testing - this is a more complex tool which allows businesses to dynamically change predefined elements of a page in order to test their performance against conversion points. The changeable elements are predefined and will be displayed according to specific rules until the best performing combination is identified.
  This method can be used to test content as well as graphic elements and can very often lead to dramatic improvements in conversions.

One thing to remember with these methods is that results will only be significant if you test the right pages, so identifying what to test plays a key part in the testing methodology.

Which tools to use?
There are a lot of tools available on the market, but if you're new to split testing, I'd advise to go with an agency at first to get a better understanding of how testing works, and how to set everything up.

For those of you who are more experienced, then Google Optimizer provides a very good structure to start testing as long as you have access to the html code of your website as testing requires the implementation of tracking tags within your site.
When looking at agencies, make sure to choose the right one for you as the most advanced solutions will be out of reach for most SMEs (from £100k +/year!). Some Google accredited providers will offer much more affordable testing services.

I am due to meet a few agencies to discuss split testing this week so I'll let you know what you can expect if you're considering testing yourself.
I think it's time to end this post and while I do realise that the content above only covers a small part of what can be tested on a website, I hope it helps you get a good overview of the basics.
Enjoy your Sunday.

How to deal with paid budget cuts

I've just realised that it's already been a month since my last post, I definitely need to make a better job of writing...but with xmas coming, not sure how this is gonna go...oh well, there are always new year's resolutions.

Alright, today's post is going to be about something that most marketers dealing with paid search campaigns will know, especially during a recession; budget cuts.
As you probably already know if you're running ppc campaigns with Google Adwords, Yahoo search marketing or Bing, changes in any elements of the campaigns can have a very big impact on results, so here are a few tips to make your reduced budgets go further:

• Whatever you do, do not pause your campaigns - Google especially likes consistency, so it is always best to avoid stopping campaigns as it could take you months to rebuild history and raise your quality score again. Even running a very minimal budget is better than stopping everything.
• Bid on brand terms - although many people may question the fact of bidding on your own name, results are very often showing that brand terms /keywords are some of the bets performing ones. And they are cheap, especially if you've trademarked your name, so go ahead and use your name. This will also help you display results in both paid and organic rankings for the same search, increasing customer confidence.
• Focus on top converting keywords - This is a bit of an obvious one, but if you lack budget, make sure you bid on keywords that have converted for you in the past (conversions being sales, sign ups or whatever other metric you use for performance).
• Look at visitors click path if available - I know this is not really easy to get, but if you can, find out which keywords your users have searched during their research. The keyword they converted from may not be the one they searched for the initial phase of their product research. Visitors may initially use a very generic keyword and as they learn about what they really want, they will tend to use more specific, long tail keywords. Knowing the click path will help you bid for these all important initial search terms.
• Optimise your landing pages - Again this should be standard practice, but make sure your campaigns are as optimised as possible, from keywords, to creatives to landing pages. The more relevant the search keyword is to your creative and your landing page, the higher your quality score will be. This in turn will have an impact on your ads rankings.
• Look at your competitors - look at what your competitors are bidding on and if need be, bid on their brand terms. Remember that you cannot use your competitors' brand in your creatives if they are trademarked, but nothing stops you from displaying a creative by bidding on their search terms.
• Use common sense - as in everything SEO related, use common sense when managing your paid campaigns, and as the market recovers, so will your budgets.

Enjoy your Sunday