Launching V2 of my site - what questions to ask the SEO Agency
-
Hi
I am in the process of launching a new version of my site and I know I need to get my current SEO Agency to check and test certain aspects of the site so that I don't lose any rankings.
The problem is I am unsure of everything to ask them and I was wondering if someone could help me out.
I don't want to have missed something basic and therefore want to give them a checklist to confirm they are happy before go live.
Any help appreciated
-
To start I would make sure you have your current site structure well mapped out and that they are working with the designer to make sure pages aren't being dropped. A great tool to use is Screaming Frog for this. We find with larger sites and ones with extensive blog content that is the biggest issue that any potential 301's are in place when the new site rolls out so as not to lose rankings from broken inbound or internal links. I'd also make sure the site maps are updated and ready.
You may also want to make sure the architecture of the site hasn't changed dramatically for major pages. I would look to see what are your top pages for landing pages in Organic search and make sure they aren't being buried deeper in the site for no reason. So a page may have been mysite.com/awesomelandingpage and with a redesign it gets moved to mysite.com/genericfolder/subfolder/awesomelandingpage and it could lose some of it's link authority.
Just a few thoughts....
-
Ask them to evaluate your link profile and ask for suggested improvements.
Also, while they are doing that, you should take a look at their own link profile and see if they know what they are talking about.
-
Hi
I agree and a lot of work has gone into making improvements and hopefully they are all done, but its more the basics I am after to make sure something fundamental isn't missed and the improvements don't get to have an impact as the basics wasnt checked.
-
If you are revamping the site, it is a great time to find out what you can do to improve your rankings rather than worrying about losing them.
So, I would have the current SEO review the site and report back on what can be done to improve. Then I would make the same request of an SEO consultant. Once I have their recommendations I would compare, discuss with them, do research and make a decision about what to do.
Paying the consultant is not a waste of money. The price should be small compared to your potential sales increase going forward. It is also education for you.
This process might increase your understanding of your website, understand what the improvements can be and feel more confident about moving your rankings up rather than worry about losing them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Review of our site
Hi Moz-Fans 🙂 I'm doing SEO for about a year now and have a new site to which I do not know where to improve any further. The main keyword is "Webdesign Freiburg" and the site is werkzeug - kasten . com Anyone want to have a look into and tell me what might bring us from page 2 to page 1 on google? Thanks a lot Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Shoemaker with ugly shoes : Agency site performing badly, what's our best bet?
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxialDev
We're a web agency and our site www.axialdev.com is not performing well. We have very little traffic from relevant keywords. Local competitors with worse On-page Grader scores and very few backlinks outrank us. For example, we're 17th for the keyword "agence web sherbrooke" in Google.ca in French. Background info: In the past, we included 3 keywords-rich in the footer of every site we made (hundreds of sites by now). We're working to remove those links on poor sites and to use a single nofollow link on our best sites. Since this is on-going and we know we won't be able to remove everything, our link profile sucks (OSE). We have a lot of sites on our C-Block, some of poor quality. We've never received a manual penalty. Still, we've disavowed links as a precaution after running Link D-Tox. We receive a lot of trafic via our blog where we used to post technical articles about Drupal, Node js, plugins, etc. These visits don't drive business. Only a third of our organic visits come from Canada. What are our options? Change domain and delete the current one? Disallow the blog except for a few good articles, hoping it helps Google understand what we really do. Keep donating to Adwords? Any help greatly appreciated!
Thanks!2 -
Question about best approach to site structure
I am curious if anyone can share some advice. I am working on planning architecture for a tour company. The key piece of the content strategy will be providing details on each of the tour destinations, with associated profiles for each city within those destinations. Lots of content, which should be great for the SEO strategy. With regards to the architecture, I have a ‘destinations’ section on the Website where users can access each of the key destinations served by the tour company. My question is – from a planning perspective I can organize my folder structure in a few different ways. http://www.companyurl.com/destinations/touring-regions/cities/ or http://www.companyurl.com/destinations/ http://www.companyurl.com/touring-regionA/ http://www.companyurl.com/touring-regionB/cities-profile/ I am curious if anyone has an opinion on what might perform best in terms of the site structure from an SEO perspective. My fear is taking all of this rich content and placing it so many tiers down in the architecture of the site. Any advice that could be offered would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Micro sites?
Hi, I have been speaking to seo firms regarding strategies and they mentioned setting up micro sites under domains that are relevant. i.e setting up armanidoamin.co.uk and we use it as a blog type site to update all info, product reviews, news relating to armani. Whats peoples thoughts on this? Does it work? Is it worth the effort? Im not so sure but obviously looking for ideas. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Site changes lead to big questions
I'm making some changes to my business that will cause me to move my blog to a new domain. The existing site will serve as a sales campaign for our full service programs and I want to keep visitors focused on that campaign. The old site will serve much like a mini site with a sales letter and video sales letter. In moving the blog content to another page - I found a post from Rand from a few years ago http://www.seomoz.org/blog/expectations-and-best-practices-for-moving-to-or-launching-a-new-domain. The way I wanted to approach this was to remove the content from the old site, and then resubmit the site map to Google for indexing. Of course they'll notice that the blog pages are gone. (probably a load of 404's) After perhaps a week, I'd repost the content (about 50 posts) on the new domain, which will be little more than a blog. I'd like some input on the way to approach this. Should I... a) Follow Rand's formula? b) Go with my idea (sort of the brute force model)? c) Consider an alternative method? It's probably worth mentioning that none of these posts have high search engine rankings. I appreciate your input Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sdennison0 -
Where would the SEO juice go if I have a wordpress site hosted by godaddy?
I am planning on moving my website to a wordpress that is hosted by godaddy. I am wondering where the SEO juice that my website has already gained would go. Would it go to godaddy when I make the move instead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SierraPCB0 -
Can Anyone show me a site that has followed the seomoz seo rules
Hi i have been reading the seo information on here which is very interesting and i would like to know if anyone can point to any sites that have followed the rules and advice. It is great when you can read the info and rules but i feel it is also better to see a site that has followed the rules and to hear from people who have followed the information and put them into practice and explain what results they have got. I am currently building the following website http://www.womenlifestylemagazine.com so it would be great to see a site that has followed all the rules and who can explain if they work or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClaireH-1848860