Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Kieran,

I feel the pain you as a business owner would be going through when you don't see all those efforts performing.

I am sure you have done your research on best practices however I would like to highlight the golden rule for online marketing success again for you. The secret is not volume, it's always quality and consistency.

I completely agree with Peter that you should not scrap the old pages with mediocre content unless they are "Not Unique". I have often seen that mediocre content is usually created through article spinning practices.

While there could be many ways to take a leap from here, however since I am not fully aware of your situation and limitations, here are some ideas:

1. List down all articles on your website in a spreadsheet and write down the following information against them:

a) Topic

b) Target Readers (Existing Customers / New Customers / Both)

c) Target Location of Readers

d) Objective of the article

e) Actions you expect the readers to take

f) Is the article Unique and Original? Please note this is not about the quality or creativity, pure uniqueness.

g) Is the quality of article poor, fair, or excellent? This is on the basis of creativity, knowledge and engagement potential of the article.

h) keywords being targeted in this article.

2. Put a filter on content quality and uniqueness and filter down all articles with fair and excellent quality and uniqueness.

3. Now starts the more difficult task of marketing these articles all over again. This is going to be time consuming and would need attention to detail. But hey honestly, there are no shortcuts to success.

a) For each article that you have filtered out, make sure you verify this before proceeding any further. All those article pages you have selected MUST have appropriate ON PAGE Meta info. Ensure you have proper titles, descriptions and keywords for each of those pages. Also try and spend 5 minutes on each article and see if you can build internal links (3-4) for each one of them.

b) For each article that you have filtered out, do a keyword detailed using Moz analysis and find out the links and ranking factors. I am assuming you know how to do this, or please contact me and I will help you through the steps.

c) Now write following for each of those selected articles. A 200-300 word Press Release (teaser), a 30-40 word Facebook post (preferably with a picture), write a twitter post for that article, 50-100 words article preview teaser (inspired from the press release), Email Teaser (50-100 words)

d) Now for each article please do the following, in no order (as per your convenience):

i) Submit press release to sites like PRweb.com if your budget allows or choose sbwire.com or similar sites.

ii) Share the facebook & twitter posts.

iii) Through your moz analysis for the targeted keywords, identify blogs and forums which are relevant for your article and submit your article teaser that you created in previous step to these sites.

iv) Send emails to all your existing customers who are relevant for that article and if possible invest in some email marketing list too. Please do not buy ready made lists however using hoovers / linkedin etc is advisable.

I hope my suggestions help you drive higher and relevant traffic to your website. Please feel free to send me any questions you may have.

Thanks & Regards,

Prateek Chandra

http://www.bizezee.com

Hi,

As Fedrico mentioned the best and perhaps the only right way to do it is to redirect all old pages to corresponding new pages.

However please make sure you do a 301 redirect.

I understand that you may have time limitations owing to which you not want to redirect each url to corresponding page but if you could share some technical information about your website, I can help you speed up the process by providing dynamic 301 redirect codes which can take care of a lot of manual work on your part.

Please share the following information on my private message:

1. Website URL/s (new if its already live and old too)

2. Do you use a CMS system? If yes please mention if it's wordpress / Joomla or any other?

Thanks & Regards,

Prateek Chandra

http://www.bizezee.com

Hi , I am sorry for the late response. For some reason I did not get any notifications for your message. Please check my private message to you.

Hi,

Sorry to hear that you are in the situation but its a problem many website owners face when they change / upgrade the website.

You have mentioned that your website traffic is down by 50% gradually in past 5 days. While there could be many reasons for the same but there are some basic checks you should do:

1. Ensure that all the indexed links in the old website are either live on the new site or redirected (301) to their corresponding pages on the new site.

2. Ensure from google webmaster tools that your new site is not facing any indexing problems. You can also do a quick check to see what pages are indexed. (Use "site:www.yoursite.com" in google search or check webmaster tools.)

3. Ensure that there are no technical issues like, slow site loading time, browser compatibility issues etc. Sometimes some scripts on your new site may affect the website loading times significantly so much that on many occasions the site fails to load.

4. Verify from google analytics if your website traffic has dropped or the avg time , bounce rate etc have changed. There is a high chance that your website's average visit duration would have dropped or bounce rate would have increased which would affect your site's conversions significantly.

If the above things are in place we can get into some advanced analysis:

1. Check your google analytics report and compare same time frame for last month or year to ensure this is not a seasonal slow down of traffic for your industry in general.

2. Check google analytics to find out if your traffic sources (organic keywords, referrals etc) are showing some abnormality compared to your website's average weekly report. You would need to compare this over few intervals of time to be able to point out any significant variations. If there are huge variations, specially in organic sources and referral sources, chances are its an impact of google's recent updates which would have affected your website's rankings.

If you still don't find a solution, please share with me your google analytics report for last 6 months.

I am hoping my answers could be of some help to you but in case these are things you have already checked, I will be glad to assist you further.

Regards,

Prateek

Hi Nick,

The question you have is one of the most basic questions that even seasoned SEO's don't have a perfect answer for. But I would like to compliment you for the fact that you are moving in the right direction.

The primary goals you have mentioned are different in nature and would need different strategies:

a) attract back links with this content - If this is your main goal then this article should rather go on high visibility forums and websites related to your niche. If the content is engaging enough and is crisp you can exploit social media too. However unless you are a product based company or fall into categories of Sports / Music & Entertainment / Arts & Photography / News & Media / Deals & Promotions , chances are that even the best written content won't be able to generate too much traction on social media. 
b) get it published - By getting it published, if your objective is outreach, use some good PR sites like http://www.sbwire.com or http://www.prweb.com . If you have a decent budget I would recommend writing high quality content and spending to get proper exposure through high visibility PR distribution sites. While more is always better, every business has limitations in terms of resource allocation for indirect marketing methods such as content generation, your best strategy would be to produce high quality unique content that has the capability to grab eyeballs and shares. Please do not forget to make all links no-follow in your press release.
c) get google to index this and benefit from the content - Google indexes everything unless specifically denied access to using no-index tag. Remember a golden rule for content creation, create your content keeping end users in mind not google. Google by default would pass authority to content that is perceived well by your audience. That's what google is trying to refine over the years, make search result relevant for consumers.

Let's say for example you write an article keeping google indexing and authority in mind and (without going into details) you manage to rank 1 on google search results for the targeted keywords. Now when traffic comes on to your website, and they don't find this content relevant to their search, all you would see is a high bounce rate on the website and no conversions, which I don't think could be the goal for any legitimate business.

So I would strongly recommend that you need to analyse your requirements based on goals and then develop content accordingly.

I hope my little explanation is of use to you. Please feel free to send me any questions you may have.

Wish you luck and success.

Regards,

Prateek Chandra

Hi Kieran,

I feel the pain you as a business owner would be going through when you don't see all those efforts performing.

I am sure you have done your research on best practices however I would like to highlight the golden rule for online marketing success again for you. The secret is not volume, it's always quality and consistency.

I completely agree with Peter that you should not scrap the old pages with mediocre content unless they are "Not Unique". I have often seen that mediocre content is usually created through article spinning practices.

While there could be many ways to take a leap from here, however since I am not fully aware of your situation and limitations, here are some ideas:

1. List down all articles on your website in a spreadsheet and write down the following information against them:

a) Topic

b) Target Readers (Existing Customers / New Customers / Both)

c) Target Location of Readers

d) Objective of the article

e) Actions you expect the readers to take

f) Is the article Unique and Original? Please note this is not about the quality or creativity, pure uniqueness.

g) Is the quality of article poor, fair, or excellent? This is on the basis of creativity, knowledge and engagement potential of the article.

h) keywords being targeted in this article.

2. Put a filter on content quality and uniqueness and filter down all articles with fair and excellent quality and uniqueness.

3. Now starts the more difficult task of marketing these articles all over again. This is going to be time consuming and would need attention to detail. But hey honestly, there are no shortcuts to success.

a) For each article that you have filtered out, make sure you verify this before proceeding any further. All those article pages you have selected MUST have appropriate ON PAGE Meta info. Ensure you have proper titles, descriptions and keywords for each of those pages. Also try and spend 5 minutes on each article and see if you can build internal links (3-4) for each one of them.

b) For each article that you have filtered out, do a keyword detailed using Moz analysis and find out the links and ranking factors. I am assuming you know how to do this, or please contact me and I will help you through the steps.

c) Now write following for each of those selected articles. A 200-300 word Press Release (teaser), a 30-40 word Facebook post (preferably with a picture), write a twitter post for that article, 50-100 words article preview teaser (inspired from the press release), Email Teaser (50-100 words)

d) Now for each article please do the following, in no order (as per your convenience):

i) Submit press release to sites like PRweb.com if your budget allows or choose sbwire.com or similar sites.

ii) Share the facebook & twitter posts.

iii) Through your moz analysis for the targeted keywords, identify blogs and forums which are relevant for your article and submit your article teaser that you created in previous step to these sites.

iv) Send emails to all your existing customers who are relevant for that article and if possible invest in some email marketing list too. Please do not buy ready made lists however using hoovers / linkedin etc is advisable.

I hope my suggestions help you drive higher and relevant traffic to your website. Please feel free to send me any questions you may have.

Thanks & Regards,

Prateek Chandra

http://www.bizezee.com

Hi Nick,

The question you have is one of the most basic questions that even seasoned SEO's don't have a perfect answer for. But I would like to compliment you for the fact that you are moving in the right direction.

The primary goals you have mentioned are different in nature and would need different strategies:

a) attract back links with this content - If this is your main goal then this article should rather go on high visibility forums and websites related to your niche. If the content is engaging enough and is crisp you can exploit social media too. However unless you are a product based company or fall into categories of Sports / Music & Entertainment / Arts & Photography / News & Media / Deals & Promotions , chances are that even the best written content won't be able to generate too much traction on social media. 
b) get it published - By getting it published, if your objective is outreach, use some good PR sites like http://www.sbwire.com or http://www.prweb.com . If you have a decent budget I would recommend writing high quality content and spending to get proper exposure through high visibility PR distribution sites. While more is always better, every business has limitations in terms of resource allocation for indirect marketing methods such as content generation, your best strategy would be to produce high quality unique content that has the capability to grab eyeballs and shares. Please do not forget to make all links no-follow in your press release.
c) get google to index this and benefit from the content - Google indexes everything unless specifically denied access to using no-index tag. Remember a golden rule for content creation, create your content keeping end users in mind not google. Google by default would pass authority to content that is perceived well by your audience. That's what google is trying to refine over the years, make search result relevant for consumers.

Let's say for example you write an article keeping google indexing and authority in mind and (without going into details) you manage to rank 1 on google search results for the targeted keywords. Now when traffic comes on to your website, and they don't find this content relevant to their search, all you would see is a high bounce rate on the website and no conversions, which I don't think could be the goal for any legitimate business.

So I would strongly recommend that you need to analyse your requirements based on goals and then develop content accordingly.

I hope my little explanation is of use to you. Please feel free to send me any questions you may have.

Wish you luck and success.

Regards,

Prateek Chandra

Hi,

Sorry to hear that you are in the situation but its a problem many website owners face when they change / upgrade the website.

You have mentioned that your website traffic is down by 50% gradually in past 5 days. While there could be many reasons for the same but there are some basic checks you should do:

1. Ensure that all the indexed links in the old website are either live on the new site or redirected (301) to their corresponding pages on the new site.

2. Ensure from google webmaster tools that your new site is not facing any indexing problems. You can also do a quick check to see what pages are indexed. (Use "site:www.yoursite.com" in google search or check webmaster tools.)

3. Ensure that there are no technical issues like, slow site loading time, browser compatibility issues etc. Sometimes some scripts on your new site may affect the website loading times significantly so much that on many occasions the site fails to load.

4. Verify from google analytics if your website traffic has dropped or the avg time , bounce rate etc have changed. There is a high chance that your website's average visit duration would have dropped or bounce rate would have increased which would affect your site's conversions significantly.

If the above things are in place we can get into some advanced analysis:

1. Check your google analytics report and compare same time frame for last month or year to ensure this is not a seasonal slow down of traffic for your industry in general.

2. Check google analytics to find out if your traffic sources (organic keywords, referrals etc) are showing some abnormality compared to your website's average weekly report. You would need to compare this over few intervals of time to be able to point out any significant variations. If there are huge variations, specially in organic sources and referral sources, chances are its an impact of google's recent updates which would have affected your website's rankings.

If you still don't find a solution, please share with me your google analytics report for last 6 months.

I am hoping my answers could be of some help to you but in case these are things you have already checked, I will be glad to assist you further.

Regards,

Prateek