 Thanks Travis. All right, so make sure you can hear me here. All right, so Welcome. Thank you for showing interest in this topic I know relaunch is natural reoccurrence in life as they happen hopefully not for a long time periods of time, but they happen if you're a consultant or on the agency side or a developer you're probably doing them all the time and Often as an SEO It hurts me when I find out that it got skipped or ignored or At the last second like five minutes before launch somebody says hey, we're getting ready to launch this Hey, do you need to do something? All right, so so we're gonna help you with planning today as Travis said this will be This can serve as a checklist. It's in slide format. I've got a search engine journal article that goes through this in more of a linear written format as well and We'll just we'll run with it So I'll try to go through it pretty quickly quickly enough to leave time for Q&A as a group If there's anything I lost you on or that was really interesting or you have something very specific to what you're going through Catch me afterwards. I'll hang out on the side to to talk to you individually or we can Talking the community lounge as well. All right, so real quick. That's my family. That's why I get no sleep I'll try to keep my energy level up here. At least I'm not right after lunch a little bit about me Been here in Kansas City for my entire career proud of that and Voltage we're digital agency in the river market founded in 05 We have our focus on three key areas there. All right, so humor me for a moment before I get into Aspects of SEO Because I work with developers in my office designers every day I know HTML from the early days before WordPress and And doing everything by hand Which was a more painful era to do SEO in especially Some ways it might have been a little bit easier too because that was before content marketing emerged so much and so I could Do SEO and a silo and didn't need other people But humor me here. I'd never do this. I think it's you know Cheesy sometimes I'm not gonna make everybody stand up or anything But what I do want to know is a little bit about everyone here and backgrounds So I could tailor this as we go and make this more productive for both of us So how many people are familiar? Where would you put yourself if you put yourself as? Beginner or not very well-versed in SEO. Let me know that I'm not gonna shame you and people don't look around Everybody can close their eyes All right, so I've got a handful in that camp Who would say that they're really proficient in SEO and so they're gonna know every acronym I'm gonna bring up maybe or most of them use the tools. All right Perfect, so I'm gonna assume we've got we got and I'm gonna assume everybody else is kind of middle of the road here I'm not gonna ask that so what we're gonna do Is I'm not gonna pause and give you like the SEO 101 I'm also not gonna go really deep into the super technical side of it and nerd out I'll do that on the side with you later if you want to But what I'm gonna do afterwards is probably write or post a blog post within the next week That gives you a bunch of links to anything. That's a bullet point in here That's talking about a concept or a tool or an acronym So that will be helpful watch my Twitter over the next week for it Because I'll post that as well as a follow-up with with my slide slides. Excuse me So that way I'll it'll just be links to resources on Google and a lot of different article sites where you can go dig in deep on what a canonical tag is or Learn some of the best practices on a robots.txt file because what I'm more focused on is giving you this Phased approach with a checklist that you can work through so that way if you're not responsible for SEO You can check in with your SEO person or if you are the person that's gonna be responsible for SEO Even though it's not your role You can talk to your developers or if you are the developer you can figure out that dynamic So within your team or within yourself if you wear all those hats you can Pause and make sure everything's in order here So I will give you one. I have one background slide on SEO just so you see my philosophy and how I organize things It's pretty common Tyler here would probably maybe categorize things differently. He's welcome to challenge me And tell some jokes maybe too. He's he's a great speaker. You should hear him tomorrow But indexing technical these are what like my three tried and true pillars of SEO Indexing and technical are kind of separate topics, but I put them together Indexing is making sure Google and Bing and any other crawler from a search engine can see your content see your site See all of it so you can get credit for it later The technical part there are some aspects of that. They're just the best practices You do them you troubleshoot them if you have to to make sure that You're promoting your content your site so the search engines can see it so in most cases. It's really easy WordPress makes it easy Sometimes you may have to do some troubleshooting there. Then you have your on-page phase So this is the stuff that builds content relevance or relevance for your content To make sure that the search engines understand that you're an expert on this subject matter on these topics So these are all the factors like Your URL your body copy your image alt text and a lot of your semantic coding within the site So this is me talking about me Essentially, it's my content. I'm talking about myself to the search engines Then you have the external influences or off-page factors that some people call them. Those are things like who links to who Some signals from social media potentially debatable Google debates them, but there's correlation data that states Higher levels and engagement social equal equal better rate rankings. So we run with it There are also some other things like unlinked brand mentions that now because some some of the external factors get spanned But basically this is your authority category So you've got relevance and on-page of saying what I'm about and presenting that picture Just like you do to your users to the search engines and then the authority side of it is I could come up with the best Kansas City plumbing company website overnight Maybe not overnight, but I could write awesome content put it all out there Google's not going to know unless it looks at the external factors to see who links to me I'm not going to have a link from the International Association of plumbers or from review sites and other credible sources To validate that I really am who I say I am so those are the external factors that weigh in your favor So all of these can be impacted Positively negatively neutral neutral is that best what you want to do in a relaunch You don't want to harm yourself at the very least even if you're not doing the relaunch or the or the new site To help SEO even if it's based on UX or business conditions or reasons Those are things you want to think about all right The end of my background side the only background slide all right three phases. There's before migration. There's at launch and then there's post launch My wife is a scientist and obsessed with space and NASA So this one's dedicated to her with some space themed references, so hopefully you're ready to buckle up and Your seatbelt works because that's where we're going here So first off take a step back goals and project plan. There's probably a good reason why you're relaunching You're not putting yourself through this just for fun Unless you're a designer and you like to read redesign things every week And then relaunch them But business use cases, so there's a probably a business reason behind this so like everything you should start with goals You're probably making some UX improvements along the way You're probably also trying to accomplish the marketing initiatives whether those are Around content around structure around your offerings what you're doing And hopefully there's SEO improvements worked into that as well. Maybe you're on an older platform Hopefully all these things work together From there now it gets hairy because now we're looking at content and information architecture this is your opportunity if you're changing your information architecture are essentially your site map and The structure of your content on the site The more that you're doing in this the more risk you're introducing I'm not telling you not to do this because I love this is the time to do it if you're investing the time but don't ignore The fact that when you move pages around or have different pages and make pages you become obsolete That you just know that you're introducing another variable that you have to account for in SEO when you launch But good, you know practices in SEO are you know just like UX. I'm now aligning my content Hopefully around how people search and what they're looking for so again This is an opportunity where you can use silos of content kind of an outdated term I still use it because I I can't get away from it But if you're building your content into services into products into categories or whatever that response needs to be for a conversion That's where you want to map those keywords to content. So SEO best practices would be You know my homepage needs a rank for the most generic aspect of what I do and then my category or service page Needs a rank for that service and if I have sub pages under that that's where we get more granular So when your site map go from general to specific in terms of content naturally is the way you're probably going to design it anyway and architect it But think about that. So know where your keyword focuses are If you're not really focused on SEO to begin with this is a good time to think about that So if you got things you have things out of whack where you want to try to rank for cars And your car dealership on a page. That's five levels deep. Maybe you should think about flipping your your side upside down Canonicals, this is one of those words where I'm not going to go too deep into it But these are if you have multiple pages on your site to have 80% you know 20 or more than 20% matching text with another page You may have the red Mustang convertible page and the blue Mustang convertible page The only thing that's different is the name of the color or the or the color in there For a legit reason, you know, you have duplicate content or you have a product Page that appears in five different categories That's another legit reason to have duplicate content the search engine struggle with duplicate content They don't like it because they don't want to show five of your pages that are almost nearly identical in the search results They want to show one or two and show some others Same thing with if you sell a product That you're using the manufacturer's description and 15 other people saw that same product You're going to have against other domains and other sites duplicate content as well This is something you need to think about so if you're in e-commerce or if you know you have duplicate content This is a strategy you'll want to think about before launch as well, especially if you're introducing new content Compared to what your old site architecture had Even if your site map doesn't change at all Think about if you're moving to a different technology You may be changing URLs which even if it's a one-to-one match on your site map your URLs may be changing it may be going from dot PHP to just the directory extension and be defaulted or Even if in WordPress if you're you know, what's nice is if you're in WordPress and you're just introducing a new theme Your URLs probably aren't changing if you're not doing anything related to site map at the same time So that's a nice advantage of WordPress compared to some not so nice Even open-source systems All right, that's a big one and we'll talk about some of the impacts in a minute on Page so this is the more traditional stuff. This is what you're probably thinking about or somebody's thinking about Probably top of mind the first thing somebody's gonna say meta tags But all of these things work together. There's no one Magical element that's gonna guarantee rankings all these working together is That beautiful picture of okay, we use these we build context. We use the same phrasing and and Terminology throughout Every one of these from the URL to the titles the title tag to meta description tag headings body copy image alt text All of these are painting the picture what you're about and can strengthen what you're doing So don't ignore these before launch, especially if you don't have a plug-in or don't have something coded That will semantically complete these for you and even if it auto populates these based on whatever the file name you Uploaded is your file names might not be great because you may have it may just be image one two three dot jpeg Straight off of your camera or your computer or whatever it might be So take advantage of the opportunities you have to go page by page or even file by file or if you can do something Dynamically and not have to go touch every file every tag Think about that because that's better than again having it be blank Some of the worst things you can do are leave it up to Google to guess or populate those for you by leaving a meta description blank Well, it's not going to help you by itself in rankings it can hurt you because you're leaving out a key piece of information that Google cares about and For example, I mean your title tag well-written title tag and a well-written meta description Will be used as the blue link and the two or three lines of text under that in the search results page So that's how much emphasis Google has on it because it goes beyond just search That's a UX thing too. So if it's poorly written or doesn't exist and Google decides to pull something from your site I've seen it pull footer links and information and it strips out the links. And so you're like copyright 2014 As like the meta description, it's going to hurt your click-through rate too for people coming from Google through to your site Because they're not seeing a helpful cue of what they what what to click through to All right redirects Two slides on that still why redirects are critical if you hear no other word today here redirects Because this is if if no other factors play into this This is the one in the indexing and technical This is where you stop being found and you disappear and you watch your work You know, I'll have somebody come to me. I'll see their analytics show that their organic traffic dropped to almost nothing Only maybe brand queries or brand name or company name because they didn't do any redirects So that's a hostile thing for it from an SEO perspective. It also is from a UX perspective So if I didn't do any redirects and all my URLs changed now Anybody who sees a link on another site and clicks on is going to get a 404 How many 404s are people going to get before they give up on me even if they know I exist and I'm a legit brand so redirects transcend everything and Are the one thing that if somebody came to me five minutes before we're launching and I could do nothing else I would find a way to pause long enough to plan out the redirects now if you have 10,000 pages on your site It's going to take more than five minutes if you have 10 pages on your site I could do it in five minutes So this is where you want to get people to pause if you're not responsible for launching it If you're not the developer just slow the process down for a moment because it's better to delay Than to launch without redirects So in addition to UX the 404 is an indexing link value to so getting deeper into that external Touches on the external factor as well So people who link to link to you are Passing link value or link juice through to you votes their votes or they're giving you authority status Based on them linking to you. So now if that's a 404 Google forgets about that too So you lose that so this is a like a cascading thing if you don't do redirects. I saw a question over here Yeah, we're good. Yeah, we're gonna I'm gonna show you how I plan it But definitely even if it was like a you know dot net all these URLs are dot net you still can drop those in your HTXS So that's the safest most permanent place to put it But WordPress has its own redirection plugins as well. There's a plethora of them I know my team keeps changing them because some of them are not very lightweight and impact performance of the site overall even though they're not public-facing but that's an excellent question of Doing it so even if it's a you know dot net or some other foreign crazy Parameterized URL that wasn't even a that hasn't even been a page in 10 years But Google won't forget about it or it was a really you know It was linked from the New York Times So you want to maintain that link value and redirect it into your new site and you can do that within WordPress or At the server level in Apache So how so first this could be time-consuming as I mentioned You want to call the existing site the easiest way to do this is not do it after launch It takes 10 times as much time if you wait till after launch You have to go find an old copy of the site restore a backup somewhere on hosting You probably don't even have if you change technologies and went from dot net to to to lamp stack or if Or or just you have to go through external tools like cert Google search console or other places to hunt down What old URLs Google knew about and you're not going to give them all so I recommend I love screaming frog. It's like a 99 pounds per year Which is 150 140 bucks For your license there are other tools like deep crawl and there are some new ones like I can't remember the new one I just just tested a few weeks ago. So Crawling tools they'll let you do I mean they're awesome because they'll go grab everything From the site and the end screaming frog will go pretty deep. You can customize the settings and tell it how many levels deep It will pull down everything all the meta information as well. It'll pull down canonicals and all kinds of Server statuses and if they're redirects in place already, it'll give you all that information You can bring it into a spreadsheet you go old school and take it to Excel You can put in a Google sheet. It could create pivot tables do whatever you want with it but essentially You need to get that information and even it's going to find a lot of URLs They like we haven't used that in years or there are a whole bunch of vanity like root level, you know pages that were for like a one-day promotion And so you can decide what value there is and redirecting them versus letting them 404 But I recommend if you have the time figure out how to redirect everything you can so you're going to take in that spreadsheet What I do as a non developer is take my column of Old-site URLs and have a column right next to it of what I'm mapping it to and hand that off and that way it can be you know a query can be run to get it into ht access or It can be copied and paste or uploaded through a text file maybe to depending on the plug in you're using as well for redirection You can with some nuances to this if pages or sections are going away entirely You can redirect to the next level up So if you have a product category, we're not even selling that product anymore redirect to the most relevant page Google and Bing will tell you something different. They'll be like no 404 that 404 is a good thing because it means we should take it out of our index I'm sitting in the room with Google and being saying that to a bunch of SEOs It's comical because everybody looks at each other and they're like no, we're not going to do that We've worked hard to get the credibility that we have and authority status with our site So and it's not spelled out I'm not telling you about any like black hat areas here. I mean this is a common practice. So figure out where to redirect Even if it's a home page Google will sort it out over time and if you shouldn't get credit for that content or those links anymore They'll drop that off Off on their end, you don't have to worry about it. So you can have Many to one as well So you can have ten pages redirecting to the same page on the new site if you're reducing content or it's obsolete as well All right, so here's an example of that spreadsheet might be a little bit hard to see you can grab it in the slides I'll be happy to actually probably send you a file like this if you want or I think this is this one was in Excel versus a Google sheet, but essentially here's my old URLs Here's my new site URL and I've even used one master spreadsheet to even plan out what my new title and meta description is So I have one just giant sheet as I'm doing everything in it So my team can collaborate off of it and copy paste or make sure that we're not missing any important pages for SEO All right, that's the pre-launch checklist Now we're gonna launch And this is SpaceX it didn't blow up This was successful So at launch there's just one slide here and With the profit the most critical part of this, especially if you're responsible for SEO and you're not the developer Is know when they're gonna launch the site and what their checklist is and if you are the developer make sure they SEO Aspects of the are incorporated in your launch checklist You probably have your tried and true QA launch checklist you should and you know what you're going through to launch the site So ensure that everybody is on the same page if it's not just you as the one person responsible for everything and Well clients may love to have you launch it at like two in the morning on like, you know a Sunday All right, make sure your whole team's awake and they know what's going on So we don't get to like 10 a.m. On Monday and embrace freaking out because we make a thousand dollars You know every ten minutes on our e-commerce site and the e-commerce sites down or nobody can get to it Because we're not in Google anymore or everything that was in Google is now going to a 404 so Just make sure you've got your timing lined out and you have your post Launch action plan ready to go because you're gonna want to jump into it. So speaking of post launch This is often what we feel like when we launch like cool. We should celebrate. I Don't know what to do. We just launched it. I don't is there something is there a next step here It's that awkward moment where it's like oh Oh, there's it there's the candy in this case the cameras on I should grab this 1970 era microphone and talk to somebody But but but this totally translates We work so hard to get this thing launched and we get it launched And hopefully it's not late on a Friday afternoon where everybody's checking out Or hopefully it it's not this reaction where everybody's now asleep because we've stayed up and pulled all-nighters to hit a deadline And this is awesome. How awkward it is to sleep in space But but hopefully you know those one of those two things is like we're excited we're getting we're ready to move on with Our day move on to the next thing No, we're not we need to go through our post launch Checklist and so okay, we're coming right back to redirects the site went live Now we need to come back and validate proper implementation. So I'm not saying you need to go check every redirect But you have your spreadsheet Spot check start clicking on some of the links or copy and paste them in your browser from your From your your spreadsheet that you had before of the old site links and make sure they're really going to the pages You mapped out and it's not that I don't have any trust in developers Love developers, but at the same time things go weird and things don't go from dev to live Like you thought they might have or from the staging site up. So just make sure they're implemented properly also Redirect check calm isn't even really a tool It's just a page that you go and plug in your URL and for non developers like me To quickly tell me the server code and what's happening there You want to make sure it's a 301 redirect and not a 302 even though Google says they treat 302 is like 301's now I still don't trust it enough. There's no reason to not have it just be a 301 Which is page permanently moved which is their acceptable way of Transferring all the credibility from the old page to the new page at least in a short term It's up to you to make sure that content is as strong and lines up with with what What you had in terms of credibility previously So just go check some of these make sure they're they're redirecting and that you're in good shape there So the dev to live audit I mentioned sometimes things don't get pushed up a database gets missed the table gets missed a Plug-in gets missed Especially if you're operating a totally separate staging site, you know Did everything get pushed over or if you're just doing a theme update? Maybe you added some new functionality or you're going to turn it on at launch and maybe You CSS uploaded but nothing, you know some of your SEO features didn't so just run through this Especially if they're dynamic features if you got thousands of pages and you're not writing custom Meta descriptions or titles for every single one you have formulas everywhere where it's product name plus Model number plus name of my website Make sure those are working because those could look really silly if they still have the slugs in there and you'll have a million duplicate Slug-based or template based Tags so I also make sure you're on page optimization if you went to all that work to write the tags and put them in Especially if you did it by hand in WordPress through Yoast or something like that make sure those went live as well Most of the time I don't ever catch anything here But there are occasions where you want to know this now and not a month from now Because if everything else was done properly, but a couple things didn't go live Even though your site might get indexed and your redirects were great some of your SEO benefits And on-page things might not have carried through All right, so this is the newer more fun category That's sarcasm. This is the new thing that SEOs have to worry about You know, we're in mobile getting to essentially right now The first one was a few years ago. Everybody had to be mobile friendly Everybody jumped thankfully Thankfully we're mostly on the responsive bandwagon and not adaptive and five other types of technologies and Google wouldn't say anything about it Again like Jim before me spoke about, you know, most of the time good or bad if Google says it That's what we end up doing so Whatever but page speed Page speed so this has been important for a few years. It was a tiebreaker factor It wasn't like an algorithm variable that was going to give you a huge boost But Google is now in addition to wanting things to be mobile friendly is is now Shifting to a mobile first index so they're only going to index the entire index of Google and ranking system is going to be Based on the mobile version of your website So if you haven't thought about that think about this weekend You have you have a week or three I actually have crossed maybe 200 websites That I have access to through Search Console at the first notification yesterday that one of ours went live on mobile friendly Which is nice that they're notifying us because they don't always have to do that and they choose not to a lot of the time So they've got a lot of different tools or a couple different places you can get to the mobile There's a mobile friendly test which has been around for a few years now They have the mobile speed test as well and it's really fascinating like if you're an e-commerce site or know the value of a conversion It'll show you where you are and you can take the slider and move it down by tenths of a second And I'll tell you how much if you plug in a couple Inputs of how much money you make in certain time stamps or what the average order is It will use some factors that they know on click-through rate and bounce rate and all that to tell you how much money in a year Additional revenue you'll make by speeding up your site. I Mean it just started so we'll have to trust it and see if their data is correct in a year, but That that's going to be whatever it renders to their Google bot that is looking at mobile So it's going to be responsive typically or adaptive will still work as well So it's whatever viewpoint it can see so if the user experience is not good on a device iPad gets into the gray area there because things could render more like desktop versus more like a phone But they're going to evaluate you based on Closer to a phone because because they're looking at they're looking at spacing between buttons and size of elements Exclusively to make sure everything is optimized there quote-unquote That's an excellent question. Go run that mobile friendly test before you even start worrying about speed the speed test All right, so now indexing and we're back to indexing redirects could have destroyed you on indexing But you've already taken care of those and validated those but now that you're everything's clean. You're ready to Tell Google hey, we've moved. We've updated. Hopefully you're doing this all within kind of a day of Launch and you're not spreading all these steps out over a week But as quickly as you can validate everything you'll want to upload or submit Validate your XML sitemaps so XML sitemaps Hopefully you don't have a static one that you have to generate through a generator if you're in WordPress Yoast and many other tools Will dynamically generate it so every time you create a new page on your site It will the site will automatically add it to the XML sitemap This is a file that humans don't look at unless you're an SEO and care about it But it's like the index page for the search engine anytime they come to visit your site They look at your XML sitemap. Are there any new URLs that I need to crawl? This is the modern version of submitting your URLs to Google, you know 10 15 years ago This is what they look for you want to make sure that in that file you don't have any 404s You don't want to have any 301 redirects in it You want to have the destination URLs in it again if you're using the plugins and technology They'll take care of a lot of this for you still test it before you submit it to Google And you want to make sure it's the canonical URL the final URL or the one you prefer if you have five versions of the Practically the same page that live on five different URLs So when you feel like it's in good shape You want to submit it to Google through your Google search console to Bing through Bing webmaster tools what you want to be Careful about though and again the reason why you want to spend five minutes and go click on some of the URLs in it And make sure they're all legit is that The last number I heard from Google was 10% but Bing said a few years ago If you're what your site map has more than 1% of error whether it's 404s redirects issues in the site map They stopped trusting it so now you lose access to a really good signal when I have a new page and it goes in there If they're not looking at my site map It's harder for that me to get them to come back sooner to see my new content Especially if it's time-sensitive or I don't want to wait 45 days for it to get into the index And then monitoring so now we're launched we've taken care of all these steps But we want to watch this thing probably daily at a minimum Probably not our or by the minute, but at least daily stay on this make sure your indexing is still happening You use Google search console and Bing webmaster tools for this They'll give you information about how many pages they've indexed you can compare that to how many pages You know you have on the site if you've had Google search console set up Long enough prior to launching you can see how that compares to your old site and what it was It'll tell you it'll tell you as another Tool about 404s that finds HTML issues duplicate tags all that stuff so monitor that daily Go add more redirects if you miss stuff or if Google knows about some URL that nobody else knows about which is weird You know I know how would whatever just go take care of that Obviously you'll watch traffic, but you don't want to wait till you see the traffic dip You want to see these things first? Yeah, so if you so how long should you monitor after you launch so I would launch day I would watch it daily for a week if I have no issues If I'm not seeing any errors and having to go fix them every day when Google finds more as it continues to index I would say then you maybe you could go to weekly your For 90 days need to be paying attention at least weekly taking a look Because that's the longest length of a spider cycle for Google to come back and revisit content Might be up to 120 sometimes, but it's gotten so much faster. I would I would say you're gonna see the bulk of it in the first 10 days now Thankfully Google doesn't talk about it since they talked about caffeine. They're faster indexing engine a few years ago But I keep seeing it get into a shorter window Thankfully Yeah, so you can mark items one at a time as fixed in search console and it's painful Most of the time that's what you have to do if you Didn't put in a redirects and now you're seeing the 404s after the fact and you couldn't get that old site map and Google Only show you like a thousand of them a day and you had to fix those wait for the next thousand the next day At a client where for 23 days we had to watch for the next thousand and address them and spend three hours a day For 23 days Weekends included because we want to keep that window as short as we could and they were a large e-commerce site that Does $150,000 a day Would have been very important. It would have been very I mean they're on magento. So we can talk about that as a different issue They're on a wordpress or WooCommerce or anything else. So But yeah, excellent question. It really depends on how many issues you're seeing if everything's pretty clean small Site no issues. You go to a week. You could go to a month But just don't ignore it because there are hidden issues and things that you won't necessarily notice until you'll get trailing indicators like traffic Which are painful to see because traffic equals revenue and now you're a week or two or three out and you're like You could have in that window taken it fixed it proactively All right, so I'm wrapping up here. You're ongoing SEO and man. I don't know why I could stare at this for like hours So like gratifying for whatever reason But now we're in ongoing SEO. So you might have started just thinking about SEO or thought about what you had to do as a bare minimum Or maybe thought about strategically in your launch process It's not set it and forget it. So I'd be remiss if I Acted like it was one time I mean and I'm not just saying that because I'm an agency and we love the retainer model and getting you on the hook for a Long time. That's not it. It's truly built around the fact that So many of these things take rinse and repeat optimization practices and you're rolling out new content So in your bigger stack or mix of digital marketing You're probably generating content for your blog or for, you know, every new evergreen content or whatever it might be To push on social. Well, you can optimize that as well It should be optimized and should play into the fact of more is typically better for SEO as well in terms of content If it's good content and so and you're not gonna hit the home run the first time So you're gonna find that yeah, I optimize this page for this specific keyword and now I'm ranked, you know in the 30s Now, maybe I should think about adding five more pages because that's what everybody else has or its long form is being ranked Better than short form So it's an iterative process that I like to take in a more agile Fashion than to try to get it all right and work for six months to have this perfect strategy and roll it out And then some things were great. Some things weren't great It's kind of neutral overall because it needs to needs to evolve So keys to success here. We all want this experience at the end of the day Not because of the trauma that they went through in Apollo 13 to get there. I want to clarify that point I'm not making light of this, but The keys to success so be flexible working with content UX dev IT other stakeholders. I mean don't think about hosting till the very end And then realize you came and get to the HT access file now. You've got to do things the hard way Or you can't do do something like that Think about all this in advance have conversations if you're more again if it's more than just you controlling the whole process redirects are critical of nothing else do that and When you're in that awkward celebratory moment after you you launched Don't forget to get into the post launch checklist as well and Validation and so then ultimately again, it's not a one-time thing So have a plan after that to transition when you're done monitoring and validating. What's my next step with SEO? Let's incorporate that this into our ongoing marketing activities, so I've got a few articles one one especially in that mapping optimizing Optimizing a you know site for multiple keywords not trying to put all your focus on the home page I've got an article on that as well as to to on the topic of relaunch So that's why this is obviously an important topic for me if you hit up my author page There are there a few resources there, so With that being said we've got I've got some time for questions got 10 minutes so redirects will be a little bit more complicated because you're going from something else to WordPress and Migration and relaunch and all those are in the same boat to me. They'll kind of follow the same process So even if you're not changing you're just going even if you're not changing the look and feel at all Nothing's changing for a user Check those URLs especially if content nothing else is changing, but you're just changing platforms You're coming into WordPress or any or going out of WordPress Nobody in this room is but if that that were the case check your URLs because they may not match up exactly I'm sorry I Excellent questions and things you're considering Alyssa So she's got a client who is who has a separate sub domain with content on it Trying to figure out if they should migrate that in with the brand new site that's launching as well So I'm big on controlling variables So first off I would not do those at the same time because if it's a cluster You're not going to know what did it or or traffic wise you can have some stability and keep it and make sure you get through All the issues and then you can cleanly Know where it's going to go in the architecture and you can cleanly migrate in later Unless there's a business reason where this needs to happen now or branding issue or something like that where it's going to Look obsolete or or it's going to cost you twice as much to keep hosting things separately And you need to do that now on the other on the flip side of it of the decision of whether we should migrate in or not actually just wrote a proposal for For a global company the other day that's just going to audit that fact alone because because the site that the That's like this much of their business in terms of revenue. They want to migrate into the parent company site but the parent but the parent company site SEO Sucks and they have no so it's like do we want to take something that's ranking really well and doing really well and move It in to get the business hierarchy right and the brand hierarchy, right? So we're evaluating that and looking at all options and looking at a lot of extra You know factors like their you know domain rank and page rank in some of the Moz scoring We're looking at link value all those factors to see what the risks are of moving in so that's a very individual decision Yeah Yeah, so voice search and schema markup So schema markup was a wait and see type of thing when it first rolled out and oh nine or twenty ten for me Are we getting wide adoption? Wait and see because it's a lot of work to put something in your site that we don't that's not a ranking factor May or may not help you a lot of industries didn't like it because now you're putting extra code in your pages So Google can take your information and keep people on Google and serve it up there So that was kind of the backlash they got early on but some of the correlation data much like social is the more Structured data markup you have in your site the better your rankings are even though the search engines will scream all day long that we Don't use as a ranking signal So it's a best practice if the investments worth it, especially if you're way down on your checklist of optimization and you can invest that If you have code that can dynamically plug it in great. There's some plugins that are okay some that aren't It is it's context and so that's a really critical piece of it The other part of that voice search This is something that's talked about constantly and Tyler you probably talk about voice search as well You've presented on it and so what's interesting for me. I I work with a handful of National or international brands. I would say that 80% of my clients are in Kansas City and their SMB's so we're not in an Enterprise space where I've got coca-cola or somebody and we can go throw a whole bunch of money into you create a chatbot or AI or whatever it might be and capitalized on voice search It's not usable for me yet and this is so frustrating I have friends who are you know on the Simpo board with me globally who are Bing ads evangelists You know high up at Google everywhere else and they're giving all these talks around the country about voice search And what what's coming and they have been for three years But my response is until you give me search query data of how people are searching Like I can get for tech for for searches people type. I can't change my behavior I'm I shouldn't ignore it. I'm not ignoring it, but at the same time I'm guessing in some areas about my personas and how what their behavior is or I have to look at external cues I can't look at and react and optimize on my site based on what's really happening so until they start showing me the 30-word question that somebody asked Alexa or Cortana or Siri I can't really read and react and optimize through that process So I'm not ignoring it, but you know definitely taking care of the best practices like schema and things like that that will help some But until I have a really good use case for it. It's not part of my day to day yet So I might sound like a dinosaur to some people from bigger agencies and companies in this room who have their own chatbot, but I don't yet Some reason I heard this is another one of these signals Google whoops Yeah, I was just gonna say that seems to me like Yes, so I had a client who came to me was losing 30% organic traffic consistently every month for the past six months and the first thing I found Probably the most there are a few things that are causing it, but the most Frustrating one is that they went to HTTPS Back six months ago and did not configure redirects from every version of the HTTP HTTP www so you've got those four by default now versions Make sure they all redirect into your primary one whether it's with WWW or without it on the HTTPS and make sure they're all doing 301 redirects Because what I found was one of two of them were mirroring the ones that didn't have the s we're mirroring the site One of them was doing a 302. So I was like none of these are doing the right thing And it's not gonna kill you Google can figure out how to work around that But it's not helping you either. And so you're just creating more confusion And not helping yourself and negating some of what you might get by the tiebreaker of having HTTPS I've got two more minutes. So I'm maybe one more question if anybody's got one Yeah, so that's that's Overlooked redirects probably get missed and that more so than they do the website launch process because you're Thinking about a lot of factors for launch if you're like, it's just an IT thing Which is a hosting thing. Let's just go or flywheel gives you an you know SSL for free like many of them do and they're gonna Make sure you understand what WordPress is gonna do for you Or what your host is doing or what you're doing to make sure that all of those are gonna 301 to that one primary version Because that's a case where you're not changing URLs Like on a page-by-page basis, but you're globally changing everything and so it it should take five minutes To do it right But if it's done wrong in those same five minutes and you don't validate it You don't go check it in like redirect check calm check a few of your your homepage and a couple of interior pages to see Make sure they're truly doing a 301 Then yeah, that's a that's like an iceberg type of danger Yeah, redirect check calm you go there and it's got one box It says do a trace or whatever you put your URL in there and then you hit trace And it'll spit out the server heading or the server codes tell you exactly what happens, which is nice because you may have Five redirects and you don't realize them realize it just by putting in your browser. So I'm out of time I appreciate the awesome questions though. This is fun And if you have any more I didn't get answers something pops up catch me Here to the side or afterwards. Thanks