I want to be visible

”I want to be visible”Some Q & A I recently worked on …

“I want to be visible”Some Q & A I recently worked on …

The online company XYZ is introducing an entirely new product

type called Widgets to their portfolio through the acquisition of a

specialist company called ABC. Whilst the company has not sold

these specific products before, they do compliment the other

items the company currently sells. Given your experience and the

scope of the role for which you are applying, what advice would

you give to the Marketing team for the launch of this range?

From the task given it is not clear whether or not XYZ aims to go for a rebranding

or ABC will keep going on its own.

Acquisition certainly offers great space in regards of a rebranding, and for the

sake of this exercise I assume ABC will sooner or later cease to exist, requiring

both the IT team and the SEO / PPC intern to go through a set of migration

strategies.

With such an operation, it is a good time also to assess whether or not some

products should be dismissed, or eventually continue to live beneath the original

brand, hence the first step is determining the extent of the rebrand, which will

typically be determined by the reason for wanting to change market perception.

However, it must be taken in consideration that there could be losses of the

internet market share if the rebranding carries on, negatively affecting the ROI.

Web site changes and SEO implications

Because of the rebranding, integrating the two web sites offering is a crucial

aspect.

None of the traffic previously gained by ABC should be lost. The existing XYZ

(called A from now onward) should host a number of brand new pages equal to

the product offering of ABC (called B from now onward).

During such an operation, the previous pages on B should be 301 redirected to

the brand new pages on A. This will ensure both the customer journey continuity

as well as the greatest part of the previous web site authority to be transferred

toward the new pages.

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It is highly recommended to keep the old web site live for a period of at least 1

year. Considering the cost of the hosting packages, a longer period may be

advisable too.

Both the old and the new web sites should ensure:

- A decent navigational structure so to allow the new pages to be easily reachable

from both the users and the search engines;

- Content copywriting on both sites to be up to date making users clear the

products are now traded underneath a new brand;

The marketing team should endeavour for supporting the SEO team generating

fresh content to be used for the link building in the various form.

PPC Implications

For this specific part, I also assume the acquisition has given company A the

possibility to get access to the existing PPC account with the full history.

Although similar to a site redesign, rebranding an entire site requires changing

the PPC process in some key areas. There are plenty of issues that could come up

depending on the site or the brand’s situation; however, the following key points

should help through a rebranding situation.

Using the new or the old account?

Because during the initial period both the brands will continue to exist, assuming

the AdWords quality score is looking healthy then the old accounts can be used

for transition everything over as the new pages on the site goes live.

Timeline considerations

As the old account will be shut down at a certain point, the structure needs to be

replicated over a new profile. This unlikely means being able to use exactly the

same configuration in place. It is important ensuring an adequate amount of time

for this operation.

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Bid on the old brand

It is fundamental keep the old account going bidding on the legacy brand’s

branded keywords orienting the existing audience to the new brand with specific

PPC ad (e.g. Looking for X. This has now become Y).

This can ensure people making the connection between the two brand identities

and this tactic can be particularly helpful if the legacy site or sites have been

redirected to the new brand’s website.

New Ads

Although the products are the same, and the old brand and the new brand

messages may coincide, it is worth investigating new marketing messages that

may help convert better.

Bidding strategies

By changing the URLs but also the account, the campaign will get a new quality

score. For this reason it will almost impossible maintain the same bidding level.

Higher bids are then expected on the majority of the keywords just to achieve a

similar position / conversion to what the old legacy brand was achieving.

Again the marketing team should work jointly with the SEO & PPC strategist

providing in advance an estimated timeline for all the products launch as well as

an indicative snippet for the PPC ads.

A strong cooperation can only ensure the maximum performances from all the

campaigns.

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Whilst running a regular report for a blog section of XYZ.com's website, you notice the blog post pages are no longer appearing in the top 50 results on Google for keywords featured in the page titles (until recently, they were ranking on the first page of SERPs). Explain what you would do to investigate this change?

As the full URL of the blog has not been revealed, I assume it is running on a

domain name like blog.XYZ.com hence as a separate site.

In order to proceed with such an investigation, it is important to ascertain whether

the loss of rank affects the blog as a whole or just a limited number of pages.

Therefore the first step is querying search engines to ascertain if domain is still

indexed.

Visibility problems may sometimes affect those web site managed by multiple

departments (or companies) due to the publication of pages or configuration files

not yet finalized that end precluding the visibility or contribute to the de-

indexation of the site.

Assuming the site is still indexed, a penalisation is in progress, which nature

(manual or algorithmic) needs to be ascertained.

The two major SEs Webmaster Tool consoles offer a great value of free but site-

specific information revealed in accordance of the most recent algorithm updates.

Although the consoles don’t provide constantly up to date information, whenever

a manual penalisation is on-going, Google is keen to send a message informing

something is potentially wrong.

If no messages are available in the console, everything leads to a site

algorithmically penalised (loss of ranking) and reasons may span in different

areas.

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A checklist to start the investigation is:

- The most recent changes made on the site; a layout change made SEs bot

to entirely re-crawl the site, hence the pages are no longer appearing as a

result of temporary actions; it is always cautious to analyse the trend for a

week or two;

- Whether or not the site is participating in unnatural link building programs

or perhaps an heavy link building strategy that featured always the same

anchor text; the most recent Penguin update is limiting the value of link

resources whilst penalising artificial network regardless the time they have

created (some sites have been affected for links generated over 6 years

ago);

- Content on site is not original and useful for the users (e.g. spinned

content); the most recent Panda update is now heavily penalising duplicate

content;

- The web site is over optimized or uses techniques that deliberately violates

the webmaster guidelines (e.g. keyword stuffing);

- The site has technical issues not properly addressed (e.g. canonicalization

issues, trailing slash, etc.)

Another important aspect is the content copywriting strategy adopted. More than

often, company’s blog is thought as a tool to support the brand, hence limited

SEO activities are conducted to support the blog optimization. If this is the case, in

the light of the most recent Google algorithm changes, this shouldn’t come as a

surprise at all.

Always referring to the blog content copywriting, the limited keywords selection

can be found; more than often, very generic keywords are used in the aim to

boost the ranking performances. Not only this is no longer the case, but it is now

also considered a spam technique, which has contributed only to narrow the

ranking probabilities over time.

As market landscape changes constantly, the above factor if combined with the

competition aspect, have certainly had the dramatic results noticed in the ranking

report.

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Technology

I want to be visible