SEO News

My five highlighted trends which are marketing/digital focused

1. Multichannel

Some people call this ‘omnichannel’ or ‘integrated marketing’. Whatever you call it this is a ‘megatrend’ for me that will last for years to come but will be big for 2014.

Angela Ahrendts, the Burberry CEO who is moving to Apple as SVP of Retail, says it succinctly: “Online, offline, it’s gotta be the same”.  

2. Real-time

In the same category as ‘always on’ and ‘agile’. Some of this is about technology (e.g. RTB or real-time analytics) but really it is about process and people.

2014 will see more focus on marketing teams trying to work in ways that are more ‘real-time’. 

3. Responsive

2014 will see big efforts to make all digital experiences responsive so they adapt to the screen and context of use. Most obviously this applies to optimising the mobile experience in its many forms. 

4. Personalisation

Another megatrend that I think will be big in 2014, but will continue for years yet.

2014’s efforts will still largely be about personalising digital experiences but increasingly it’ll be about personalised multichannel experiences (see my first trend). 

5. Marketing Automation

This is part of the megatrend that is data-driven marketing and decision-making. It sits closely alongside CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) that will also be a major focus for companies in 2014.

Marketing Automation has historically been largely the domain of B2B but this year we’ll see the thinking and technology applied to B2C too. 

And my five selected trends which are technology-focused

6. “Internet of Everything”

This has been big news at CES in Las Vegas last week. Connected cars, smart health services, and of course the ‘conscious home’ that Google’s acquisition of Nest for $3.2bn, announced yesterday, has further propelled into the limelight. 

7. Wearables

This is really a sub-set of the previous point but is worth highlighting. Google Glass was big last year.

The likes of Oculus Rift and Meta’s Space Glasses show what is possible. Internet-connected ‘wellness’ devices, watches, even fabrics will proliferate in 2014. 

8. Sensors

This too relates to the previous two points. Whether it is audio (e.g. Nuance), gesture (e.g. Myo), or structure sensors that can capture and transmit 3D images (for 3D printing among other things) the world of internet-connected sensors is exploding and will be exciting in 2014. 

9. Geotargeting

Apple’s launch of iBeacons late last year have propelled localisation and geotargeted communications back into the limelight. 2014 is being heralded as the year of BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) as the tech that will really help this catch on.

Whichever technology wins out, 2014 and beyond will see more localised and personalised experiences delivered for both content, marketing and payments.

10. Payments

The payments space was exciting last year but will further accelerate this year with huge amounts of activity from both start-ups and the bigger players.

Payments will seek to become ‘frictionless’. They will become more mobile, integrated with social, and even voice-enabled. 

The above are just 10 that I’ve selected as the most ‘front of mind’ for me at the moment but do download the full 40+ page free report for all my trends and predictions across the 10 core digital topics Econsultancy covers.

Below is a picture of keyword metrics for an ecommerce client of my company. The colours represent search visibility: dark green is the portion of hyper-visible kewords, where the domain appeared in the top three positions, and on the other end of the spectrum gray means unranked. They appeared beyond page ten or not at all.

You can see a dramatic change around September, when the site redesign launched (or, should I say, flailed).

When things went wrong, they went very wrong indeed: at one point, close to 100,000 keywords were returning 404 pages, and the domain disappeared completely from the hyper-traffic positions (1-3). That means this company wasn’t even ranking for branded terms.

The good news is that this site has recovered. Still, it took months, and anyone would cringe to think of the lost revenue.

This happens more often than you might think. There’s a lot to consider as an SEO preparing for a site redesign or migration, but we do notice drastic problems tend to come from the same mistakes over and over again.

We’ve boiled that down into three crucial areas and corresponding ways to prevent similar site redesign disasters.

1. Take inventory and set up tracking

When our client’s site began to tank, one of the first things they did was add more keywords to track, understandably wanting to optimize more pages in order to regain search visibility.

The problem was that for all those keywords they were suddenly paying attention to, there was no benchmark or context. If a new keyword wasn’t ranking, was it because of a problem caused by the site redesign, or was it something unrelated?

Would the original site have ranked for those keywords? It was impossible to tell.

So, as you prepare for a site relaunch, identify your assets (what pages are already naturally attracting links and social traction?) and record your trends and metrics.

If you go into a restructuring with an established baseline, you’ll be able to recognize that there is a problem much earlier — the patterns foretelling disaster are subtle until, well, you’re not ranking for your own brand.

Knowing your baseline metrics can also help you locate what part of your site is damaged and fix it that much more efficiently.

Here are some key metrics to gather:

• Internal link count for top-performing pages.
• Natural search traffic.
• Search engine rankings on top terms.
• Page load times.
• Number of indexed pages in search engines.
• Number of keywords (use Bing and Yahoo).
• Number of unique landing pages that are driving natural search.

2. Hone your sitemap strategy

Make sure you have a sitemap strategy in place to help the search engines reindex your site. Sitemaps help search engines identify your content (including images and videos).

They also act as a tiebreaker for duplicate content issues and assist in redirects. You should create two sitemaps: one for your old urls, and the other for new.

After you’ve created your sitemaps (templates are available here), make sure you submit it to Google AND Bing. Bing, especially, relies on sitemaps, and failing to submit it there amounts to lost revenue.

3. Redirect with care

Of course, if you don’t have to change your URL structure, that’s ideal. You would save yourself a lot of time, risk, and preserve your social equity (unfortunately social signals like tweets and likes don’t follow from one URL to another).

If you do determine it’s necessary to change your URL structure, make sure you document all of your existing URLs (301s and 302s) before the migration.

Then, establish a 1:1 relationship for all your URLs. Double and triple check that your valuable pages are redirected, so that you don’t lose your PageRank.

Only you can prevent site redesign disaster

Over and over again, we see underprepared sites take a serious hit after a redesign. More often than not, it’s a lack of preparation: inadequate baseline metrics, no sitemap strategy, and sloppy redirects.

It’s a sturdy old adage that applies here: prevention really is the best medicine.

As you can probably guess, there’s a lot more to preparing for a site redesign than just these three major pain points. You’ll want to clean up the original site of old 404s to prepare for the new. You’ll want to prepare marketing messaging to create buzz and earn links and traffic to establish the new site.

You’ll also want to set the expectations of others in your company, especially the leadership team, for the natural fluctuations that occur during and right after a redesign.

For more depth on the topic, check out this site redesign webinar, or of course, start a discussion in the comments!