Some Q&A on which I worked on recently ... to support online visibility.

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

2. “I want to be visible”
Some Q & A I recently worked on …
The online company XYZis 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.
Pagina2

3. “I want to be visible”
Some Q & A I recently worked on …
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.
Pagina3

4. “I want to be visible”
Some Q & A I recently worked on …
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.
Pagina4

5. “I want to be visible”
Some Q & A I recently worked on …
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 consolesdon’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.
Pagina5

6. “I want to be visible”
Some Q & A I recently worked on …
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.
Pagina6