A website relaunch is an important and nerve-wracking moment for every organization: it’s exciting to reveal a new brand or approach (and hours of hard work) to the world. But far too often, it’s a cringeworthy moment when things go awry – things that can have a lasting effect on the website’s performance in the future. Consider this your word of caution: you’ve got to nail the site flip! Here’s how.
Checklist for Managing Google Ads through a Site Redesign or Relaunch
As your site changes, your strategy for using the Google Ad Grant (or paid Google Ads) should change, too. Follow each of the steps below when managing your campaigns through a site redesign or relaunch to ensure your campaigns stay up to date.
Plan to turn off old campaigns
If you’re deleting any pages from your site that are currently receiving ad traffic, and you’re not putting up a similar page that could act as landing page for the same ads, plan on deleting the campaign.
Plan for new campaigns
During the site relaunch process you have probably spent a lot of time reworking your site’s content and your priorities may have changed. Is there a new section of the site you really want eyeballs on? A new action people can take that wasn’t there before? Immediately after launch is a great time to set up new campaigns to promote these resources.
Map out new URLs and plan to update ad landing pages
Having ads pointing to old, now non-existent URLs (404s) is a violation of Google Ad Grant policy (and a terrible user experience). If the URLs of any of your website pages are changing, you will need to update the destination URLs of the ads that point to those pages. Use Google Analytics to generate a list of all the Final URLs that are currently being used in your Google Ads account. Make a spreadsheet with “Old URL” in one column and “New URL” in the next column. Use this to plan out the migration. Then, log into Google Ads post-site launch and update any ads that are sending to the same URL.
Update sitelink extensions
After mapping out your URL updates, make sure URLs used in sitelink extensions are updated, too.
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SEO and Web Tracking Checklist for Site Relaunch
Here’s a site launch checklist of other items that are often neglected but can have a long-term effect on SEO and tracking. If your eyes are glazing over reading this, don’t worry. Most developers should know what these items mean, so send them this article and they should be able to help you out. Or, check out the links to dive deeper into these areas!
Pre-Site Relaunch Checklist for Tracking and SEO
- Plan for 301 Redirects. 301 redirects ensure that if users click on links anywhere on the internet that contain old URLs, they will still land in a helpful place on your site.
- Make a list of all the URLs that are changing, and create a spreadsheet that maps the old URL to the new URL.
- Make a list of any URLs that will not be migrated to the new site (i.e. any pages you are getting rid of and not revamping). Make a spreadsheet that marks which new, relevant URL this should link to instead.
- Plan for Google Analytics migration. Make a spreadsheet of any hard-coded event tags and their location (i.e. button clicks or downloads you’re tracking with specific code snippets) and add these onto the new site before it goes live. Better yet, use Google Tag Manager to manage all your tags in one place. If you are not using Google Tag Manager to deploy your basic GA tracking code, that will also need to be migrated over or all basic GA tracking (sessions, pageviews, users, etc) will discontinue. Finally, make sure you know how all current events are being tracked and how they will change on the new site.
- Design for SEO. Make sure the site navigation, tagging system, naming conventions, and coding practices are designed with SEO in mind. This includes coding in a lightweight way that will keep page load time down, and making the site mobile friendly.
- Test, test, test. Test out forms, like email subscription forms and contact forms, to make sure they are pushing the right data to the right places. Close review can be the difference between a successful site launch and a big disaster.
Post-Site Relaunch Checklist for Tracking and SEO
- Set up 301 Redirects. Set up 301 redirects according to your plan above – make them live in whatever CMS you are using.
- Check for 404s. Using Google Search Console, Moz, or Google Analytics, pull a list of all the URLs that are bringing users to a 404 page (this would be any URLs you missed while setting up 301 redirects above). Make a spreadsheet that notes the correct URL, and set these up as 301 redirects.
- Check Google Analytics using Real Time reports. Use real time reports to make sure data is coming through and that all custom events, goals, or reports are behaving as expected.
- Check Google Search Console. Check Google Search Console for any other high- or medium-priority crawl errors. During this step we once saw that a site’s robots.txt file was making the entire site uncrawlable – if we hadn’t caught it within 24 hours this would have wreaked havoc on their traffic!
- Make sure your old site will not be crawlable by search engines. Depending on the platform and the way the “flip” happens, there are different ways of doing this.
- Create and a new sitemap. Upload it to Google Search Console.
- Add metadata. Make sure all new pages have custom meta descriptions, title tags, and any other metadata needed.
- Check organic traffic trends. Keep an eye on your organic traffic in the weeks after the site relaunch.. If there is a major dip (20% or more) that doesn’t seem to be returning, there is likely a technical issue getting in the way of organic growth.
- Perform a site speed audit. Use tools like Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights tool. Long page load times will drag down SEO, so find slow pages and optimize them for faster load time by decreasing image file sizes, removing Flash code, etc.
- Rescrape important pages for social media. This Facebook Debugger tool lets you re-crawl specific pages (one by one or in batches) to make sure that, when people share your site’s URLs on social media, the most updated information on your site is shown.
Need help?
Whole Whale’s customizable “Ready, Set, Launch” package focuses on ensuring smooth site relaunches so your organization won’t lose out on any paid or organic traffic during or after your relaunch. We’ll work with your development firm to nail the relaunch without skipping a beat. Get in touch for more information.