Creative and Search Agency Collaboration

How should creative agencies and search agencies collaborate when relaunching a website?

The key part of any site build and launch is continuity for the search engines.  Few brands are creating websites for the first time nowadays (although SMEs are).  For me, the key parts of this agency collaboration are based around making sure the visitor experience for the new site is an improvement on the old one.

You must not lose any of the strong key word traffic which the old site had.  And so a careful keyword tactical plan ensuring similar phrases are used on the major website pages, meta descriptions and alt tags is needed.

Secondly, check whether the URL structure is going to change or not.  Frequently ecommerce stores use different structures and so this risks breaking all the historic data for the site.  Set up a 301 redirect so that traffic gets to the right page.

As a marketing agency, I always recommend running an inbound campaign to drive traffic to the new site as soon after it launches as possible. This starts the process of “re-educating” the search engines about the new site structure as quickly as possible.  And above all, test and measure EVERYTHING.

This was a submitted answer for Northcutt’s Experts, Gurus and other Mythical Entities article series.

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