Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It could be the difference in your on-page optimization.  Have you checked competiton vs. your pages with the http://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader yet?

When you are porting a website, there are several key considerations.

Do you have access to Google Analytics? Google Webmaster Tools? Historical data?

Besides Google SERPs, your traffic may be coming from many different sources. How many are REFERRED from other sites, via external links? How many are DIRECT traffic from old visitors who saved the URL as a favorite, or e-mailed the old URL to a friend?

That is why you need to know your top landing pages, and make sure to handle redirecting old URLs to new URLs.

Since you are changing the URLs, is there any way to redirect each of you OLD URLs to their corresponding new URL? Unless you can do that, your porting will be one step forward, two steps back. Until Google ranks all your new pages (URLs) it will be hit-or-miss. Google may take days, weeks, or months to rank and settle your new URLs into the SERPs.

Hey Mozzers, Are there any good Migration-SEO-QA Tools out there?

Given a prioritized list of URLs and prioritized list of Keywords, is there a tool that can compare basic SEO factors, old URL vs. new URL, and identify all the specific gaps that need to be fixed?

Here is a basic SEO-QA acceptance checklist, for porting any website.

. . . Until the porting work is completed we cannot accept the new website.

Givens:

1. A list of the Top 100 URLs from the old site, prioritized by conversion rates, landing page traffic, and inbound links.

2. A list of the planned 404 - mapped URLs, old to new site, from the porting team.

3. A list of the current Top 200 Keywords, prioritized.

4. A good amount of SEO work has already been done, by several professionals, for the current (old) site.

**How to evaluate if the new site will be acceptable to Google?  Check ON-PAGE SEO Factors... **

**. . . that is, the NEW site must be AS GOOD AS (or better than) the current (old) site,
in the eyes of Google, to preserve the On-Page SEO work already done. **

Criteria:

• URLs ok? :: Is the URL mapping ok, old to new, best web page?
• LINKS ok :: Are all internal LINKS and keyword Anchor Text ported?
• TEXT ok :: On-page content, TEXT and keywords ok?
• TITLE ok :: HTML Title and title keywords ok?
• DESCRIPTION ok :: HTML Meta Description ok?
• H1, H2 ok :: HTML H1, H2 and keywords ok?
• IMG kwds :: HTML IMG and ALT keywords ok?
• URL kwds :: URL - keywords in new URLs ok?

Potential porting defects:

• Keywords in URL missing:
• Keywords in HTML Title missing:
• Keywords in Meta Description missing:
• Any internal LINKS or Link anchor text missing:
• Keywords in Page TEXT missing:
• H1, H2 missing keywords:
• HTML IMG alt-text, IMG file URLs, any missing keywords:

Notes:

• Until the porting work is completed we cannot accept the new site, or set a target date for potential cutover. There are eight (8) data items per URL, and about one hundred (100) URLs to be considered for SEO-QA before going live. We were expecting to cutover before the end of February, at the latest. There is no point in doing full QA acceptance-tests until the porting work is completed.
• QA spot-checks have found far too many defects. About 60% of the landing-page traffic comes via the top 40 URLs. With over 100 URLs to look at, it can take more than a week or two just to do SEO-QA in detail, manually, item-by-item, page-by-page, side-by-side, old vs. new.
• Spot-checks indicate a business disaster would occur unless the porting defects are fixed before going live.

_Any Migration-QA Tools?_Given a prioritized list of URLs and prioritized list of Keywords, is there a tool that can compare basic On-Page SEO factors, old URL vs. new URL, and identify most of the specific gaps that need to be fixed before going live with the new site?

_ *** Edit: Any comments on the SEO criteria, tools, or methods will be appreciated!_

An image with no image? That would be just like an HTML error. It would be a mistake to think that doint this would be good for your SEO.

Here is a technique that may work for you.

In Google Analytics, you can go to:

Acquisition...
Keywords...
Organic...  (Or paid)

Sort by highest bounce rate.

You may see a lot of one-offs that may not be very relevant, so it's useful to add some filtering.

So, set some advanced filters, such as:

Site usage... Bounce rate... greater than 50

Site usage... Visits... greater than 5.

Which may filter out some of the noise.

Sort by bounce rate to see the highest bounce rate keywords.

Remember that more than half will be not provided, probably, but this will give you a sampling of keywords with the highest bounce rate.

Also, perhaps the bounce rate is high because they found what they wanted to know on that page very quickly. Sometimes a satisfied visitor bounces.

Here is a correction :: Posting on Google+ is not the same as Google+1's.

Google +1's Amazing Correlation with Higher Search Rankings - Moz

http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations

by Cyrus Shepard - in 11,464 Google+ circles
Aug 20, 2013 - Many publishers have added Google+ authorship information to their websites in order for author photos to appear in Google search results. . . . _(Edit: This should say "posting on Google+" instead of Google +1s. It's clear that Google doesn't use the raw number of +1s directly in its search algorithm, but Google+ posts have SEO benefits unlike other social platforms.) _— August 20th, 2013 - Posted by Cyrus Shepard

I have been using GSERP.com for several months now, and it seems to be reliable and accurate. It is free, in beta-test, with no pricing plans yet announced. The rankings correlate well with actual Google search query results, and are updated on a daily basis.

It has a few quirks, such as the graphing feature usability (not being able to deselect all and then select specific keywords, you have to deselect keywords one-by-one, as far as I can tell.) Also, be sure to set your default country correctly.

The GSERP results are downloadable, which makes it handy to keep track week-to-week and month-to-month and compare results with the average SERP rankings you see in Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools.

There are several other good rank tracking tools, but most cost $50 per month, more or less.

Ricky,

One question.. All things being equal (and they never are) are you certain that the ONLY change that Google sees is the WWW change?

There are so many ranking factors that can be involved when creating a new site to replace an old site, such as keywords in the context of each page, keywords in Title tag, Meta description, text-on-page, IMG tags, etc...

Was this a direct port of the old content of each page, Titles, Descriptions, etc?  Page-for-page?

What about the IP address of the web host, and whatever Google thinks about that neighborhood.

There are so many factors to consider that could explain a change in SERP ranking.  Rankings can fluctuate up or down, day-to-day, depending on hundreds of factors, including whatever the competition may be doing...

Thanks for the vote, but if you have something to say, why not add it? Is my interpretation of the ranking factors wrong?

Interesting... one of my clients has the opposite problem. Bounce rate is over 50% yet average pages per visit is over 4 and average time per page is over 3 minutes. Peter's suggestion seems to be a very good one. Check individual pages to see who needs fixing the most. Put more oil on the squeaky wheels.

Note that  **http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors  **shows:

URL Starts with 'www'  0.03

Indicates that SEO experts have determined thru testing, search engines may slightly prefer the WWW to be canonical, if I am interpreting that correctly.

So, you may want to make the WWW version the canonical one.

Use a 301 to redirect the non-WWW to the WWW version, for the entire site.

Use Google Webmaster tools to set the WWW as the preferred domain.

Also, your # of Google +1's may need help.  Have you compared your backlink profile with that of your competitors lately?

Yes, we have 301 redirects ready for the top 100 pages that bring us over 97% of our traffic and our inbound links.

However, I have concerns about the page content. Since the site navigation and architecture is very different between the old and new backend, what will Google do if page content changes?

My thinking is, the content must be as good or better than the old site, otherwise Google will not look favorably on the new website.

How important are keywords in URLs vs. keywords in page content text, HTML headings, Meta Descriptions, IMG tags, internal link anchor text, etc...

Fellow Mozzers,

While doing an SEO assessment to prepare for migrating an e-commerce website from one shopping cart platform to another, many questions arise. The old site is being ported to a new platform, and testing can soon begin. Meanwhile, trying to predict or understand how Google will react to this site migration, before going live, and head off or correct problems before they occur.

What SEO tools can help to do a website audit, to compare two equivalent sites, the live site and the test site? (URLs, keywords, page titles, meta descriptions, etc.)

Background from SEO perspective

The website is about 10 years old, and has had only minor changes in the past few years.

There are over 10,000 inbound links from over 500 domains.

Nearly 80% of the traffic comes from search, and only 20% is paid search, so 60% is organic.

About 80% of the visitors are new, and 20% returning.

The present conversion rate is low, below 3%.

There are over 20,000 visitors per month on the average, with some cyclical, seasonal variations, spring and fall peaks.

There are about 20 pages that receive 60% and 100 pages that receive 98% of all the site entrances, with over 1,000 pages on the site. There are over 200 products in about 30 sub-categories.

There are also about 100 landing pages accounting for 98% of all the referral traffic, and all those URLs will have 301 redirects on the new platform.

Old site was PHP based, new site is ASP.NET based dynamic web pages. The new URLs will be quite different from the old URLs due to platform differences.

SEO Questions for Migration —— Keywords and URLs?

Besides concerns for keywords in HTML Page Titles, Meta Description. HTML Headings, IMG tags, internal-link anchor text, and page content itself, how important will the URL keywords be? Are keywords in URLs still important?

Are keywords in URL Parameters after the ? (new site, asp.net) considered as valuable as keywords in URLs (old site, php) or not?

Some examples:

old-site:

www.storebrandname.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html

new-site:

www.storebrandname.com/default.aspx?keyword1 keyword2 keyword3

i.e.

www.storebrandname.com/default.aspx?keyword1 keyword2 keyword3

For about 20% of the top 100 pages there are other kinds of URLs, such as:

/keyword1-keyword2-keywpord3.html
becomes
/category/keyword/Default.aspx
or
/category/keyword1/keyword2-keyword3/Default.aspx

also

/brandname-productname-keyword1-keyword2.html
becomes
/product/brandname-productname-keyword1-keyword2/Default.aspx

i.e. old URL file names, in effect, become new URL sub-directory names, within a subdirectory.

The new shopping cart uses /product/ and /category/ subdirectories whilst the old one did not.

Can you describe any (good or bad) experiences with shopping cart migrations, or speak to any of these specific concerns regarding keywords and URLs?

Can you make any predictions about how Google will respond to the new URL structure?

Any other concerns or tips about shopping cart migrations?

Thanks!

Hi Adnan,

If I understand your question, you have a page for each specific product, yes? So, you may want THAT page to rank better than most of your OTHER pages, for a specific search query relevant to the name of that product?

This is a very common issue for any shopping cart system. So, any good shopping cart CMS would be SEO friendly enough to ensure the product name is used prominently in the page title tag, and in an H1 or H2 heading tag, IMG alt tag, etc... Then, it's up to you to have a high-quality and relevant product description (page text) that uses good SEO for your important and related keywords and interesting content. That is what's important for on-page SEO.

I am not yet sure how hummingbird would affect this, just use the basic SEO good practices for on-page content, and you should do well.

The question then becomes, have you prioritized your keywords, including long-tail, for each product and it's own webpage? Have you optimized your content accordingly?

Hope that helps.

1% response rate is much lower than I would have expected from public libraries. Have your respondents given you any feedback?

A more personal approach may have much better results. You could have your local staff ask a parent to visit the library and speak to someone in authority, starting with the reference desk, who are usually very helpful. Ask the parent to get the name of a person who has authority to add this type of content to the library's website, and approach them directly. That may even be the library reference desk staff. Give the parent a briefing and something to deliver to the library staff.

The library may be more responsive to a library patron, a local parent, who would recommend your services.

In my own experience, good category names are very, very important. Have you prioritized your top 10 or 20 keyword search phrases? Those should be worked into your top level categories. I have recently seen reasonable benefits from redesigning categories and subcategories, and of course 301 redirecting popular old ones to the new ones diligently.