Highlight Drupalcamp Zaragoza 2022: Talk “Key Ingredient of a Successful Website Relaunch” by Irina Khramtsova

In this talk we met Irina Khramtsova, an Online Marketing Specialist within the company 1xINTERNET. She showed incredible knowledge in Digital and Social Marketing Management.

Juanlu and I were lucky enough to be able to find familiar faces in their company 1xINTERNET, such as Lara Garrido and Fran Seva, and also was a great pleasure to meet their colleagues Alberto Saldaña Contreras and Jose Montiel Nieves, who were Speakers at this Drupalcamp Spain 2022.

 

 

 

In the talk Irina commented and explained what the key ingredient is, which processes should we follow and which way should we take in each phase of the project to achieve the success in the re-launch of your site.

In one of the slides, she explained the possible combinations that exists and on which it depends to launch the site or not. Let’s talk about it but with not so much spoilers, because as soon as the video of the talk comes out on the official AED vimeo account I strongly recommend you to watch it.

Irina commented the possible combinations that we can find.

• “Site location” (where possible problems first arise).
• “Platform” (hosting changes).
• “Content” (change the content of a homepage or make it multilanguage).
• “Structure” and “Project and UX” (they covered the points of a functional structure restyling and as we well know, UX will change the entire visual part).

Anyone who is reading any of the previous points and seen the possible combinations, has remembered problems that are not very "funny" to solve. Irina called these “not very funny to solve” problems as an alternative path, I would call it a cliff, but she also showed us the other “Seo-friendly” path that we all seek: visible and tangible results and which we will continue talking about.

I recommend as soon as the video is available, that you pay attention to the Relaunch Process part.

But she also showed us the SEO-friendly way to work, which will take us to visible and tangible results. I recommend as soon as the video is available, that you pay attention to the Re-launch Process part.

Each phase is important as well as the combinations to take into account and to know what the pre-launch, re-launch and post-launch process is, what must be verified, taken into account and if we followed the correct path, the results will speak for themselves.

She highlighted the pillars of SEO that will help us to take into account a series of guidelines during the process of our re-launch that we will see below:

 

On-page SEO covers the tactics you use on your site to help search engines better understand and rank your content. From creating great content on your site, optimizing title tags, meta tags, and header tags; to internal links, image optimization and more. All of this is considered part of on-page SEO.

Off-page SEO includes those tactics that relate to activities performed outside of your own website. Link building is often considered the number one off-page tactic. However, this also includes tactics like content marketing, social media, podcast engagement, reviews, local citation generation, and more.

Technical SEO covers those tasks that directly impact the indexing and crawling of your site by search engines. Some argue that this is part of on page SEO. However, it is also considered a discipline of its own, as it encompasses: site speed optimization, structured data, canonicalization, hreflang, and more - all of these are considered part of technical SEO.

 

 

If it is not enough, she left us some tools and tips to carry out in each phase:

 

-Tips- PHASE 1: ON-PAGE SEO > TECHNICAL

• Run full website crawl and export all internal crawl data.
• Analyze website architecture.
• Check for indexation & security issues.
• Check for page speed insights issues.
• Check for multilingual issues (hreflang).
• Check for structure data issues.
• Check XML Sitemap.

-Tools- PHASE 1: ON-PAGE SEO > TECHNICAL

• Screaming Frog.
• PageSpeed Insights (SF API).

-Tips- PHASE 2: ON-PAGE SEO > CONTENT

• Analyse top traffic pages & conversion pages.
• Analyse existing search rankings.
• Define a list of priority URLs.
• Check for content optimization issues.
• Check for cannibalization issues.
• Check for internal linkings issues.
• Create metamap with focus keywords and plan new website architecture.

-Tools- PHASE 2: ON-PAGE SEO > CONTENT

• Google Search Console (SF API).
• Google Analytics (SF API).
• Semrush, Sistrix, Ahrefs (SF API), Majestic (SF API), MOZ (SF API).

-Tips- PHASE 3: OFF-PAGE SEO > BACKLINKS

• Run backlink profile audit.
• Extract all existing backlinks. 
• Extract all existing backlinks from high authority domains.
• Analyze backlinks for toxicity.
• Check for backlinks opportunities (broken links).
• Create a list of URLs with backlinks to keep.
• For most important backlinks: contact webmasters.

-Tools- PHASE 3: OFF-PAGE SEO > BACKLINKS

• Google Search Console (SF API).
• Semrush, Sistrix, Ahrefs (SF API), Majestic (SF API), MOZ (SF API).

-Tips- PHASE 4: IMPLEMENTATION

• Get access to stage version.
• Crawl stage version.
• Check for potential issues/ loops.
• Implement 301 redirects.
• Set-up custom 404 page.
• Give "green light" for relaunch .

-Tools- PHASE 4: IMPLEMENTATION

• Screaming Frog.
• Redirectinator v 1.1.

Irina left some examples of possible problems with redirects if the above paths and processes were not especially careful and well thought out. Which was quite familiar to us.

-Tips- PHASE 5: MONITORING

• Crawl new live website.
• Check XML sitemap & robots.txt.
• Check Google Search Console.
• Check traffic in Google Analytics.
• Check PageSpeed Insights.
• Monitor for at least 4 weeks.

-Tools- PHASE 5: MONITORING

• Screaming Frog.
• Google Search Console (SF API).
• Google Analytics (SF API).
• Semrush, Sistrix, Ahrefs (SF API), Majestic (SF API), MOZ (SF API).
• PageSpeed Insights (SF API).
• Redirectinator v 1.1.

And after have followed this whole process, a well-deserved vacation with the project at the top of the search engines!

A talk and speaker worthy of a Drupal event. From today we will apply and test these tools and we hope to see more talks like this in future Drupal events.

I keep Irina’s favorite phrase and my favorite: “All good performance starts with clear goals”. Kenneth H. Blanchard