How to Quickly Remove A Former Employee From Your Website

One of Many?

If the former employee is currently displayed on a page with one or more others, then this could end up being quite easy. Just remove them from the page and you’re about done. Confirm that the “meta description” and “meta title” areas don’t contain any of their personal information. For good measure also remove their primary image from the site’s image collection.

Their Own Unique Page

If the employee had their own page on the company website, then completely removing it from the site is a good start. But, since copies of most online content are stored in search engine’s memories, you may want a more immediate separation between brand and individual.

Get Them Removed from Google, Quick!

A 301 Redirect can be sued to tell search engines that the content has been moved permanently. 301 redirects, for any outdated URL, can be created by your website admin, WordPress plugins, or IT team. Rather than using the 301 Redirect to send visits back to the homepage, the 301 can serve up a replacement page to future visitors who attempt to access the ex-employee’s page. Pages such as a Team Overview or About Us are good candidates for use as replacements, to help visitors get back on track and accessing profiles of just current team members.

Keep Their Blog Posts?

If having some old blog posts by a former employee is problematic then consider removing the post or changing the post’s authorship to a generic author name if appropriate.

Get Them Removed from Google, Quick!

Make sure that the site’s dynamic sitemap is linked up and sending notice of revised and removed page content, directly and automatically to Google and Bing. Both have a verified Webmaster Tools area that is used to link your sitemap. Once logged in you can also request specific pages be hidden from appearing in SiteLinks, which are the subsection links that sometimes appear beneath the main website link, usually when a website is the top most relevant search result.

Finding the Trail of Digital Breadcrumbs

Once the company website content is scrubbed it’s time to do some search engine testing, to see what results come up. How unique is their name, and how closely is it associated with your brand? Depending on the quantity, visibility and positive/negative sentiment of the links that appear in search results, you may want to update external sites and also consider creating some new branded content to hopefully push older content downwards in search. Creating a social media policy ahead of time can also help by clarifying the obligations for employee and employer upon termination of employment.

Hopefully your business website is using informative online content to highlight the depth of the talent within your company. If not, then getting a plan together for what to do when an employees leaves should give you the confidence to start showcasing your staff more often online.

Design: Training Your Website Review Team

Who do you turn to for design advice? While there are many many tools available to perform testing and analysis, sometimes the data raises more question than it answers. So if you make many of your design and marketing decisions “from your gut”, then welcome to the club! I encourage everyone to go with their gut first and foremost. But for your most important marketing or website changes, it’s comforting to be able to share it with your family and friends pre-launch, asking for their suggestions. Any feedback is good feedback, right? Wrong! In order to squeeze the most actionable business insights from their comments, you’ll want to carefully select a review team and give them a framework to provide helpful comments:

• Explain the characteristics of your target audience, and ask them to act the part of that demographic.
• Try to get them to consider every question you ask from the perspective of the target audience.
• Simple questions, such as “which do you think would persuade my audience best, version A or B?” are more easily measured than open-ended ones.

Lucky you if a professional website designer is among your closest friends, to give you a professional perspective. But the very best reviewer is an actual client or someone who closely fits the demographic of your audience. Regardless of who you choose for your team, the extra time that it takes to train them will pay off when they start giving you more usable feedback.

Fine Tune: Your Content Strategy

It’s easy to see how your site is ranking for your highest priority keywords by taking a quick look at your Google Webmaster Tools “Traffic / Search Queries” tab. If your target terms aren’t showing up here try checking your rank using a rank tracking tool. Now that you know what Google considers you relevant for, and where you rank, create content with a short list of target keywords in mind. To improve your ranking for your target terms, include them in prominent areas of your site. But don’t force the keywords in — just keep adding content. And ask yourself before posting:

• does the content help inform and educate?
• does it make sense to the intended audience?
• is it high quality, creative and entertaining?
• does it contain the target terms?

Search engines may change the way they rank sites over time, but consistently posting high quality content will never go out of style.

Analytics: Link Up Your Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics continues to add features to help website managers to better understand and improve their sites. Many of the more advanced views now require your Google Webmaster Tools account to be linked up in Google Analytics. Not sure if you’re accounts are linked up? Try viewing Traffic Sources / Search Engine Optimization and you may see a message saying “This report requires Webmaster Tools to be enabled” with a button that says “Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing”. Clicking the setup button and linking the correct Google Webmaster Tools profile now allows search term impressions and clicks to be viewed right in your Google Analytics dashboard. Even if you don’t plan to look at your Google Analytics right away, take this step now.

Research: Never Stop Spying On Your Competitors

Just like having a target keyword list in critical in judging your search-engine success, creating and updating a competitor “watch list” can help you with tactical decisions and allocation of marketing budgets. The same type of ongoing analysis that you perform on your own site can easily be performed occasionally on your competitors or other best-in-class companies, to see where they lag behind your offering, where they are improving, and where they meet or exceed your efforts. Google Alerts is a decent place to start with monitoring competitors and your own brand mentions. Alexa.com and Compete.com both offer free comparison data, just plug in your site then a few example sites and see approximately where you rank for traffic. Charts and data from Compete and Alexa are often inaccurate, at least with their free offerings, so use it for general research purposes only.

Monitoring: Your Site’s Health

Help Google stay up to date on changes to your content structure by occasionally checking your Google Webmaster Tools under Diagnostics for “Crawl Errors”. If you see any 404 Page Not Found errors, a 301 Redirect can be added to redirect traffic from the old URL to a similar page on your current site.

Keep up with other site performance tips over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Now it’s time to find out what keywords are popular in your niche. Choose your favorite keyword research tool and dive right in! The Google Keyword Tool is a good free option. The actual reported volume numbers are higher in Google’s tool than with other keyword tools, but if you ignore the specific numbers, the relative volumes are identical from tool to tool. Other keyword research options include:

• Find real-time suggestions by typing the beginning of your term into the search box in Google and YouTube to see what their “instant” feature suggests
• Peruse your top competitor’s websites to see what keywords they mention most.

Start with terms that are highly relevant — terms that your website visitors would use when they’re looking for exactly what you do. Create lists of possible keywords, then roughly group them by type and search volume. Beware of search phrases containing one or two words, which are highly competitive and also less likely to convert into customers. Terms with three or more words are likely to be closer the sweet spot for lead generation. Even though the multi-word phrases often have much lower overall search volume, they will deliver more qualified visitors to your site.

Branded vs. (Potentially) Lead Generating Terms

Let’s take fictional entity Bob’s Builders, a builder of custom homes in Pasadena, California, and operated by Bob Stevens. The different search terms used to get to the website can easily be grouped into Branded and Potentially Lead Generating keyword categories.

Branded terms will likely make up a good portion of the keyword traffic:

• bob builders
• bobs builders pasadena
• bob builders los angeles (not everyone knows Bob is in Pasadena so they use the metro area term)
• bobs builders la (people in Los Angeles often type LA)
• bob stevens (many people know Bob personally but not his company name)

Terms with lead generating potential might include:

• custom builders pasadena
• commercial builders pasadena
• custom builders glendale (an adjacent community)
• builders pasadena

A business website will typically rank well already for most branded terms. Where things get interesting though is with the potentially profitable, lead generating terms.

Your (Changing) List of Target Terms

So you’ve researched for hours, reviewed your competitors’ sites, and you’ve got a pretty tight list of target keywords for your site. If you haven’t already asked your marketing team for a “keyword wish list” do it now. Keep things simple initially and focus on phrases that the site is currently showing up on the SERPs for. Google Webmaster Tools gives decent data on what terms the site is ranking for and also the terms that are driving your website traffic. The rank checker tool from SEOmoz gives slightly rosier results, showing SERP placements about 5 better than Webmaster Tools.

For each top keyword track success organically by looking at two metrics:

• Goal Conversion Rate for the Conversion Goals set up in Google Analytics
• Successful form fillouts

If your business is using paid search, you’ll have a different list of keywords to target specific to your paid search campaign. Issues of organic ranking, competitor activity, and bid cost will help define ideal target terms for your paid search campaign. One benefit of paid search is the keyword analysis opportunities that you get once you have paid for top placement for terms that the site would not normally rank for. There will always be a few terms that the site is struggling with organically, and a modest PPC budget can help by boosting the site’s visibility for terms it’s ranking poorly for.

If a term is not leading to visitors filling out a lead capture form, and the visitors from that term are not hitting the conversion goals, then it may be time to eliminate the term from your list. If you have accumulated enough visitor data to make an accurate assessment, and all signs point to failure, why keep trying? I’d say it’s time to dump that keyword, or put it on the back burner and try again later once your site has enough new relevant content to satisfy those visitors.

Look At Your Keywords Through A Profitability Filter

Ideally the terms you select for your initial keyword target list will appear in your website analytics with enough frequency to make the sample size large enough to allow for accurate analysis. Once your site is engaging visitors who enter for one term, it is likely that it will start to rank for an expanding list of search queries over time.

You are on the right track when your site is ranking well for a term, your website analytics show profitable visitor behaviors for visitors enter using that term, and you can attribute form fillouts to the term. If these things are not happening then refocus your efforts towards more profitable terms.

Create A System for Monitoring and Measuring Your Results

Moving forward, carefully consider visitors arriving using branded terms versus lead generating ones. Visitors entering using branded terms are likely to already be aware of your company. They may be a current customer, brand advocate, or strategic partner. As you are studying your website analytics for lead-generating activity, it is ideal to segment off as many branded terms as possible. For many sites the company name is a leading search term. Choose the clear volume leader and create a Custom Segment in Google Analytics. After clicking Create Custom Segment, select the Keyword dimension, then select Does Not Contain, then type in your top branded keyword. Why exclude brand-related keyword from some analytic reports? Because they are just downright boring, that’s why!  More importantly, segmenting allows you to better analyze the behavior of your prospects. Prospects are not as engaged with your content as your customers or advocates, and they do not necessarily have a favorable opinion of your company… yet!

Does Anything Need Improving?

Once you segment out branded traffic you will get a better picture of the behavior of your sales prospects specifically. How they interact with your site will likely show you a few areas that need improvement. Testing new website improvements is the final critical step in finding long-term success online.

There are countless additional ways to find profitable keywords. The goal is to have one or more profitable keywords working for your site and generating leads for your business. Once you have established your site for one term, focus on doing it again and again, one keyword at a time. How is lead generation working on your website? Please share your tips below.

Our Customers Say Our Site Looks Great… But Will It Generate New Leads?

By now even the most conservative businesses are interested in attracting a share of online searchers to their site. Will these visitors eagerly consume your site’s content? Will they give you a call, buy your product or service, support your cause? What does it take to turn your website into a lead-generating machine that keeps your phones and email humming? It’s easier than you think to get started…

First, Define Your Key Audiences

Everyone wants something different from your company’s website. The company’s marketing team may want excitement and social media integration. Sales may want to add product feature lists and company background info. Management may just want to “out-web” their competition. But what about the most important audience, your website visitors? Every website has a diverse set of users, all looking for slightly different things. It’s important to define which audiences are most important to the business, then tailor your navigation and content to suit them.

So What Makes a Conversion?

To make informed decisions about lead generation activities, different types of websites will have different measurement challenges to prepare for. E-Commerce websites can use the sales numbers as an easy way to see how the website is performing. For companies with with longer buying cycles such as B2B a prospect may visit the site multiple times before purchasing.

If your site attracts thousands of website visitors it’s a complete success, right? Hold up! You need to check a few things first. Looking at the website’s visitors, many of them will have entered the site using a specific keyword in their search engine to get to the site. Where we can connect the visitor data to a specific keyword we can analyze the profitability of each search term, using some popular metrics:

• Bounce rate: higher bounce rates may indicate that the site lacks relevancy for the keyword they used;
• Time on site: are users engaging with your content, or are they leaving immediately;
• Number of pages visited: you’re on the right track to profitable traffic when a search term shows above average “time on site” combined with higher than average pageviews;
• Conversion goals met: how many and which goals did visitors achieve for each of the site’s most popular search terms – this is a especially helpful metric to judge keyword effectiveness.

Setting up Conversion Goals in Google Analytics can show how engaged visors are with your content and help discover which keywords are most helpful to the business. There are countless ways that GA conversion goals can be set up, from one simple goal like “Visits to the Contact Us page” to a maximum of four sets of five goals each, which can help track behaviors of different website user groups. After you have segmented and analyzed your visitor traffic, it should become clear which are profitable visits and which are futile ones.

Tracking Your Emails

One easy way to track leads generated from your website is to just monitor the contacts arriving via your website’s lead capture forms. How many did you get in a month? Compare that to your unique visitors for that month. Now, turn this into an ongoing tracking and measurement activity. Extra credit: Consider what elements on the site or form page could be changed to encourage more form submissions?

About Those Form Submissions

By tracking visitors successful completion of a lead capture form, you will quickly find that certain keyword terms have little chance of leading to a new customer. Knowing which keywords your form completions come from is critical in fine tuning your keyword target list over time.

So…… Did You Close ‘Em?

Is your sales and marketing team in synch with your website support team? If so, communicating sales closure rates back to your marketing and website teams can help them understand and focus on lead sources that deliver the most qualified prospects.

Improve The Tools To Improve Your Results

For larger companies who are making significant investments investment in online marketing, paid monitoring and measurement tools may be a good choice.

How is your website doing in delivering leads? Please share what’s worked for your business in the comments below.

First, Check Your Local Rep

What happens when someone “Googles you” or your company? Control what you can by claiming your Google Places listing. You can edit the details of the listing, add images and links your YouTube videos. To confirm that you are authorized to edit the map listing, Google will send a postcard to your address with a PIN number on it. After entering the PIN into your Google Places account your enhancements will start showing up on Google Maps.

Take The Vanilla Out of Your Google Analytics

Yes, Google Analytics is free, but to get meaningful insights a few things should be configured. Hopefully there is already Google Analytics tracking code installed on the old site. If not, it may be worthwhile to install it on the old site. In the time leading up to the launch of the new site some decent traffic data could accumulate.

Benchmark the performance of the old site by noting the site’s past general and specific keyword traffic. A year out from now when you are studying analytics, having the legacy benchmark data available will allow for more meaningful analysis and allow you to more easily judge ROI for the new site.

Set up groups of Conversion Goals. Goals can be configured in a variety of ways to track the important conversions on your site. Set up a bunch, they’ll help you judge how engaged your visitors are with your content, and will especially pay off when you are analyzing which keywords are most valuable. One of the simplest approaches is to set a goal for important pages on your site like product-specific pages, specific service pages, and contact forms.

Establishing a few Custom Segments will also help you gain more accurate insights than looking at all visitor data at once. For instance if you only do business in the State of California then why look at visitor statistics for the entire world? Create a segment that includes just your service area. Try one where all “branded” keyword traffic is factored out, or where a geographic region is isolated,

301 Redirects

Creating 301 redirects takes anyone who tries to visit your old site URLs right to the new site. With the redirect code in place, visitors who try to visit “mysite.com/oldpage.html/” get instantly transported to “mysite.com/newcontent/” – nifty! Don’t redirect all pages to your new homepage. Redirect your old About/Company section to the corresponding new one, same with Contact Us and all the rest.

Get To Know Google Webmaster Tools

There are too many great features within Google Webmaster Tools to mention here, but the first thing to do is submit your sitemap. Your website will have one or more sitemap addresses, which you’ll want to submit to your Google Webmaster Tools sitemaps area. Check later to make sure the sitemap’s status is green. Once this is done Google will index the new site faster and your new pages will appear in the search results instead of your site’s older “cached” pages. While you’re at it, go ahead and sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools and submit you sitemap there. Bing supposedly drives decent traffic so may as well get indexed there too.

Do The Robot

Create a “robots.txt” file to disallow specific folders. Also use it to allow or disallow your site’s images to be indexed by Google Images. Also useful to make sure your wp-admin page does not show up in Google’s index.

Get Visitors Back On Track WIth A Helpful 404

Even the most vigilant website manager will still occasionally find visitors encountering a “page not found” error on their site, also known as a 404 error. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools diagnostics can both help pinpoint problems. When the inevitable happens and the error page does display, you’ll wish you had created a branded 404 error page. Make sure visitors know that you care about their experience on your site by including a sympathetic “oops” or “we’re sorry” or whatever message is most appropriate for your brand. And include some helpful links to help them find what they’re looking for.

Got Uptime Monitoring?

Signing up for mobile website hosting downtime alerts from a service like Pingdom will let you know if your site goes down, and for how long.

The day after launch, check to make sure that Google Analytics data is accumulating normally. Now go get back to your vacation! Need some reading material? Go study some analytics tips from the GA sage Avinash, at his blog.

Have some website launch tips for us? Please share them in the comments below!