In Search of Man City players
Any scouts or fans assuming this is an insight into our player acquisition strategy will be sadly disappointed, this post is about search. Yep, good old fashioned Search Engine Optimisation and how we’ve gone back to basics on our new mancity.com site.
When we sat down to scope the new mancity.com site, search was an important factor. News sitemaps, video sitemaps, meta data, image optimisation, content migration, redirects…it was all there and then some. As with all the best laid plans though, not everything made it across the finish line and now we’re playing catch up.
Namely our players. Our brand keywords, man city, mcfc, Manchester city, etc still perform well, as you’d hope for a global Premier League club. We redirected the site using the usual 301’s to get traffic to mancity.com. Google et al promptly followed.
The player profiles however have suffered a loss in ranking, from Aguero to Zabaleta, and this was down to a number of factors.
Here are a few that we identified and how we overcame them.
- Search console
Getting the Google search console updated and understanding our index, ranking and errors across the new site in general was the first step. We’ve subsequently set up the search console in Bing too to get more information. We also worked with third parties, who did the leg work to help us understand how each player page was performing, for example what their ranking was, to benchmark against. It also highlights errors on the site which may be hindering the ranking. More delightful 404’s, articles that were too short, broken links, hangover items from the move that just needed some attention. - Sitemaps
Sitemaps lay out what you want the search engines to look at. You submit them in the various search consoles in a specific format, Google search console is the obvious starting point.
Once fixed, it was clear within the crawl errors the site was throwing up numerous server redirects we’d missed. It’s not fun to update redirects, but it needs to be done and on a regular basis to keep on top of those pesky links that are buried in the thousands of articles and videos we’d migrated.
It’s worth noting we also had to contact Google to get the News Publisher Centre settings updated from the previous site (you submit a news sitemap in the News Publisher Centre to get the news into Google news). This took some time but thanks to the guys on the News Publisher forums for helping us out. - Meta Data
It’s an oldie, but a goody. The meta tags hadn’t been carried across. There was an afternoon well spent getting the meta title, descriptions and keywords up to date. This involved ensuring all the profiles were included in sitemaps, available for index and had follow links. - Linking
Internal linking is easy to do, but it’s easily overlooked too. Our content team were getting to grips with a new site and it’s many components. Subsequently we weren’t linking consistently to the players’ profiles when mentioned. A quick training session and some support and the team are back on it. - External linking
This is something we’re working on with our supplier to help us with. Finding and updating third party links to ensure they’re pointing to the new site. Not exciting, but hey it’s got to be done. - Code
The front end code had been written with numerous title (<title>) and header (<h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc.) tags. Ideally there should only be one title tag and header should be structured accordingly. This wasn’t the case for us. We’re still working on this and hoping this will provide clarity for search bots once live — this week hopefully.
You may have noticed we’ve not gone down the paid search route. Clearly that would give us an instant boost, but it’s not a fix long term. Our focus was to ensure the content guys were back to their linking, meta tagging, best with the right code to support their efforts.
We’ve recently updated the sitemaps to clear some of the errors and there are more updates coming in this week’s deployment as well as ongoing optimisation from then on.
The players are on the up. We’ll keep you posted when we find them on the first page of Google.
