How Agile Technical SEO Can Add Value To Your SEO Campaign, by Adam Gent

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Agile & Technical SEOADAM GENT

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“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most

intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

CHARLES DARWIN

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SEO industry Survey

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Why are SEOs waiting so long?“Technical debt is a concept in programming that

reflects extra work due to short term solutions

applied on a website, rather than applying the

best overall solution.”

Technical Debt on Wikipedia

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Start

4 months on…

Technical debt in action (current campaign)

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• Client brief• Insights and Market

Research• Technical SEO Analysis• Solid SEO Strategy • Business Case• Prioritised SEO action list• Technical briefs for

actions

VS

It’s not just about technical debt• Marketing budget restrictions• Legal restrictions on tech

changes• Client team development

resource• Time• Business prioritises

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Every client campaign is different

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Agile Methodology“The Agile methodology is a project

management movement which seeks an

alternative to traditional waterfall project

management processes.”

Agile Methodology

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1. Think about your overall SEO/digital strategy

2. Understand your web technology3. Recognise what you can’t do4. Identify alternative methods5. Test, test and test again

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LOCAL OPTIMISATION URL

STRUCTURECONTENT STRATEGY

FIXING BROKEN

LINKS

TITLE TAG OPTIMISATION

HREFLANG TAGSINTERNAL

LINK STRUCTURE

PAGE SPEED OPTIMISATON

IMAGE OPTIMISATION

SITE STRUCTURE

SCHEMA MARKUP

VIDEO OPTIMISATION

SEO Strate

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Prioritise technical actions

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1. Understand your website

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@AdoublegentSource: BuiltWith - https://goo.gl/IoYI7H

Content Management System (CMS) A few (brief) examples, can you

update:1. Title Tags2. Meta descriptions3. Canonical tags4. Meta robots (e.g. noindex)5. Robots.txt6. URLs7. Content8. Images9. Image alt text

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SEO modules/extensions/plugins for your CMS

DRUPAL - https://www.weebpal.com/blog/top-drupal-seo-modules WORDPRESS – https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ MAGENTO – https://yoast.com/magento-seo/ SITECORE – https://www.sitecore.net/company/blog/415/how-sitecore-supports-your-on-page-seo-policy-4061 JOOMLA – https://extensions.joomla.org/category/site-management/seo-a-metadata KENTICO - https://docs.kentico.com/display/K8/Search+engine+optimization

They can help to reduce technical (SEO) debt and get actions complete!

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Client who has actively optimised organic search

snippets

Client who can’t change organic search snippets

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Web Server/hosting

A few brief examples, can you update:1. 301 redirect maps2. Global redirect rules (e.g. non-

slash URLs to slash URLs)3. Page level 301 redirects4. Log files

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Log file Analysis

99%

1%

Live HTML URLs crawled by Googlebot over over 24 hours

Not in internal link structure Canonical Link

Parameter URLs

Actual webpages we want to be crawled

The Ultimate Guide to Log File Analysis – Builtvisibile

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2. Recognise what you can’t do

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Can complete

list

Can’t complete

list

SEO Strategy

Prioritised technical SEO action list

Developer Queue

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3. Alternative methods

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40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Source: Think with Google

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CloudFlare

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CloudFlare Off

CloudFlare On

6.17 secs 2.39 secsPingdom Page Speed Tool

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+61%

in 30 mins…

Page Load Speed

…It impacts the entire site

(not just 1 webpage).

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HTTP/2 is now standard

More on HTTP/2 here.

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BUT need to make you aware…• There are rare cases it causing ranking drops

• To reduce risk to SEO performance:o Get your own custom SSL certificate (before

the switch to CloudFlare)o Upload your own SSL certificate (with a

business or enterprise package)o Get your own unique IP addresso Configure CloudFlare dashboard

Guide: Cloudflare SEO issues and how to protect yourself

– SALT.agency

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“Google’s indexing system can render web pages more like an average user's

browser with JavaScript turned on.”

Source: Webmaster Central

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Document Object Model“The Document Object

Model (DOM) is a

programming interface for

HTML, XHTML and XML

documents. It provides a

structured representation

of the document as a tree.”

DOM Wikipedia Find out more on the DOM here.

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JavaScript can manipulate the DOM

“"The DOM allows programs and scripts to

dynamically access and update the content,

structure, and style of a document."

W3C JAVASCRIPT DOM

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Allows us to add custom JavaScript to a webpage.

Google Tag Manager

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Enter your custom JavaScript and JQuery

here.

GTM can change a webpage’s DOM without a developer

(but still keep them in the loop)

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Schema Markup (JSON)

Google Search Console

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Noindex meta robots

Before

After

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JavaScript redirectPage A Page B

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GTM possibilities are endless

Add/update Meta Tags Add/update Schema (JSON) Add/update Content Add/update Images

Google Tag Manager is on the rise. If you don’t have it installed, then I suggest

you get it!

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“Adding hreflang to a site is ‘informing’ Google that the site is offering content for queries in a specific language, tailored for a specific region of the world.”

Source: Branded3

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Hreflang tag generator

Hreflang tool – The Media Flow

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International SEO for Norton

UK Results

189%Increase in SEO visits YOY

DE Results

50%Increase in SEO visits YOY

IT Results

59%Increase in SEO visits YOY

FR Results

292%Increase in SEO visits YOY

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4. Test

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Branded3’s contact us pageCloudFlare broke the thank you animation broke on our contact us page. Users weren’t sent to the thank you page but left on the contact us page.

It was quickly fixed using the page rule feature though!

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Always test your tools before you deploy

them live!

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1. Think about your overall SEO/digital strategy

2. Understand your web technology3. Recognise what you can’t do4. Identify alternative methods5. Test, test and test again

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Thank [email protected]

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