Technical SEO Beyond the Audit - Brighton SEO April 2017 - Philip Gamble

Philip GambleFOUND

Technical SEO Beyond the Initial Audit

@freeg131 http://www.slideshare.net/freeg131

Start with

an audit

Deliver the audit

If we’re lucky

everyone’s on board

to implement

Reach an

acceptable level of

technical compliance

Things Change

Our job

isn’t done

Technical SEO Beyond the Audit

challenges change brings

performance impact

how to identify quickly

importance of a swift resolution

INSTANCE 1:DE-INDEX

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

24% drop in indexed pages

250

270

290

310

330

350

370

390

410

430

450

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Ind

exe

d U

Rls

Week

Most important pages deindexed first

21% traffic loss

80% traffic loss on top service page

-7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0

How long until you notice?

Don’t rely on retrospective

rankings or traffic

Monitor robots.txt

Monitor meta robots key pages

Daily rankings track key pages

Identify

Check all robots

Request change

Review implementation

Fix

traffic recovered quickly

-7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

2 days to get fix live!

6 weeks for all URLs to get re-indexed

250

300

350

400

450

500

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Ind

exe

d U

Rls

Week

Request Google

re-crawl the pages!

INSTANCE 2:‘MINOR’ CHANGE

“re-organised products slightly”

Check Everything

Trailing Slash Removed

https://www.site.com/service-name/

https://www.site.com/service-name

-22% page traffic

/service-name/ /service-name

map keywords to URLs

check ranking URLs

don’t rely on aggregate data

How to identify

https://www.site.com/service-name/

https://www.site.com/service-name

https://www.site.com/service-name/

Change Reversed

instant recovery

/service-name/ /service-name

demand sign-off

get access to dev ticket system

Communicate!

How to prevent

INSTANCE 3:GOOGLE GETTING “SMARTER”

Search Engines try to be clever

Google is dumb

Behaving like a user

= new problems

Improved Code

Execution

Filtering Sliders: 1000s more URLs!

Sub-category

Location

+ every salary by year

+ every salary by day

+ every salary by hour

Normal

URLs

37%

Salary

Filtered

URLs

63%

63% of Google’s

Crawl BudgetOnly 0.1% of Visits

Massive Inefficiencies

JavaScript imported content

HTMLJS

CONTENT

Thousands of thin variants

?ids= 15/reload-slider242,10407,14310,12039

JS

CONTENT

x 100000

+25% Indexed URLs in a Month

Visibility Decrease

Visibility

IndexedURLs

-

200

400

600

800

1,000

1,200

-

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

35,000

40,000

45,000

Indexed URL count

Large sites: log files

Don‘t rely on your crawler

Identify

URL parameter configuration

Robots.txt

Proactively block

Fix: Conserve Crawl Budget

URL removal tool

Force crawl

Fix: Tidy SERPs

APPROACH

Monitor

Monitor

Catch Quickly

Monitor

Catch Quickly

Retain Performance

TAKING ACTION

What to monitor?

Robots,

Uptime,

Crawl Data,

Speed,

Indexation,

Content

Google

Analytics

Google Search

Console

Thresholds:

Identify what matters

Configure Alerts

ChangeDetection.com

Build Dashboards with

Google Data Studio

Build Dashboards

Google Data Studio

Screenshot(s)

Automate reports

Make sure they are seen

Lots of Google Analytics apps

IFTTT or APIs

Slack

Slack

Slack

Google Search Console reports 3 additional crawl errors on sitename.co.uk[keyword 27] has dropped from #3 to no rankhttp://www.sitename.co.uk/landing-page-27 has dropped from Google's index

Vigilance Pays

Image Credits

Start with an audit: https://stocksnap.io/photo/JVSII4KCCKReach an acceptable level of technical compliance https://www.pexels.com/photo/mathematics-colorful-game- color-19677/Things change http://cubercritic.com/product/rubiks-cube-review/Our job isn’t done https://pixabay.com/en/tub-palio-race-river-water-remo-114349/How long https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-round-analog-wall-clock-121734/Fix: GooglebotRequest Google recrawl the pages: https://static.pexels.com/photos/262272/pexels-photo-262272.jpegCheck everything: https://pixabay.com/en/fear-fright-horror-frightened-1172407/Behaving like a user = new problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsF7enQY8uIFix – Tidy SERPs: https://pixabay.com/en/lego-legomaennchen-males-workers-568039/Google Data Studio: http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2017/02/google-data-studio-google-search-console-report.pngVigilance pays: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-hawk-on-focus-photo-162354/