how agile technical seo can add value to your seo campaign, by adam gent
TRANSCRIPT
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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
gy
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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 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
