seo technical metrics. tools, tips, and guides
DESCRIPTION
This is the presentation that I gave on Technical SEO Metrics that matter at SMX West 2013. The focus was on 6 areas of low hanging fruit to address when starting any SEO project. Additionally, I shared some results from a survey we did analyzing SEO impact with real users.TRANSCRIPT
Eli SchwartzOnline Marketing Manager
SurveyMonkey
The Technical SEO Metrics You Should Care About
SMX West 2013
Poll: Have you woken up to or inherited this?
EMD, DMCA, Top Heavy, Venice, Freshness
Overview
• Significant impacts from basic technical SEO changes:
URL Issues
Robots.txtJavascript and CSS links404 pagesRedirectsCanonicals
• User benefit to technical changes
Look for URL Issues
www.wufoo.com Username.wufoo.com
• Check for http:// vs https://• www vs non-www• Index page does not redirect to the root• Subdomain duplication
Check Robots.txt
Could this be important?
www.irs.gov/robots.txt
Browse without Javascript and CSSDisable Javascript
Afterwards Disable CSS
Links being hidden by CSS might suddenly appear
Plugin: http://bit.ly/devel-plugin
Crawl entire domain with Screaming Frog
http://bit.ly/scfrog
A Screaming Frog crawl can help you discover 404 pages
Optimum settings
Download landing pages from GA
Change to 25
URL will now show:
Change to 2500
1) 2)
3)
4)
Discover new 404 pages
Upload the CSV that you downloaded from GA to Screaming Frog with the list option
Discover pages that had received traffic but now 404
Redirect Path Plugin – Header responses
http://bit.ly/ayima
Visually shows server header response as well as redirect path
Screaming Frog shows all redirects
Sort Screaming Frog crawl by status code to find 302’s and 301’s
Update 302 redirects to 301’s; use direct links when possible for internal links that 301
Tamper for Firefox finds redirect path
http://bit.ly/Tamper-Tool
Discover canonicals with Screaming Frog
Canonical column will contain a URL if a canonical exists
Find incorrect canonicals in Excel
Excel Formula: IF(A1=B1,TRUE,FALSE)
Export Screaming Frog crawl into Excel
See results in Google Webmaster Tools
Are impressions trending higher?
Google’s Webmaster Technical Guidelines
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
User impact from technical changes
• Random selection from general US population
• Random assignment into 1 of 2 surveys with 16 questions
• Survey sent to 3,000 people
• Survey was open for 5 days
• 615 people participated• Comparison of means
over a variety of indicatorshttp://bit.ly/sma-research
What happens when a search user does not find what they expected on the page?
60% of users
bounce
Other interesting survey results
User trust of guest posts
Why would users block a site from Google results?
22% decrease
in trust for a guest
post
t(237,345)=-9.47,p < .001
Top Heavy
Panda
Takeaways and homework
• Always focus on the user, but look out for:
• Missing pages• Redirects• Broken canonicals
• Download: Screaming Frog, Tamper for Firefox, Ayima Redirect plugin, any developer plugin that controls CSS and Javascript
• Be a hero
Thank you!
Eli Schwartz, SurveyMonkey [email protected] @5le @surveymonkeyDownload slides: http://bit.ly/SEO-Tech