the price of technical seo debt final
Post on 19-Oct-2014
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The Price of
Technical SEO Debt
John Doherty - @dohertyjf
You’re leaving money on the table.
Let’s stop that.
John Doherty Director/Lead Consultant at
Distilled NYC
Blogger – johnfdoherty.com
Tweeter - @dohertyjf
Photographer –
johndohertyphotography.com
Usually wears this shirt to
speak
If you want to learn hardcore
technical SEO, follow these guys
They’re smarter than I am and are who I learn from.
@dsottimano @adamsherk @searchmartin
@thenextcorner @brianprovost @mdsimmonds
Read These Awesome Resources
How To Perform The World’s Greatest SEO Audit (SEOmoz)
Craziest Audit Checklist On The Internet (SEER via @anniecushing)
Find Your Biggest Technical Flaws in 60 Minutes (SEOmoz via @dsottimano)
Technical SEO Debt defined: A metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of
poor or evolving architecture or SEO
problems/dependencies within a website.
(paraphrase of Technical Debt on Wikipedia)
Client 1 wasn’t ranking
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
6+ pages targeting every term (high-volume search terms) – low effort
Zero internal linking – high effort
No crawl path to speak of – high effort
Minimal content on “SEO” pages – medium effort
Tons of links - bonus
Potential Traffic Was
Astronomical
500,000+ visits per year potential, at $XXX/conversion. WOW.
This is for
their top
2100
keywords.
This doesn’t
include
longtail
either. We’re
talking
millions in
revenue per
year.
Client 2 wasn’t ranking
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
No crawl path – medium effort
10,000+ 302 redirects – low effort
No keyword targeting – medium effort
“SEO” content, not valuable content – high effort
Growing #s of links, but not traffic
We fixed 302s iteratively and
traffic tripled.
302s fixed over a 3 week period. Traffic 3x’d.
302s
changed
to 301s
Oh hello.
Revenue/Effort Potential revenue * Potential converting traffic/hours*hourly rate
If potential revenue is higher than the total cost to make
the change, it’s worth your time. The bigger the margin,
the easier the case.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/meaningful-seo-metrics
Your KPI Is Your Pitch
http://www.seonick.net/seo-business-model/
Whatever your conversion means (revenue, profit, user signup), this is
how you achieve buy-in to fix technical problems.
Another way to pitch it is “How much/many money/conversions are we
leaving on the table by not making this change?”
http://www.distilled.net/blog/web-analytics/are-you-leaving-mobile-
users-on-the-table/
If we do x, we can expect y. If we don’t do x, y will do z.
http://www.johnfdoherty.com/making-seomozs-serp-analysis-tool-more-
awesome/
http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty
http://seogadget.com/mozscape-api-extension-for-excel/
I do one Excel sheet with all my
data, and visualize.
http://www.johnfdoherty.com/making-seomozs-serp-analysis-tool-more-
awesome/
Internal links
External links
DA/PA/mR
Page size
Load time Level in architecture Rank
Then graph it and find
anomalies.
Spot the correlations and anomalies – Excel for SEO
Bad Information Architecture
Kills Your Rankings/Revenue
http://seogadget.com/inspiring-sitemap-diagrams/
Visualize yours vs your competitors. Show ranking and potential traffic
comparison. I used Visio here.
Bad Information Architecture
Kills Your Rankings/Revenue
Pitch what they care about, not what you find interesting.
Visualize yours vs your competitors. Show ranking and potential traffic
comparison. I used Visio here.
If you show this to your VP I will fly to your office and kick you in the shins.
I showed it this way too.
Competitor comparison is powerful.
Level in
architecture
was closely
correlated to
rankings. We
ranked
terribly, and
this convinced
the exec to
buy into
letting us
make changes.
Pitch the potential $$/users.
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
5000 potential visitors 5% conversion rate $200 per conversion
$50,000 potential
revenue in this test.
Show how the investment will
pay off.
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
5000 potential visitors 5% conversion rate $200 per conversion
$50,000/(hours)*(hourly rate)
Use Story Time To Get Accurate
Numbers.
The only way to get these numbers as accurate as possible is to get
commitment from the development team about how much time *they*
think it will take.
This is true agile. Some companies call it “story time” where they sit
down, build the “story” of what they want to do, and come to a team
consensus.
Pitch a test if necessary.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday
Getting buy-in is the hardest part, so pitch a test. We did an internal
links test and these are the results we saw across the domain (30%+
increase in keywords and unique ranking URLs).
Protip – execs love these charts. Up and to the right is their language.
Be sure to report on the results
with KPIs in mind.
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
Here’s one keyword that we tested (10k/visits mo) and now have buy-in
for more work.
Use one success to create more
tests for success.
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
Here’s one keyword that we tested (10k/visits mo) and now have buy-in
for more work.
It worked. Got more buy-in.
Thin Content Keeps You From
Ranking
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
In this case,
content on-
page was very
highly
correlated to
rankings/traffic
. This held true
across SERPs
run through
Screaming
Frog.
Thin Content Keeps You From
Ranking
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
Added
content to
important
pages. When
the page
already
ranked, saw
a 13.46
position
increase on
average. 5.65
was average
when URL
changed.
Built upon previous success to
get buy-in and prove worth.
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
Repeated Success.
Client Targeted A Keyword
About To Spike in Volume
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
Search volume spiked Months later, we still get converting
traffic from it.
Client Targeted A Keyword
About To Spike in Volume
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
You know where I’m going with this now. It’s time to do some more
modeling and show reason for doing it again.
Pitch the Internal Case Study
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
What we’re saying here is “let’s do it again!” If example A yielded x%
conversion and y number of users, then it’s worth trying to replicate that
success especially since the infrastructure already exists!
If A did B and got us
result C
Fixing Technical SEO Issues Sets
You Up For Future Success
John Doherty | @dohertyjf
This was
the 302s.
Flywheel accelerating
Remember This Formula
http://geoffkenyon.com/keyword-opportunity-tool/
Potential Traffic
Cost to Fix
Avg Conversion
Value
Avg Conversion
Rate