Jeff Preston - Advanced Search Summit Napa 2021

© 2020 Move, Inc. All rights reserved. Do not copy or distribute.
SEO Governance

© 2021 Move, Inc. All rights reserved. Do not copy or distribute. 2
Realtor.com SEO
● Real estate listing aggregator
site for the US housing market
● Launched in 1995
● 200M+ pages
● Complicated publishing
platform
● Strong SEO competitors

SEO Governance Program
Governance programs help to:
● Catch changes in market share and flag algorithm updates
● Monitor our sites for major technical problems before they show up in
Google Search Console
● Decide when to be worried
● Build a response plan in advance
● Keep the organization SEO savvy

Traditional SEO
Vestibulum congue
Technical
coding

SEO Now
User
Experience Links
Words
on
the
page
Technical
coding

SEO Governance Program
Out of scope for this presentation:
● Monitor ranking performance at the keyword URL pair level (See
William Sears presentation)
● Link monitoring (different presentation)
● Content quality (different presentation)

Share of Voice
Share of voice
shows how we
are doing in a
large set of
keywords
versus a set of
competitors

Share of Voice Top 4 sites had share
of voice change the
same day

Share of Voice June 2
update

Share of Voice
Share of voice as a metric helps:
● Catch changes in market share
● Catch algorithm updates
● Decide when to worry about an update

Governance: Technical SEO
Takeaways:
● Prioritize the most important technical/engineering items
● Monitor these items in a way that is easy to understand
● Decide in advance what to do when you find a problem
Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/webmaster-
guidelines

Google has
principles and
guidelines it
expects us to
follow.
Sites that follow
Google guidelines
tend to do better in
search.
Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/webmaster-
guidelines

Much of our SEO
technical work is
intended to make our
site more compliant
with Google
standards.

Governance: Monitoring
Using log data we can
create dashboards
that will visualize any
spikes in our overall
trends

Spikes outside of
normal ranges will
trigger alerts via email
and Slack.
Need to
investigate

Governance: CWV Monitoring
Spikes
outside of
normal
ranges will
trigger
alerts via
email and
Slack.
Need to
investigate

Governance: Build Monitoring
Pro Tips:
● Set up monitoring in the publishing pipeline
● Catch problems before they go live
● Decide in advance what to test
● Builds fail if critical (and predetermined) SEO elements are missing

Takeaways:
● Decide in advance what to test
● Use logging to monitor Googlebot on the site - look for things out of the
normal
● Track Core Web Vitals over time
● Catch problems before they go live with build testing

Governance: Service Level Agreements (SLA)
Set up automated monitoring and SLA agreements with engineering
leaders to address issues quickly.
● Crawl rate (200s)
● Site errors
○ 4XXs
○ 5XXs
● Redirects (3XXs)
● Core Web Vitals fluctuations (good to bad)
○ LCP
○ FID
○ CLS

Governance: Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Governance: Documentation
Providing solid documentation makes it easier for leadership, engineering,
product, marketing, etc. to understand what is important for SEO.
Explains the “Why” of what you do
Takes time and patience to keep updated
Managers need to keep it in mind when hiring talent

SEO standards and policies are documented. Here are some topics:
● Technical SEO Checklist
● Canonical URL
● URL Structure
● Metadata
● Internal Linking
● Crawl Health
● XML & RSS Sitemaps
● Javascript Rendering
● Global Navigation
● Core Web Vitals
● Schema Markup

https://wiki.move.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=497641166

Governance: Checklists
Documentation includes a technical
SEO checklist and a migration
checklist for reference.

Governance: Training Schedule
Training schedule is published in
advance for all teams.
SEO team builds and updates
training materials based on
roadmap and latest standards.

SEO Governance Summary
● While many things about the Google algorithm is out of our control,
we can keep the site maintained with the latest standards
● Automated monitoring helps us catch issues earlier
● Work out agreements with partners in advance to have a plan when
problems arise
● Constantly update documentation
● Provide training on SEO technical standards at a regular cadence to
help internal teams stay up to date (and ahead of competitors)

Thank you!
36

Jeff Preston - Advanced Search Summit Napa 2021

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