Redefining Technical SEO, #MozCon 2019 by Paul Shapiro

Editor's Notes

1. Let’s take a trip back to SEO grade school… To the very beginning when you were learning our craft.
2. Grab your Ninja Turtles lunch box and recall what you were taught about it in the early days…
3. If you were like me, you had a picture painted like so. 3 pillars intersecting in the venn diagram of search engininess…
4. Which in practice, equated to the following sub-disciplines… (often silod)
5. The problem is that the things we were taught in school weren’t always right, were sometimes oversimplifications, embellishments, collective truths that were in reality collective falsehoods, etc. For instance, an apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head did not cause him to have a eureka moment resulting in the law of gravity. He was observing apples fall in his orchard though.
6. “i before e except after c” It’s generally true, but there are something like 193 exceptions.
7. Benjamin franklin’s famous kite experience, not used to discoverer electricity. Electricity was well know for quite some time. This was to test electrical nature of lightning.
8. I recall an anecdote from college where a friend majoring in engineering told me how everyone is taught V=IR, except the equation falls apart in more complex scenarios, a so called “infinite grid of resistors” Anyway, SEO is no different. It’s complex, and its subject to overs implications among other things.
9. So let’s evaluate how the common definition of technical SEO in my opinion is somewhat misguided.
10. Traditionally, technical SEO is about designing well architected websites that enable proper crawling and indexing of its content, so that it may rank.
11. And of course, with JavaScript heavy websites increasing in popularity steadily over the years, the model comes to include proper rendering of that for bots.
12. And don’t get me wrong, this is hugely important. If you’re an ecommerce website and product can’t be crawled or isn’t crawled properly, then you’re missing out on sales that you would have gotten from one of the highest converting channels there is.
13. Websites can get quite complex and expertise in how all of this works is surely necessary.
14. BUT… you can have the most technically sound website and earn no traffic from organic search, get no sales, because at the end of the day—it’s content that drives that. Content may be more important. (shrug) “GASP”—How can I say that!? this is the technical SEO. I’m getting there.
15. Furthermore, there are some very easy ways to get your technical seo right. A wordpress installation with the yoast plugin, gets you most of the way there.
16. In fact, if we look at the adoption of WordPress across the web, we might conjecture that a large portion of websites are already set-up for success.
17. So, it’s no wonder you see articles like this popping up. I think the underlying idea isn’t entirely wrong, but it was a very poor, offensive analogy and a bit inflammatory. Technical SEO is very important. There’s also WAY MORE to technical SEO than what articles like these are talking about. There’s WAY MORE to it that the definition that you learned in SEO grade school permits.
18. Let’s redefine technical SEO.
19. If you aren’t already aware, I founded a conference completely dedicated to technical SEO, TechSEO Boost. It’s coming back for its 3rd year in December. It’s free to attend. Although we have a lottery for tickets. We’re also livestreaming it for free if you can’t make it.
20. If you aren’t already aware, I founded a conference completely dedicated to technical SEO The first year we had it, I brought Russ Jones in to do a talk about the “state of technical SEO”. It was a brilliant presentation and during it, Russ gave his definition for what technical SEO is: “Any sufficiently technical action undertaken with the intent to improve search results” That certainly widens the playing field for technical SEO doesn’t it?
21. Let’s dive deeper. As I see it, there are 4 types of technical SEO
22. Checklist/automated technical SEO
23. Checklist Technical SEO is where you can simply go through a checklist process, one item at a time and make sure things are as they should be.
24. You can use a template like the one Annie Cushing sells (I’ve not actually seen it) and a use a tool like Screaming Frog or Botify to get most of the way there.
25. Essentially it’s the lower skill form of traditional technical SEO and subject to automation. And, I don’t mean to diminish this either. There are tons of websites that get these things wrong and fixing them will most certainly help. But the robots are coming for your job if you rely entirely on this.
26. General Technical SEO
27. This concerns itself with the same things as checklist technical seo, has to do with the more traditional definition of crawling, indexing, and rendering— but requires higher skill and are more difficult to automate. These like finding and correcting obscure crawler traps generated by a bug in your CMS’s codebase, developing custom site architecture, internal linking analysis, SSR design, etc.
28. Blurred-Responsibility Technical SEO …welcome to SEO folks
29. Oftentimes as SEOs, there are technical (and non-technical) tasks that fall to us, that aren’t necessarily SEO tasks. They can easily fall to UX, CRO, Front End Web Development, Taxonomists, etc. These are tasks involving web performance optimization, internal site search system design, structured data, and analytics implementation All important to a holistic view of SEO, but can also fall to someone else.
30. Advanced, applied technical seo
31. Technical tasks that are specifically for SEO purposes, but not necessarily concerning crawling, indexing, and rendering. - SEO testing - Adoption of brand new technologies that effect search (might be a blurry-lined item) - Data science for SEO purposes - NLP to enhance content development - Use of ML to search data - Automation
32. I’d like you to show particular attention to general technical seo and advanced, applied technical seo. When you consider these facets of tech SEO, the whole “tech SEO is makeup argument surely falls apart”. Tech SEO becomes integral to every aspect of SEO, from content, to link building, and of course, crawling, indexing, and rendering. All SEO can be technical SEO
33. Now that you’re nice and excited let’s look at some examples and give you fine folks a bunch of free Python scripts…
34. Applications to link development
35. Expired domains script. Use to find old domains with great content. Redevelop that content’s purpose, examining the site with the wayback machine, and perform outreach. Explain how it works above
36. For instance, I scraped a niche forum for my board game blog – boardgamesquad.com - saw an old domain for sale and reached out to the original author asking to use its old content. I could have just written to his highest linked content, but I’m giving this a try first. Technical application to link building.
37. Applications to on-page SEO
38. Now, what if we wanted to enhance the relevancy of our new and existing content and expand the breadth of our keywords? We could do something like this, using the Google Natural Language API. Explain how it works above
39. So this represents scored entities on the term “martin guitars”. We can use these insights to enhance our Martin Guitars page, improving relevancy for that term by encompassing more topics, and rank for more keywords. Technical application of on-page SEO
40. There are many technical approaches to content ideation, because data mining is so very useful for this purpose
41. I’m a big redditor, and I think it’s a great source of content ideas. You have a bajillion niche communities, on every subject manner imaginable. Explain how it works above
42. I feel as SEOs, we tend to over rely on Search Volume. You need more semblance of audience in your decisions. For instance, I used to run a horror movie blog. When I was looking to see which film directors to write about, I first looked at search volume. This data would have you believing that Alfred Hitchcock should be a high priority content piece.
43. Head over to /r/horror, Dreadit and you see that he’s not discussed all that very much. Search Volume reflected the general populace, which wasn’t my audience. I was much better off writing about George Romero, which was the happy medium Data mining for content ideas. Technical application of on-page SEO.
44. Let me give another example, since this one is so rich
45. YouTube is a great repository of content, but it’s all locked up in videos. So you could use a script like the one above to automatically download all the auto generated transcripts and figure out what to write about. Explain above
46. I ran this on the MozCon 2016 playlist. 2016 was the year of content and friends apparently. Again, Data mining for content ideas. Technical application of on-page SEO.
47. I love this one. Site migrations can be such a pain, and oftentimes you miss old URLs. You can use the wayback machine API to download a list off all the historic URLs and map it to your current content. Explain above.
48. I searched google for “law firm redesign” btw. Totally random website that needs some redirects. Anyway, you get a score of how similar one page is to another and then you can create redirects automatically. Great for large websites. Saves a ton of time. Saving time for strategy, with a technical approach to SEO
49. This is also a sort of automation example, and I wrote about it on Search Engine Land. What if you had to create a lot of unique meta descriptions all at once? That would take a while. Rather than letting Google pick, you could use text summarization to begin the process for you. Explain above.
50. Ran on my board game website. Some algorithms are definitely better than others depending on the page. I’ll pick the one I eyeball as being the best.
51. Then plop it into my handy bulk title tag and meta description pixel width checkers and start rewriting them a bit. Semi-automated. A technical solution to an SEO problem that otherwise isn’t techical
52. I believe in audience driven SEO, and when time permits, creating personas when doing keyword research is a part of that process. You can use a tool like HitWise that meshes panel and clickstream data to categorize audiences and apply it to your keyword research. They have this tool called AudienceView that’s pretty awesome, and will show all sorts of demographic and psychographic data for search terms. The only problem is it doesn’t allow you to quickly do individual keywords. Explain above
53. So we can start looking at individual keyword audience representations, individually or in aggregate. It can be very powerful. Again, you wouldn’t expect it, but creating something like this to enhance your keyword research is a technical process.
54. Spending too much time on creating reports? Consider creating dashboards with live data. You’ll still need to explain to the client or stakeholder, but it can do a lot of the heavy lifting. In order to do that, you need to create a data lake. Explain above.
55. So you can make really informative dashboards The initial creation was technical
56. I also would like to illuminate a non-coding example. I believe that testing for SEO is of the utmost importance now-a-days.
57. Explain above
58. And I include this as an example, because almost all of the other ones implied you need to code, and although I think it’s important, it’s not the only path to advanced, applied technical SEO. Aiding in experimental design and writing test specs is technical and wildly important. Explain above. That being said…
59. That being said, having some semblance of knowledge is important to many aspects of advanced, applied technical seo. It permits to work more agilely, without engineering resources. Or if you have engineering resources, it aids in your understanding of how to better work with them. I recommend at least learning the basics.
60. Aw. My twins again. Coding is also becoming basic literacy—it’s being taught in elementary school. My twins will learn to code at a young age. It might seem daunting, but you can really get the basics very easily. And if not, remember your children will have this knowledge, and they’ll eventually enter the workforce…
61. Also truly proficiency in “general technical SEO” will also lead you down the coding rabbit hole See the following examples I mentioned earlier? Coding would certainly help.
62. All of this is why I recommend thinking about investing in technical SEOs, rather than technical SEO itself. It’s the skills, the people that are the glue here, your bottleneck
63. That being said, I don’t want you to stress if no one on your team meet the criteria or you don’t. how do you solve that? Should we just hire software engineers? Data scientists? Analysts? Can my existing SEO staff learn these skills?
64. Read above.
65. People who can code and meet the following criteria, you’re set. People who can’t code and meet the following criteria, invest in education.
66. Okay, to go back to our discussion of the pillars of SEO. I insinuated that content might be even more important than technical SEO. Is it? Na
67. Nore is technical SEO isn’t more important than content or link building either. It’s all apart of that crazy venn diagram.
68. And Technical SEO can be at the center, enhancing the other disciplines. Elevate your work that your creative, content strategists are already doing. Elevate the work that your link builders are doing. Start thinking about technical SEO differently
69. Let the technical SEOs be your glue. They help everyone