When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all. That’s SEO QA in a nutshell. The key to online life, love and success is: testing. Testing involves product, devs and SEOs. Tests: everyone wants them but time and accountability get in the way. In this talk, Gianna Brachetti-Truskawa and Myriam Jessier go over how to automate, semi-automate and fake it till you make it QA testing methods that do not rely on developers and minimize inter-team frictions. They’ll also show basic tests everyone should carry out to save some anxiety. They’ll also discuss the mysterious mysteries: everything that can go wrong and all of the things NO ONE EVER TELLS YOU.

1. TECHNICAL SEO QA
Myriam Jessier | PRAGM
Gianna Brachetti-Truskawa | KaFe
Rocks Ltd.
She/Her
They/Them
SLIDESHARE.NET/MYRIAMJESSIER
@MYRIAMJESSIER
SLIDESHARE.NET/GIANNABRACHETTITRUSK
@TENTACLEQUING

2. 💡SHINING A LIGHT
ON INVISIBLE WORK💡
@tentaclequing @myriamjessier
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3. 0. BEFORE WE BEGIN
1. WHAT NO ONE TELLS YOU
2. BASIC TESTING
3. AUTOMATE QA TESTING
SEO QA IN A NUTSHELL
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4. 0 | BEFORE WE
BEGIN

5. What
motivates
QA?
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6. AVOID DEPLOYING
BROKEN CODE
DETECT & FIX ERRORS
AFTER A DEPLOYMENT
OR
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7. Have a Staging
Environment to Test
Things On
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8. @tentaclequing @myriamjessier
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9. WHAT’S IMPORTANT
DEFINE
TO CHECK DURING QA
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10. Critical pages, user flows,
core functionalities…
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11. Have an evolving
checklist
⚓Or steal ours at the end of
the presentation
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12. 🚀
Relaunch
🎨
Redesign
📟
Ongoing QA
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13. 1 | GETTING QA
JUST RIGHT

15. Is it indexable? Is it rank-worthy?
Is it crawlable?
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16. What is a successful
deployment from an SEO
perspective ?
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17. 2 | COMMUNICATE
POTENTIAL RISKS

18. Code Content
Design
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19. POTENTIAL RISKS
1. Language issues: hreflang
2. Intrusive interstitials for your crawls
3. Changing URL structure, trailing slashes, etc.
4. Drastic content changes
5. Internal links & sitemap.xml
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20. SHIT THAT
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MATTERS

21. BUT
THAT
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NOBODY
TELLS YOU

22. Do not overload the bot with
thousands of new pages
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23. GSC has a time delay, keep
this in mind during QA
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24. Some QA checks must be
manual, no way around it.
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25. QA your code: canonicals,
schema and HREFLANG
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26. CONFIGURATION FILE
⚓See how to setup a config file in Screaming Frog
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27. ..*Be aware that each type of
site has its own QA flavour…
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28. DEVS DEPLOY
WITHOUT TELLING YOU
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29. AND SOMETIMES
IT’S MACHINES
DOING THAT
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30. Some deployments are not
done by humans: cron jobs,
scripts, server updates.
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31. 3 | AUTOMATION
SCENARIOS

32. You, with the proper
monitoring tools,
during QA
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33. Post-release
crawl
Automated
weekly
crawling
GSC notifications
SEO change
monitoring
software
QA engineer for
a cleaner
deployment
Pre-release
crawl
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34. MONITORING SETUP
WHAT, WHERE, HOW, WHO?
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35. ● What tools do you have?
● What issues are they tracking?
● What’s missing?
WHAT
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36. ● Where are the alerts going?
● Where should they go?
eg. Slack, MS Teams, E-Mail, JIRA, Trello, …
WHERE
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37. How do these alerts get there?
eg. via APIs, filters, services
HOW
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38. Who handles alerts? When?
How?
eg. writing tickets for Product/Dev,
handing over tasks to a team, …
WHO
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39. GSC E-MAIL NOTIFICATIONS
GSC ERROR CODES “WNC-XXX”
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40. GA E-MAIL NOTIFICATIONS
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41. SERVICE TOOLS (Zapier, IFTTT)
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42. DEDICATED SLACK CHANNEL FOR
NOTIFICATIONS
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43. SEO MONITORING
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44. ZAPIER
E-MAIL
GA
GSC
CONTENT
KING
PINGDOM
TOOLS
JIRA
SLACK
CONFLUENCE
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45. INTEGRATIONS
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46. RECAP
1. Define test scenarios
2. Create standard config files for your crawls
3. Use a checklist
4. Automate as much as possible
5. Review your checklists and config files periodically
6. Add any new test scenarios
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47. DANKESCHÖN/
MERCI
GIANNA BRACHETTI-TRUSKAWA
MYRIAM JESSIER
@tentaclequing
gianna@kafe.rocks
@myriamjessier
myriam@pragm.co