The document discusses technical SEO best practices for improving a website's performance and visibility in search engines. It provides tips for conducting a technical audit to identify and resolve issues, optimizing site speed, ensuring search engines have full access to content, and building good SEO practices into development processes. The document also outlines common technical SEO risks and solutions for working with large volumes of content.
22. Technical
Audit
Indicators
• Drops
in
Organic
traffic
• Drops
in
visibility
in
SERPs
• Drops
in
organic
conversions
rela?ve
to
total
• Webmaster
Tools
data
alarms
• Error
repor?ng
in
Moz
• Changes
in
organic
Quality
score
23. Technical
Audit
Valida?on
of
problems
• Duplicate
page
content
(tags,
copy)
• Not
all
content
is
indexed
• Lots
of
“omiMed”
pages
in
SERPs
• Canonical
tag
problems
• www
vs.
non-‐www
with
no
global
redirect
• XML
sitemap
not
accurate
(enough)
• Incorrect
or
no
redirects
on
updated
urls
• Thin
or
nearly
duplicate
product
descrip?ons
25. Known
Technical
SEO
risks
Duplicate
issues
• Selling
the
same
product
as
other
sites
• Industry
standards
and
feature
parody
• Regulated
Industries
• Corporate
mul?-‐unit
owner
• Franchisee
• Ecommerce
website
with
products
in
mul?ple
categories
26. Known
Technical
SEO
risks
Marketers
problems
• I
don’t
fully
understand
the
technical
infrastructure
• The
tech
team
doesn’t
know
or
care
about
SEO
• I
am
working
on
somebody
else
website
• Somebody
took
shortcuts
and
went
for
the
cheapest/quickest
op?on
• Somebody
used
black
hat
SEO
27. Known
Technical
SEO
risks
Other
knows
risks
and
issues
(Knows
and
Unknown)
• 302
redirects
• Errors
in
XML
Sitemaps
• 404s,
500s,
and
other
crawl
errors
• Missing
and/or
duplicate
tags
• Mul?ple
H1s
and
improper
h-‐tag
hierarchy
• Flat
URL
structure
and/or
hierarchy
problems
• URL
tracking
parameters
without
canonicals
• Mobile,
printer-‐friendly
and
feed
pages
• Iframed
content
28. Known
Technical
SEO
risks
Working
with
large
scale
content
• Tens
of
thousands
of
product
pages
that
can’t
be
op?mized
individually
• Dozens
of
loca?on
pages
• hundreds
of
pages
of
standardized
industry
content
and
references
• Mul?ple
corpora?ons,
brands,
and/or
sites
under
one
umbrella
30. Solving
Technical
SEO
Problems
1. Review
sitemap
&
find
areas
that
can
follow
templates
for
URL
structure,
tags,
headings,
&
copy
2. Build
formulas
for
the
planned
dynamic
items
in
non
technical
language
for
each
template
sec?on
3. Integrate
with
content
strategy
to
address
need
for
unique
content
including
user
generated
content
(reviews,
?ps,
comments
etc)
&
other
ways
to
build
at
scale
31. Solving
Technical
SEO
Problems
1. Determine
areas
where
canonicals
are
needed
&
document
(could
be
a
big
project)
2. Review
pagina?on
&
develop
plan
for
canonicals
and
/
or
single
page
solu?ons
3. Determine
op?ons
for
the
robots.txt
and
xml
sitemap
files
&
develop
recurring
audit
plan
&
elicit
feedback
32. Solving
Technical
SEO
Problems
Have
more
involvement
with
the
planning
stage
on
projects
•What
technology
is
in
place
for
the
website
•what
ques?ons
do
I
have
about
how
it
works
•What
is
required
from
a
content
standpoint
•What
can
be
programma?c
versus
manual
•What
CMS
and
GitHub
control
will
I
have
over
SEO
elements
•What
resources
will
i
have
at
my
disposal
33. Improving
Site
speed
Speed
maMers
• A
1-‐second
delay
in
page
load
?me
yields:
• 11%
fewer
page
views
• 16%
decrease
in
customer
sa?sfac?on
• 7%
loss
in
conversions
• 52%
of
online
shoppers
say
quick
page
loads
are
important
for
their
loyalty
to
a
site.
(source:
Aberdeen
Group)
34. Improving
Site
speed
Streamline
the
number
of
elements
on
your
page.
Use
CSS
instead
of
images
whenever
possible.
Combine
mul?ple
style
sheets
into
one.
Reduce
scripts
and
put
them
at
the
boMom
of
the
page.
Target
a
server
response
?me
of
less
than
200ms
Enable
compression
Enable
browser
caching
Minify
resources
35. Improving
Site
speed
• Op?mize
images
• Op?mize
CSS
delivery
• Priori?ze
above
the
fold
content
(Consider
splikng
your
CSS
into
two
parts:
short
inline
part
that
styles
above-‐the-‐fold
elements,
and
an
external
part
that
can
be
deferred.)
•
Reduce
the
number
of
plugins
used
on
the
site.
Too
many
plugins
slow
your
site,
create
security
issues,
and
• olen
cause
crashes
and
other
technical
difficul?es.
• Reduce
redirects.
Redirects
create
addi?onal
HTTP
requests
and
increase
load
?me.
So
you
want
to
keep
them
to
a
minimum.
36. Giving
the
search
engine
full
access
• Ensure
that
Googlebot
can
crawl
JavaScript,
CSS
and
image
files
by
using
the
“Fetch
as
Google”
feature
in
Google
Webmaster
Tools.
• Check
and
test
your
robots.txt
in
Google
Webmaster
Tools.
• Test
your
mobile
pages
with
the
Mobile-‐Friendly
Test
• Test
both
the
mobile
and
the
desktop
URLs
37. Make
sure
search
engines
like
Google
can
understand
the
mobile
site
setup.
• Responsive:
Use
meta
name="viewport"
• For
responsive
images,
include
the
<picture>
element.
• Use
HTML5
standards
for
anima?ons
• Use
video-‐embedding
that’s
playable
on
all
devices.
• Have
the
transcript
of
the
video
available.
• Configure
(or
turn
off)
pop
ups
or
live
chat
on
mobile
device
Mobile
op?miza?on
38. Where
possible
plug
into
the
Google
services
• Publisher
tags
• Google
maps
• Google
my
business
• Local
schema
There
is
probably
a
lot
more
and
more
to
come.
I
will
update
this
sec?on
Local
SEO
considera?ons