Patrick Stox presenting on why it's hard to measure and prioritize SEO efforts at Pubcon FL 2019.

1. #pubcon
Why It’s Hard To Measure
And Prioritize Efforts
Presented by: Patrick Stox @patrickstox

2. #pubcon
Who is Patrick Stox?
• Technical SEO for IBM - Opinions
expressed are my own and not
those of IBM.
• I write, I speak, I judge
• I organize 2 SEO Meetups in
Raleigh
• /r/techseo moderator

3. #pubcon
WPO Stats https://wpostats.com/
• Carousell reduced page load time by 65% and saw a
63% increase in organic traffic, a 3x increase in
advertising click-thru rate and a 46% increase in first-
time chatters.
• Tokopedia reduced render time from 14s to 2s for 3G
connections and saw a 19% increase in visitors, 35%
increase in total sessions, 7% increase in new users,
and 17% increase in active users.

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Does that mean more people click through
to a fast site or your rankings improved?
• Nope, it means more people were likely recorded
because the analytics tag was fired sooner in the
page load, capturing people before they left.

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Test: Chrome on a Motorola G (gen 4) tested
from Dulles, Virginia on a 1.6 Mbps 3G
connection with 300ms of latency.
• Normal Analytics Request Start: 22.530 s
VS
• Removed Render Blocking Scripts Analytics Request
Start: 14.400 s
There’s obviously more issues here, but removing render blockings
scripts means that someone with these test settings would be
recorded 8 seconds sooner.

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AMP
• AMP preloads in the SERP, so part of the site is
already loaded before clicking. Again this allows
analytics to fire sooner.
Source: https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/why-amp-caches-exist/

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Speed = Better Analytics
• More traffic recorded = traffic increase
• More traffic recorded = click to visit increase

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Switch to HTTPS and Traffic Drops
• Highly Unlikely
– Most cases are people looking in a single profile in Google
Search Console when not all traffic has switched.
• Create a combined view in GSC such as a Domain
Property to properly look at this data.

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Why Do I Say It’s Highly Unlikely?
HTTP/2
Source: https://http2.akamai.com/demo

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Also Referrer Policy
• Default is Referrer-Policy: no-referrer-when-
downgrade
– Sites typically lose the referrer when going from a site on
HTTPS to a site on HTTP. It doesn’t have to be this way,
but for the most part it is.
• Switching to HTTPS = Better Attribution (less dark
traffic)

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What About Domain Migrations?
• A combined view can help. Property set in old GSC or
maybe Data Studio going forward.
• People tend to use site: searches and think things
aren’t migrated properly, but think about that
search, you’re asking to see the pages on a website.

12. #pubcon
Useful Commands
• Site: shows pages from a website
• Info: shows the canonicalized version of a page (this
is where signals like links are consolidated and how
the page is being treated in the index)
• Cache: will likely show you the same page as info:
• URL inspector in GSC (shows resolved URL, lacking
how it got there)

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That’s Likely The Most Important Part
of Technical SEO
• You have to understand how something is being
treated in the index and why. How signals
consolidate, what version of a page will show,
duplication, clusters, etc.

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Timing of Case Studies

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Same for Case Studies After Holidays
• Want a successful case study in house, do it in
January-February. Compared to the previous months
you’re probably way up because people are back
from vacations.
• You can’t compare these year over year because too
much has changed and you can’t properly attribute
the rise to your test.

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And Case Studies That Only Look At Part
Of The Data
• Looking at you all the studies who did this one thing
but really you have a whole new website with a
whole new internal link structure
(subdomain/subdirectory)
• Or ones that only look at a folder before and after
not counting the folder that was redirected or moved
over
• This kind of stuff is rampant

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We Increased Traffic by xxx% with this
one weird trick
• I guess the rest of the company was on vacation and
did nothing for those months.

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Attribution is Hard
• Journeys can be complex. Tracking people over each
step and assigning lift or even negative impact is
difficult. Multi-Touch Attribution can help as a guide.

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Tools tend to lead People in Directions
that Waste Time
• Word Count
• Readability
• Keyword Density
• Multiple H1 tags
• Tag too long/too short
• Invalid HTML
• Really anything without any understanding
• HTML too large
• Too many links on page
• Broken/redirected links
• Social tagging
• Tag missing or empty
• Favicon…

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What About On-Page?
• Title - how do we measure relevance, to what? What if I use a
different version of a word or say the same thing in a different
way?
• Description – not even a ranking factor and if it’s blank it will be
written for you.
• Heading Tags – relevant to what? What if I made up a term?
• Images (name, alt, content) – what if it’s a background image or
something used for spacing or something not relevant, should I
include an alt attribute? Should I use the keyword or what it is?

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Content…
• Most content tools come down to saying use this
keyword xx number of times, and this one y number
of times and this other one z number of times.
• There’s no understanding of the target keywords
(most only let you target a single term) or if it’s the
right term or something made up.

22. #pubcon
What if Search Engines Fix it for You?
• There are a lot of issues that while we consider them
best practices, the web is a messy place and search
engines will try to figure out how it should be and
they may ignore what we have. (Duplication,
Canonicalization, various hreflang issues, how certain
parameters are handled, etc.)

23. #pubcon
Pareto Principle 80/20
• Most websites get a majority of their traffic from a
relatively small number of pages.
• Focusing on improving all pages or elements can
waste time.
• Effort vs Impact

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What Does Matter?
• Is it indexed, how is it indexed
• How are signals consolidated (content, links (internal/external),
redirects). Fewer, stronger pages
• Content (talk about the right things, the things people are searching
for, the things top pages are ranking for, the things top pages are
talking about, expand to domain/topic level opportunities, what’s
driving value to competitors) Every person, every time
• Intent – to me this is as simple as match popular search terms. Google
tries to show a mix (fractured intent) of popular searches in their
results and generally top pages talk about what people search for.
Meet user needs and fulfill your promises

25. #pubcon
Thank You All