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Developing a SEO friendly CMS from the ground up - Digital Elite Day 19
The document discusses developing a SEO-friendly content management system (CMS) from the ground up. It recommends starting with an autonomous full-stack SEO team and constantly redefining what features are handled by the platform versus users. The document also recommends investing in features to improve publishing operations, building monitoring into the platform, and leveraging APIs to scale operations.
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Developing a SEO friendly CMS from the ground up - Digital Elite Day 19
- 1. DEVELOPING A SEOFRIENDLY CMS FROM THE GROUND UP Fabrizio Ballarini
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- 3. WHAT IF ITOLD YOU IT DEPENDS
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- 6. How important is the CMSto control your site performance? @Pechnet
- 7. What is the average depthof understanding of CMSs among SEO professionals? @Pechnet
- 8. The less controlthe highest chance to underperform vs plans! @Pechnet
- 9. The choice iswide, not entirely SEOs fault @Pechnet
- 10. Yet we havepreferences @Pechnet
- 11. We are askedto contribute to technical decisions @Pechnet
- 12. Debug what isbroken @Pechnet
- 13. Produce guidelines anddocumentation, define processes @Pechnet
- 14. Choosing is notsimple as some choices don’t have immediate impact on SEO @Pechnet
- 15. Every situation isdifferent and you can’t simply follow what’s recommended @Pechnet
- 16. Your problems areunique to your business, so are your processes @Pechnet Our landing page creation flow
- 17. We decided tobuild our own: Meet Lienzo @Pechnet
- 18. Whatever is yoursetup keep an eye on the SEO “DevMometer” @Pechnet Fresh start or migration to new platform with prospect of healthy collaboration SEO team has no direct control on CMS choice and product but has to pitch changes to web/product team Cms is already in place & there is very little SEO team can change
- 19. Less friction themore your team** is full stack @Pechnet SEO Specialists Full Stack Devs Frontend Devs Designers Copywriters Editors Translators Publishers Analysts **Credit for all the below actually goes to them, I simply do the talk :)
- 20. Simple basic growthlevers @Pechnet CTR Conversion Rate Unique Pages Search volume Customers
- 21. 3 years lateron the content / SEO side of the team @Pechnet 2 3 15 1712 3M Custom CMS SEOs Content specialists CountriesLanguages Indexed Pages
- 22. We growth atthe speed at which we ship/optimise pages @Pechnet 3M INDEXED PAGES 🚀
- 23. Publishing via CMSdoesn’t scale: go beyond basic SEO checks and optimise operations! Copywriters Editors Translators Publishers Keyword Data Unique page @Pechnet
- 24. 4 categories of features youshould invest engineering on Make search engines bots happy Accessibility Avoid screwing up Monitoring Improve team processes Publishing Ops Build automation Scaling @Pechnet
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- 27. Don't just give developers alist of SEO features Customize URLs Meta data Structured data Canonicals and redirects Indexing Sitemaps hreflang and geotargeting
- 28. Define what ismust to build and what you can hack: Our first xml sitemap after launching 1M+ URLs! @Pechnet Lorem 3 Put KPIs against hacked process until we realised we were hitting scaling issues and couldn’t simply keep up. TIme for engineers to automate it. Lorem 1 To save dev time we worked harder on building a strong internal link structure that bots could crawl more efficiently. Lorem 2 Built manually by SEOs. >>Dump list of URLs from DB >> Build static XML sitemap >> Upload regularly Build itDo without Hack it
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- 30. Define what ishandled by the platform Vs what is managed by users @Pechnet #1 Language/Country selector #2 Unique page hreflang key #3 Locale-mapping
- 31. Users only selectlanguage/country + unique key, Platforms does the mapping to URL locales @Pechnet Language/Country selector Unique page hreflang key Locale-mapping
- 32. Invest time definingideal user roles and rights 🚧 @Pechnet SEO Social/PPC/Affiliate Content Specialist Regional Marketing Manager ● Full admin access + API access ● Approve change from other profiles on SEO features (indexing, canonicals, hreflang) ● Can duplicate SEO indexed pages, confined to non to publish on folders that no index by default ● API access ● Restricted access to SEO features ● Require approval on editing/duplicating/deleting index SEO pages if published on folders linked from main architecture
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- 34. Why scraping asite you actually own? @Pechnet Everytime you press update on any page changes get stored in your database. You don’t need to crawl your site to find out!
- 35. Connect your data @Pechnet Connectyour database to an easy to use BI server, such as Metabase, Looker or similar. Metabase is the easy, open source way for everyone in your company to ask questions and learn from data.
- 36. “Ranking Perpetrators” getinstant notifications @Pechnet
- 37. Process with externalmonitoring Introduce error Crawl site Compile report Identify owner & request fix Publish fix Process built into platform Introduce error Instant notification Publish fix @Pechnet
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- 40. Plain content searchcapability @Pechnet We can now search ing content of each page directly into Looker Example: We want to identify all blog articles that contain links to sources that require regular updates.
- 41. Rendered content searchcapability @Pechnet We want to limit our team scraping the site during their day to day operations and give them access to fast insights. Example: Find all comparison tables where we have issues with markdown that prevent us from capturing feature snippets.
- 42. #1 Locate theissue @Pechnet 1. Replicate the issue 2. Inspect element
- 43. #2 Edit asHTML @Pechnet
- 44. #3 Select theHTML rendered representation of the table header @Pechnet
- 45. #4 Filter inLooker ⚡ @Pechnet 1. Manipulate copied element to fit Looker avance match rules 2. Apply filter and identify pages affected in seconds
- 46. Better sync withSEO operations
- 47. Fine tune backendto achieve seamless workflow @Pechnet Easy access to brief & draft from writers Automatically track keywords via API
- 48. The Average Handlingtime (AHT) is normalizing. In average it takes around 15-18 days for each of the production stages. Overall it takes us 2 - 3 months to publish an article from the moment the brief for it is created. Measure time to publish KPIs to evaluate process efficiency and value of adding features Publishing Analyst
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- 50. https://developers.google.com/analytics/solutions/experim ents-client-side User friendly builtin split testing 🚧 @Pechnet Create pages in the way you are used to do it regularly, nothing different. A page for the control group: https://transferwise.com/page-a A page for the test group: https://transferwise.com/page-b Add experiment key & launch test!
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- 53. Know your CMS,your content & structure data @Pechnet
- 54. Learn how touse APIs @Pechnet Understand how your CMS works: database, data format and structure Example: our CMS is running on a PostgreSQL database and each page is stored in a JSON format. Examples for other CMS: https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/
- 55. Why would wedo it? (Use cases) @Pechnet Creating and updating landing pages manually takes time and is prone to errors. Create 1000s of scalable landing pages from scratch Update out-of-date content, or fix broken links in scale Delete obsolete pages Clone existing pages at scale
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- 57. Use case: Wrongcanonical and optimise meta elements @Pechnet Example: We wanted to update values for meta titles on 200+ landing pages. At the same time, some of the pages had incorrect value for rel=canonical
- 58. #1: We haveprepared our list of changes @Pechnet Prepare your changes in a simple csv - we also included a path name for an extra check to make sure we have the correct page ID
- 59. #2: We wrotea simple script in python @Pechnet We wrote a simple python script to download a JSON response for relevant page ID, make required changes and then send the updated JSON back to the API.
- 60. #3: Test locally& execute in production 🚀 @Pechnet After first testing the changes in a local environment, we were ready to run the script in production: $ pipenv run python find-replace-request.py csv-filename public 200+ pages optimised!
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- 62. Use case: create1000 new landing pages @Pechnet Imagine you want to create 1000 new templated landing pages - for example to sell different types of ice cream, in multiple languages. Each page should contain information about different aspects of ice cream: - Its flavour - Price - And list of allergens
- 63. #1: Create atemplate @Pechnet In JSON format, create template matching the API schema and map templated fields to variables.
- 64. #2: We haveprepared our list of variables @Pechnet Prepare the values for templated fields in a csv like this one:
- 65. #3: We wrotea simple script in python @Pechnet We wrote two simple python scripts: 1. To generate JSON files based on variable values and template 2. To send JSON files as a POST request to our API
- 66. #4: Test locally& execute in production 🚀 @Pechnet $ pipenv run python api-request.py csv-filename public After first testing the changes in a local environment, we were ready to run the script in production: 1000+ new pages launched!
- 67. We used tohack our Database 🙈, with API it’s safer and way more efficient @Pechnet 1000+ new pages DONE! Step 1: We plugged our CMS to Metabase Step 2: Understand template in JSON Step 3: Edit template, concatenate JSON Step 4: Inject data in in PosgreSQL ☢
- 68. Exceptionally powerful whencombined with widgets that leverage internal/product data Frontend Widgets Price Comparison Service Data Collection Service Landing pages @Pechnet
- 69. 🤖 APIs beatHumans 🤖 @Pechnet 👨🔬👩🔬
- 70. What did welearn so far
- 71. 🚨 Warnings 🚨:what we didn’t know 3 years ago @Pechnet Must do: Escape technical dependencies from other teams, takes time but it’s worth Don’t limit to just sending a SEO recommendation without knowing how people will implement it in your organisation Treat users of the platform as your customers and spend time working out how they use it, put KPIs against usage What could have been faster or gone better: Don’t let your ability to develop the platform limit your growth Don’t build features until you future proof them, iterating it’s ok but shutting down stuff isn’t.
- 72. @Pechnet Start with anempowered autonomous full-stack SE0 team… 1. Constantly redefine what SEO features are handled by platform vs users 3. Invest in features to improve publishing operations 2. Build monitoring into your platform 4. Leverage APIs to scale
- 73. @Pechnet Link to slides>> wi.se/seo-friendly-cms Money without borders >> wi.se/borderless Join us >> wi.se/seo-jobs Thank you