You might have a standard set of processes and fixes when dealing with normal-sized sites, but how does that change when you start working with large enterprise sites? How do you adapt SEO processes to work effectively for clients with these needs? In this session, Sam will provide efficient and effective strategies on how to tackle complex SEO challenges for Enterprise level sites.

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Solving Complex SEO Problems When Standard Fixes Don’t Apply
Strategies &
Tactics For
Overcoming
Enterprise SEO
Challenges

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Getting SEO right on any site is difficult enough…
Source: https://searchengineland.com/seotable

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SEO is getting more technical…
https://www.elephate.com/blog/mobile-first-chrome-user-experience-report-javascript-apocalypse/
You can’t do SEO without
getting technical.

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…this is reflected in Google’s focus for 2019
Source: https://searchengineland.com/seotable

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How the hell is effective SEO
possible for the
web’s largest sites?!

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Talk about what you know
What we do every day:
Help people to crawl websites to get insights,
no matter how many URLs they have.

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SEO challenges and solutions for humongous sites
What we’ll cover:
Challenge #1 – Scale
Challenge #2 – Issue detection & prioritisation
Challenge #3 – Monitoring & management

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Challenge #1 - Scale

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What’s the problem with analysing large sites?
It isn’t time-efficient to extract
insights for the entire site.
Analysing every page is resource
intensive and costly.
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Tactical
analysis
to the rescue!

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“In most cases, you only need
enough data to validate
issues.”

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What is tactical analysis?
Getting the data you need
as quickly as possible.
Building the bigger picture
from smaller parts.
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Tactical analysis is about
using segments to give a
representative picture of the
whole site.

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Roadmap for tactically tackling large scale sites
Baseline analysis – Unrestricted initial analysis with
limited no. URLs.
Design segments – Sampling and slicing. Maximum
insights with minimum resources.
Benchmark analysis – Focused and frequent ongoing
analysis for monitoring.

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Example: Large marketplace client
2 million URL initial crawl
15 targeted crawls to test hypotheses
Ongoing benchmark crawls

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Tactical crawling to the rescue!
Sampling Slicing

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Sampling is about
analysing a percentage
of the whole site.

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1. URL Exclusion

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1. URL exclusion

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2. URL level limitation

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2. URL level limitation

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Reduce the site down to it’s core categories

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3. Page group sampling

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3. Page group sampling

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Slicing is about
analysing an isolated section
of the site.

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Horizontal slice – all products, no categories

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Horizontal slice – all products, no categories

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Vertical slice – distinct section of a site

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Vertical slice – distinct section of a site

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Challenge #2
Issue detection & prioritisation

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Detecting issues that are actually worth fixing.
Deciding on issue prioritisation.
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What’s the problem with issue detection on large sites

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Challenge #3
Monitoring & management
We need some level of
prioritisation

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How can we priortise the issues that we find?
Effort x Impact = Severity score & priority level
(1-5) (1-5) (1-25) (low-high)
Example:

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Some tell-tale signs of HIGH priority
issues on large sites…

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Top 4 major issues on large sites
Proportion of
primary pages
Crawl depth
with >20 levels
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JS rendering finding
iframe breaking head
Excessive international
page versions
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Example: Technology company
Lack of SEO direction meant ridiculous
no. country/language combinations in
URL path.

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Pages for Kazakh speakers in
Switzerland e.g. /kk-KZ/zurich/

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However…
Even with validated implementations, Google doesn’t
seem to be showing the right pages to the right
audience.
Could be that…
Algorithm for swapping out alternates doesn't work as
precisely as we expect.
Or
Trouble with very complicated sites with many
alternate versions.

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Challenge #3
Monitoring & management

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What’s the challenge with monitoring and managing
large sites?
Keeping on top of issues as they arise on a
large scale site.
Maintaining a top level perspective of a large
portfolio of domains.
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Example: Media publisher
Large scale migration to new CMS.
Over 300k subdomains migrated in 6
months.
Monitoring traffic & crawling pre and
post to ensure smooth transition.

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Dashboard ALL the things!

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Multi-domain keyword
cannibalisation

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Multi-domain businesses struggle
to keep on top of cannibalisation

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The uses
Identify duplication of effort across domains
Filter down by device, country & query sets
Track cannibalisation issues over time

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The setup

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Keyword Cannibalisation dashboard

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The controls
1. Pick your queries 2. Pick your countries 3. Pick your dates

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Cross domain keyword data!!!

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Crawl insights in Data Studio

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Launched in 2016.
Zapier is God!
Automating workflows
with triggers and actions
@sam_marsden SMX

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Crawl insights in Data Studio

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XML Sitemap Dashboard
Bringing together DeepCrawl & GSC

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XML Sitemap - Indexability reporting

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What are the benefits?
@sam_marsden PHLSEO
Conveniently monitor GSC
& crawl insights

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Track indexability over time
Easily flag indexing issues

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Track indexed pages over
time

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Speed dashboards using CrUX data

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Google’s putting more emphasis on speed

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Accessing CrUX data

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Getting to the CrUX of the matter

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Why should you visualise raw CrUX data
Flexibility to manipulate how you display CrUX data.
Inexpensive to query and store data.
Easier for comparing multiple domains
(competitor analysis).

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Mining for CrUX Data

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Alternatively, for automated CRUX dashboards...

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Essential resources for creating CrUX dashboards
Paul Calvano - CrUX query tutorials
Rick Viscomi - CrUX cookbook
Oliver Mason - Misusing the Chrome
User Experience Report

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See how you stack up to competitors

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Informing development teams

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Trend business impact over time

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Wrapping it up…

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What we’ve learnt about dealing with SEO on large sites?
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Scale
Detection &
prioritisation
Monitoring &
management
Tactical analysis,
sampling & slicing
Prioritise based on
business impact
Dashboarding &
automation

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Guide to setting up these
dashboards:
bit.ly/seo-automation

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LEARN MORE: UPCOMING @SMX EVENTS
THANK YOU!
SEE YOU AT THE NEXT

75. #SMX @sam_marsden
LEARN MORE: UPCOMING @SMX EVENTS
THANK YOU!
SEE YOU AT THE NEXT #SMX