In a recent SEJ webinar, Steven van Vessum discusses the importance of real-time SEO auditing and the need to proactively address SEO issues before they impact website rankings and revenue. He highlights that 80% of SEO problems go unnoticed for weeks, leading to significant financial losses, and stresses the necessity of monitoring changes, limiting access, and employing quality assurance practices. The webinar emphasizes that the question is not if issues will arise, but when, urging the audience to be prepared.

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@stevenvvessum
How to Catch & Fix SEO
Issues Before It’s Too Late
Steven van Vessum

2. #SEJWebinar
@stevenvvessum
About Me
• VP of Community at ContentKing
• 13 years in SEO
• In-house, agency-side,
and vendor-side

3. #SEJWebinar
@stevenvvessum
Real-time SEO Auditing and Content
Tracking

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@stevenvvessum
• Search engines never sleep — they constantly
crawl and update their index.
Why this topic?
• SEO mistakes can happen anytime. You need
to fix them before they impact your rankings
and bottom line.

5. #SEJWebinar
@stevenvvessum
Why this topic?
80%
Number of SEO issues
that go unnoticed for at
least 4 weeks
$75K
Cost of the average SEO
issue in lost revenue

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@stevenvvessum
With the right tooling and processes,
you can mitigate these issues.
There is good news, though…

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@stevenvvessum
Google Search Console notifications —
delayed and limited.
But, what about existing tools?
Google Analytics — your organic traffic
has already taken a hit.

8. What kind of SEO issues
are we talking about?
#SEJWebinar
@stevenvvessum

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@stevenvvessum
Client or colleague gone rogue

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@stevenvvessum
Client or colleague gone rogue
“The CMS was telling us to update
it, so we did — including the theme
and all of its plugins!”

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@stevenvvessum
“We tweaked the page titles on
these key pages all by ourselves!”
Client or colleague gone rogue

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@stevenvvessum
Client or colleague gone rogue
“These pages didn't look
important, so we deleted them.”

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@stevenvvessum
Client or colleague gone rogue
“We didn’t like the URLs on these
pages, so we changed them.”

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@stevenvvessum
• Track changes.
Client or colleague gone rogue
• Limit access.
• Get alerted when someone goes rogue
(trust me, they will).
• Set clear rules of engagement.

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@stevenvvessum
Client or colleague gone rogue

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@stevenvvessum
Client or colleague gone rogue

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@stevenvvessum
Client or colleague gone rogue

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@stevenvvessum
• Development team gone rogue.
Other common issues
• Releases gone bad.
• Buggy CMS plugins.

19. Have you ever had important
SEO issues go unnoticed?
#SEJWebinar
@stevenvvessum
A: Yes B: No

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@stevenvvessum
Development team gone rogue

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@stevenvvessum
Development team gone rogue
Rolls out JS-driven
pagination, causing
delays in crawling &
indexing.

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@stevenvvessum
Development team gone rogue
Changes approved
for English version get
hastily shipped across
all language versions.

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@stevenvvessum
Development team gone rogue
• Track all changes.
• Get alerted when someone goes rogue
(trust me, they will).
• Set clear rules of engagement.
• QA testing (more on that later).

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@stevenvvessum
Releases gone bad

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@stevenvvessum
Releases gone bad
• Robots.txt from staging /
acceptance moved over
to production.
• No crawlers given access.

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@stevenvvessum
Releases gone bad

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@stevenvvessum
Releases gone bad

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@stevenvvessum
• Automated Quality Assurance testing
during pre-release, release, and post-release.
Releases gone bad
• Track all changes.
• Get alerted when something goes wrong.

29. Are you also monitoring your
staging or acceptance
environment?
#SEJWebinar
@stevenvvessum
A: Yes B: No

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@stevenvvessum
Buggy CMS plugins

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@stevenvvessum
• Security updates are often forcibly applied.
Buggy CMS plugins
• When they contain bugs, these are introduced
without your knowledge.

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@stevenvvessum
• Disable automatic updates.
Buggy CMS plugins
• Track all changes.
• Get alerted when something goes wrong.

33. Tradition
al
crawling
#SEJWebinar
@stevenvvessum
Continuo
us
Monitorin
g

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@stevenvvessum
Traditional crawling’s weakness
TIME TO DETECT

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@stevenvvessum
When something breaks, you need
to know immediately and fix it before
Google notices.
Monitoring and Proactive Alerting

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@stevenvvessum
The right approach
START
Special URLs:
- Robots.txt
- XML sitemaps
- Tag manager containers
- etc.
Special URLs Special URLs Special URLs
Special URLs Special URLs Special URLs Special URLs
(no end)
URLs according
to importance

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@stevenvvessum
• Websites have an upper limit to the number
of requests they can handle per second.
Intelligent usage of available bandwidth
• Use smart scheduling and heuristics to make
the most of it.

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@stevenvvessum
1. Only “need to have” access
Recap
2. Set clear rules of engagement
5. Alerts™ when something goes wrong
3. 24/7 Monitoring™
4. Continuous Auditing™ and Change Tracking™

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@stevenvvessum
Recap
80%
Number of SEO issues
that go unnoticed for at
least 4 weeks
$75K
Cost of the average SEO
issue in lost revenue

40. #SEJWebinar
@stevenvvessum
The question isn’t if something will go wrong.
Recap
The question is when.
Don’t leave your bottom line unprotected.
ARE YOU READY?

41. Thank you
for your attention!
#SEJWebinar
@stevenvvessum
contentkingapp.com