How Agile Technical SEO Can Add Value To Your SEO Campaign, by Adam Gent

Agile & Technical SEO
ADAM GENT

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but
the ones most responsive to change.”
CHARLES DARWIN

@Adoublegent
SEO industry Survey

@Adoublegent
Why are SEOs waiting so long?
“Technical debt is a concept in programming that reflects
extra work due to short term solutions applied on a website,
rather than applying the best overall solution.”
Technical Debt on Wikipedia

@Adoublegent
Start
4 months on…
Technical debt in action (current campaign)

@Adoublegent
• Client brief
• Insights and Market Research
• Technical SEO Analysis
• Solid SEO Strategy
• Business Case
• Prioritised SEO action list
• Technical briefs for actions
VS
It’s not just about technical debt
• Marketing budget restrictions
• Legal restrictions on tech changes
• Client team development resource
• Time
• Business prioritises

@Adoublegent
Every client campaign is different

@Adoublegent
Agile Methodology
“The Agile methodology is a project management movement
which seeks an alternative to traditional waterfall project
management processes.”
Agile Methodology

1. Think about your overall SEO/digital strategy
2. Understand your web technology
3. Recognise what you can’t do
4. Identify alternative methods
5. Test, test and test again

LOCAL
OPTIMISATION
URL
STRUCTURE
CONTENT
STRATEGY
FIXING
BROKEN LINKS
TITLE TAG
OPTIMISATION
HREFLANG
TAGS
INTERNAL LINK
STRUCTURE
PAGE SPEED
OPTIMISATON
IMAGE
OPTIMISATION
SITE
STRUCTURE
SCHEMA
MARKUP
VIDEO
OPTIMISATION
SEO
Strategy
@Adoublegent
Prioritise technical actions

@AdoublegentSource: BuiltWith - https://goo.gl/IoYI7H
Content Management System (CMS)
A few (brief) examples, can you update:
1. Title Tags
2. Meta descriptions
3. Canonical tags
4. Meta robots (e.g. noindex)
5. Robots.txt
6. URLs
7. Content
8. Images
9. Image alt text

@Adoublegent
SEO modules/extensions/plugins for your CMS
DRUPAL - https://www.weebpal.com/blog/top-drupal-seo-modules
WORDPRESS – https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
MAGENTO – https://yoast.com/magento-seo/
SITECORE – https://www.sitecore.net/company/blog/415/how-sitecore-supports-your-on-page-seo-policy-4061
JOOMLA – https://extensions.joomla.org/category/site-management/seo-a-metadata
KENTICO - https://docs.kentico.com/display/K8/Search+engine+optimization
They can help to reduce technical (SEO) debt and get actions complete!

@Adoublegent
Client who has actively optimised
organic search snippets
Client who can’t change
organic search snippets

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Web Server/hosting
A few brief examples, can you update:
1. 301 redirect maps
2. Global redirect rules (e.g. non-slash
URLs to slash URLs)
3. Page level 301 redirects
4. Log files

@Adoublegent
Log file Analysis
99%
1%
Live HTML URLs crawled by Googlebot over over
24 hours
Not in internal link structure Canonical Link
Parameter URLs
Actual webpages we
want to be crawled
The Ultimate Guide to Log File Analysis – Builtvisibile

2. Recognise what you can’t do

@Adoublegent
Can complete
list
Can’t complete
list
SEO Strategy
Prioritised technical SEO action list
Developer Queue

40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer
than three seconds to load.
Source: Think with Google

@Adoublegent
CloudFlare Off CloudFlare On
6.17 secs 2.39 secs
Pingdom Page Speed Tool

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+61% in 30 mins…
Page Load Speed
…It impacts the entire site
(not just 1 webpage).

@Adoublegent
HTTP/2 is now standard
More on HTTP/2 here.

@Adoublegent
BUT need to make you aware…
• There are rare cases it causing ranking drops
• To reduce risk to SEO performance:
o Get your own custom SSL certificate (before the
switch to CloudFlare)
o Upload your own SSL certificate (with a business or
enterprise package)
o Get your own unique IP address
o Configure CloudFlare dashboard
Guide: Cloudflare SEO issues and how
to protect yourself – SALT.agency

“Google’s indexing system can render web pages more
like an average user's browser with JavaScript turned
on.”
Source: Webmaster Central

@Adoublegent
Document Object Model
“The Document Object Model
(DOM) is a programming interface
for HTML, XHTML and XML
documents. It provides a
structured representation of the
document as a tree.”
DOM Wikipedia Find out more on the DOM here.

@Adoublegent
JavaScript can manipulate the DOM
“"The DOM allows programs and scripts to dynamically
access and update the content, structure, and style of a
document."
W3C JAVASCRIPT DOM

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Allows us to add custom JavaScript to a webpage.
Google Tag Manager

@Adoublegent
Enter your custom
JavaScript and JQuery here.
GTM can change a webpage’s DOM without a developer
(but still keep them in the loop)

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Schema Markup (JSON) Google Search Console

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Noindex meta robots
Before
After

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JavaScript redirect
Page A Page B

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GTM possibilities are endless
 Add/update Meta Tags
 Add/update Schema (JSON)
 Add/update Content
 Add/update Images
Google Tag Manager
is on the rise. If you
don’t have it installed,
then I suggest you get
it!

“Adding hreflang to a site is ‘informing’ Google that the
site is offering content for queries in a specific
language, tailored for a specific region of the world.”
Source: Branded3

@Adoublegent
Hreflang tag generator
Hreflang tool – The Media Flow

International SEO for Norton
UK Results
189%
Increase in SEO visits YOY
DE Results
50%
IT Results
59%
FR Results
292%
@Adoublegent

@Adoublegent
Branded3’s contact us page
CloudFlare broke the thank you animation
broke on our contact us page. Users weren’t
sent to the thank you page but left on the
contact us page.
It was quickly fixed using the page rule feature
though!

@Adoublegent
Always test your tools before
you deploy them live!

Thank you
adam.gent@branded3.com
@Adoublegent

How Agile Technical SEO Can Add Value To Your SEO Campaign, by Adam Gent

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