In this session, Chris and Danny their experience of recovering from an unsuccessful SEO relaunch by using data tactics. The sessions covers three SEO issues structural change, page bloat and Javascript issues and how data tactics can help. This Github repo contains all the data pipeline code shown at SMX Advanced EU 2023. It contains implementation details for four data products, as shown in the session: - a 404 live alert on GA4 data, executed via a cloud function - a sitemap monitoring script, based on advertools - a custom SEO crawler, based on advertools - a webvitals monitoring script https://github.com/ChrisGutknecht/smx_advanced_seo_data/

1. How to Recover From an
Unsuccessful SEO Relaunch
by Activating Your Data
Danny Zidaric | Christopher Gutknecht | Bergzeit

2. This is NOT an SEO Success Story…

3. It is an SEO Recovery Story… Using Data

4. What is Your Value from This Session?
1. Real company story,
with many DON'Ts
2. Specific how-tos for
data activation in SEO

5. Performance
Analytics
Climber
1997 2008 2013 2023
E-Commerce
Tech SEO
Skier / Outdoor Sports Enthusiast
1990 2012 2017 2023
About Danny and Chris

6. This Was Our Two Year Journey… Step by Step
Stopped work on
old platform
Relaunch Fixing our structure with data

7. The Start: What Drove the Relaunch Decision?
Blessed from
COVID growth
Need for an integrated
commerce platform
Less flexibility than
initially expected
Delivery deadline
pushed SEO
requirements down

8. Result: We Had to Change 97% of Our URL Structure
Danny: I quit!

9. Pre-Relaunch: So Much Crawling & Redirecting
● ~20M crawl requests in 6 weeks
● ~70k URLs in 4 languages
● added +50k redirect rules

10. Post Relaunch: 404 Levels Per Day Grew 10-Fold (!)
… We kept adding more redirects

11. First Hope: We Won Back Danny as Tech SEO
Org changes made:
● SEO moved to product
(Ecom)
● SEO team to be built
● SEO QA as required
product workflow step

12. Post-Relaunch: Google Does NOT Like MVPs
Our old site Our new site

13. Our New Site Had Three Core SEO Issues
1. Large-scale
structural change
3. JS-heavy application
(SPA)
2. Page Bloat
1. Large-scale
structural change

14. Our Custom URL Structure was NOT Compatible
System Capabilities
Our URL Requirements

15. Our URL Structure Changed From Pizza to Pyramid
# Pagetype Old URLs New URLs % of
URLs
(new)
1 Category (Generic) /jacke/
/jacke-herren/
/bekleidung/jacken/
/herren/bekleidung/jacken/
5%
2 Brand /patagonia/ /marken/patagonia/ 2%
3 Brand + Category /patagonia-jacke/ /marken/patagonia/bekleidung/jacken/ 15%
4 Brand + Category +
Gender
/patagonia-jacke-herren/ /herren/bekleidung/jacken/?filter.marke=Patagonia
/marken/patagonia/bekleidung/jacken/?filter.gender=He
rren
20%
5 Productdetail /patagonia-r1-jacket-red-
s/
/p/patagonia-herren-r1-daily-
jacke/1094060/#itemId=1094060-022
50%

16. After 3 Months, Old URLs still had 10% of Impressions

17. Redirects Aside - How Can We Catch 404s asap?
Dashboards are
beautiful, but they’re
soft like butterflies….

18. To Fix 404s asap, You Need Alerts & a Dashboard
Alerts Dashboards

19. Reaches multiple people at once
This is what our 404 Live Alert looks like
Contains link to dashboard
Above committed threshold (e.g. 85 > 70)

20. Our GCP Data Pipeline for 404 Live Alerts
Cloud Function
(+GA4 Streaming)
Dashboard
Teams Alert
GitHub: https://github.com/ChrisGutknecht/smx_advanced_seo_data

21. You Should Monitor Your Googlebot Logfiles
Save crawl budget
Reduce server requests

22. GSC Crawl Stats are OK, but Not Enough…
not log-level
not searchable
not groupable

23. These Crawl Peaks Do NOT Imply a Faster Site

24. Logfile Case #1: /ga/screeninformation/
blocked by
robots.txt
WTF?

25. Logfile Case #2: JS Functions that look like Links
WTF?
blocked by
robots.txt
blocked by
robots.txt

26. Our GCP Data Pipeline for Logfile Exports
Cloud
Storage
Hourly csv export
(Stack Management)
Daily Table
Update &
Tests
Dashboard
Teams Alert
GitHub: https://github.com/ChrisGutknecht/smx_advanced_seo_data

27. Let’s Move on to Issue #2: Page Bloat
1. Large-scale
structural change
3. JS-heavy application
(SPA)
2. Page Bloat

28. How Our Daily Category URL Count Fluctuated
Relaunch:
Important URLs not in sitemap,
but also duplicates
Regular jumps in Sitemap URL count

29. The Root Cause for Page Bloat? Team Structure
Marketing E-Commerce
Product Owner
Tech SEO
Content SEO
Content
SEO was spread across teams, but missing critical product influence
Product / IT
Acquisition

30. In Our New Structure, SEO is Part of Product
Marketing E-Commerce/Product
Product Owner
SEO
Reference: https://www.kevin-indig.com/forging-a-fine-tuned-seo-machine/
Content

31. Our Decision Rules to Reduce Our Categories
1. Exclude
High traffic
Duplicates
Low/no traffic
2. Keep or Add
High demand
(internal/external searches)

32. We Combined Three Data Sources For This
Inventory Data
Combined
Data Model Dashboard
SKU … Categories_All
100-01 … Cat1, Cat2, Cat3
101-01 … Cat1, Cat5, Cat6
…. … …
GSC Data
GA4 Data

33. We Combined all Data Sources for Decisions
Overall removed:
~ 500 duplicates
~ 1500 low/no traffic categories
Removed

34. How Can We Monitor Category URL Changes?
What happened
here & here?

35. Daily Sitemap Monitoring is Super Simple

36. Our GCP Data Pipeline for a Sitemap Monitor
Cloud Function
Table Update
& Tests
Dashboard
Teams Alert
GitHub: https://github.com/ChrisGutknecht/smx_advanced_seo_data

37. Bonus: Run a Custom Crawler in the Cloud

38. Our GCP Data Pipeline for a Weekly Crawler
Managed Notebook
Daily Table
Update &
Tests
Dashboard
Teams Alert
GitHub: https://github.com/ChrisGutknecht/smx_advanced_seo_data

39. Our Custom Crawler Dashboard
Only 1/3 of category URLs
found in crawl

40. Let’s Move on to #3: Optimizing WebVitals
1. Large-scale
structural change
3. JS-heavy application
(SPA)
2. Page Bloat

41. We Need to Balance these Three Site Properties
Interactivity
Web Vitals
Crawlability
Static HTML
SPA
Rendering
Strategy

42. Client
But Most of Vue.js Logic is Hidden to Googlebot
Server
API Calls
Initial HTML

43. WebVitals Case #1: Pagetype Dashboard
1.
Competitor
Benchmark
2. Internal
Pagetype
Benchmark

44. WebVitals Case #1: Reducing HTML Size
Removing the static privacy
page from initial HTML
increased performance score
by 15 (!) points

45. WebVitals Case #2: Anomaly Detection
🔎Start, List & Mag moved!

46. Our GCP Data Pipeline for WebVitals
Cloud Function
(Pagespeed API)
Daily Table
Update &
Tests
Dashboard
Teams Alert
GitHub: https://github.com/ChrisGutknecht/smx_advanced_seo_data

47. Or Send WebVitals Events to GA4…
GitHub: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web-vitals

48. An Example Test Configuration for a CLS Alert
dbt expectations: https://github.com/calogica/dbt-expectations

49. Our Current Results since Relaunch and YoY
Visibility: + 4 Points (since relaunch)
GA Sessions: + 6% (120d YoY)
GSC Impressions: + 8% (120d YoY)

50. Takeaway: Bring Observability Into Your SEO Project
Chris

51. Thanks for Listening!
Looking Forward To Questions.
Danny Zidaric | Lead SEO
Christopher Gutknecht| Teamlead Analytics

52. Annex: Why Use a Custom Crawler?
Screaming Frog SaaS Tool
Adhoc crawls
Low-cost
Direct benefit
Cost for larger sites
Diminishing returns
Not for the cloud
🕷️☁️
Custom Crawler
Cloud-Native
Low-cost
Customization

53. Annex: How Did our Blog visibility change?
Relaunch
Wordpress Blog with
very few changes