Slides from my SEO training day, conducted at Igoo in Liverpool. These formed the basis of a full day, bespoke advanced technical SEO training day.

1. SEO Training Day
IGOO
9th March 2020

2. SEO Basics
&
SERP Appearance

3. Keyword Research
Classic SEO technique, crucial to your technical efforts.
Bedrock of your campaign. Even the best tech SEO campaign won't rank a site with no keywords
Not about keyword stuffing, but planning a best practice website structure for SEO success

4. Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Watch out for cannibalization, don’t optimize more than one page for the same terms
Use tools to determine which pages are ranking
Utilise primary and secondary keywords from your research and continually test

5. Pruning
Be sure to remove all low-quality content from the index. This is where manual auditing and technical
SEO combine:
• NoIndexing & Canonicalisation
• Content Repurposing to Tackle Cannibalisation
• Range of Techniques Available here
• Almost certainly how Google determines E-A-T, along with the rater guidelines
Think about UX, engagement and CTR

6. Break
10.30 – 10.45

7. Crawling & Auditing

8. Website Crawling
Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, Sitebulb and SEMRush all excellent
Very similar but with different UI’s and reporting

9. Manual Checks
A deep crawl of the domain is essential, especially for some areas we will cover
But manual auditing should complement this and there are some vital checks:
• Text Only Cache
• Tracking Check (GA vs GSC & Bounce Rate) – multiple installations?
• Robots.txt
• Breadcrumb
• Chrome Console Errors
• Mobile Responsive (Crosschecked with GSC)
• Excessive Advertising/Pop-Ups
• Content Review (Empty, Thin, Dupe & Orphaned)
• Doorway Pages

10. URL Inspection Tool
https://search.google.com/search-console/inspect

11. Technical SEO Audit Process
Create a master SEO checklist
Remember that not all implementations will have the same impact
A domain’s authority, size and the issues at play will determine the order in which you should
correct errors
This may also be impacted on the sector or vertical, but by and large links are still a significant
part of Google’s algorithm

12. Any Sign of a Penalty?
Could also impact how you prioritise your SEO recommendations
Even the best and most advanced tech SEO cannot solve content, backlink or spam issues

13. Link Profile Analysis
Not really technical SEO, but could propel your efforts or even stop you wasting your time
Combine data from Google Search Console, Ahrefs, MajesticSEO or Moz for the full data set
Disavows still necessary if you know that there have been historic, aggressive link building efforts

14. Lunch
1pm – 2pm

15. Interrogating Data

16. Crawl Data
Collate your crawl data, connect with your Google Search Console account, backlink profiler

17. Server Log Files
The only 100% reliable source of date in terms of determining how various user agents and bots are
crawling your website
Great for:
• Establishing crawl errors encountered by all search engines
• Migrations
• Obtaining true response times for site speed optimisation
• Highlighting spider traps
• Mobile first indexing
• Assessing use of crawl budget
• Establishing why pages are performing badly
• Highlighting problems with website architecture (URLs vs Requests)
• Aged and thin content – blog post deprecation etc
Great article here from BuiltVisible, although the Screaming Frog Log Analyser allows you to automate
their manual process

18. SEO Visibility Tools
The better ones provide a lot more than just an SEO visibility score, which can be misleading at times.
• Cannibalisation
• Organic traffic fluctuations
• Keyword increases/decreases
• Top/worst performing directories
• Competitor performance
• Inbound links
• Post update performance
• New business auditing
• Social signals
• Reaction to SEO recommendations
• Featured snippets
• Migrations (URL changes)
• Keyword research
• Indexed pages

19. Break
3.45pm – 4pm

20. Advanced Techniques

21. Structured Data
• Articles
• Books
• Breadcrumbs
• Carousel (Recipes etc)
• Reviews
• Events
• FAQ
• How To
• Image Meta Data
• Job Posting
• Local Business
• Logo (Knowledge Graph)
• Product
• QA
• Searchbox
• Speakable / TTS
• Video

22. Website Structure & Architecture
If you have done all of your SEO housekeeping but visibility and organic traffic is still struggling, you
could have some more fundamental issues at play.
Things to think about:
• Silo Structure
• Orphaned Pages
• URL Structure
• 301 Redirects
• Hidden Content
• Site Speed
• Mobile Rendering
• Over Optimisation
• Domain name change of Migrations
As we have covered; Google Search Console, your server log files and tools can all help you to
diagnose the issue. But manually checking code, rendered HTML and the index is also crucial

23. JavaScript & Rendered HTML
Never presume that our source code is what is being honoured by the search engines
Mobile first and Google rendering of JavaScript has meant that this is unreliable
Inspecting element is the key, as well as using Google’s tools to see what is actually being processed
when indexing your website

24. Site Speed Optimisation
Lots of tools out there, all with their perks
GT Metrix and WebPageTest offer excellent insight but you can do most of the testing you need via
Google Chrome
Waterfalls are where you can find out all you need to know
Ensure you are testing on all devices and connectivity – emulating the average user
All about developer liaison and these enhancements will benefit all channels, particularly conversion

25. What To Do With Tricky CMS or Dev
Not all CMS systems are SEO friendly
Migrating can be expensive and labour intensive
This can hinder SEO performance, but there are some work arounds:
Using the Data Layer & The DOM
Dealing With Tricky Development

26. Thank You!
Any Questions?