Make sure that your site is built on solid technical foundations

Tom says: “Ensure that you have complete technical quality throughout your entire site.

I come from a technical SEO background, that is what I do, and it's incredibly important to ensure that you have solid technical foundations for a website. If you have those foundations, you can build quality content, cracking links, and everything else on top of that. If you don't have that foundation in place, that's where things start to go wrong.

If Google can't effectively crawl and index the content on your site, they can’t get that content to perform as well as it could. You’re not doing your content justice. If you don’t pay attention to technical SEO, you're not giving your site the best helping hand possible.”

What does good technical site quality look like in 2024?

“It’s largely the same as it has been for the last few years. Make sure that Google and other search engines can access your site as quickly and efficiently as possible. Not only that but also make sure that users can access and engage with the content on your site easily and effectively.

Make sure your content loads quickly and it’s easy for users to find and access what they’re looking for. Have a solid information architecture, and relevant schema in place on your pages. Follow best practice guidelines and ensure that Google and users can find stuff as easily as possible.”

Have SEOs taken their eyes off the ball when it comes to their technical setup?

“As SEOs, we often get distracted by the next best thing. Six months ago, everyone was raving about ChatGPT and how it's going to change the world. Then we realised that it's not actually going to change the world just yet. A lot of people will try and go for the next and greatest thing, and it can be really easy to forget about the basics.

If you get the basics right, then you can start exploring the next and greatest – but you've got to get those basics done first.”

How often do SEOs need to look at their basics?

“You should never forget about the basics. Every time you launch a new section of a site, make sure it is technically sound. That should be part and parcel of the procedure. If you want to have a checklist, you would have 10/15 things on that checklist that you do on a monthly basis.

A good starting point is to use Screaming Frog’s crawl scheduling. Set up a daily or weekly crawl and get data pulled into a Looker Studio report automatically. That can be a fantastic way to start implementing these reports regularly and keep an eye on the basics without forgetting about them.

Once it's set up, it just runs in the background. You don't have to manually run a crawl every day. You can just review a Looker Studio report at the start of the day, and that's that.”

Should you set up alerts and what alerts might those be?

“You can set up an email alerting system. Every site above a certain size is going to have some 404 errors, so you can set up an alert for a spike in those, a spike in redirects, or anything else that shouldn't be happening. If it does happen, you want to get a report or email alert sent to you.

You can use numerous things for that. If you've got data that's being pulled into Google Sheets, you can use a short Apps Script. You can even get ChatGPT to do it for you. That script will send you an email any time it goes above a base level or has a certain percentage increase.

You can use Python if that's more your game, or you can use Zapier if you don't want to touch any scripts at all. Plug that into your sheet, and any time a cell value goes above a certain number, it can send you an email alert. If you want to level things up further, you can get it to send Slack alerts too. It will ping you a direct message on Slack saying, ‘Hey, your site has seen an increase in errors.’

Having that view on the basics can be really important, especially if a client does something like adding a noindex to their home page. You can catch it on the same day and save them a lot of lost revenue.”

Is it possible to set up really specific alerts, like a sudden loss in conversions from a particular device?

“Of course. If you're using Google Analytics 4 and you're pulling that kind of data into it, you could also pull that into the same Looker Studio report and you could get it to automatically sync with Google Sheets and set up alerts that way as well. You can set it to refresh at the same time every single day, pull that data into that one location, and then send alerts.

I'm a big fan of GA4. It’s a subject of much debate, but I like the way it classifies everything as an event, and you can get it to track events for everything. You can set up Tag Manager to track those specific conversions that you want to be looking at and set up alerts that way too.”

Does site speed still have a significant impact on user experience?

“Absolutely. As a ranking factor, it's part of the overall EEAT of experience, expertise, authority and trust. Speed is a part of experience, meaning how a user experiences your website.

If it's incredibly slow, there's going to be a massive drop-off in potential conversions and potential money that people are spending on your site. If your site loads in a second and you could do a really technical tweak to save you a millisecond, it's probably not worth it, unless you're trying to get the fastest site possible.

It's all about trade-offs. If you make the site four seconds faster, what impact on your revenue could that have? If you make it 0.01 seconds faster, what impact is that going to have? Usually, the more seismic changes are going to have the bigger impact."

How do you determine if technical underperformance is impacting user behaviour?

“Generally, you can tell pretty quickly. If you look at a site and it has a lot of technical issues, then that is probably causing a lot of problems.

It's also about experimenting. If you think something's causing a problem and it's a site-wide issue, fix it on a single page. Then, track that single page granularly, looking at every single metric: impressions, clicks, click-through rate, conversions, time-on-page, scroll behaviour, whether they spend a long time trying to find what they're looking for or immediately go to the CTA, and whether it’s clear to them what the next step is.”

If users are happy with your site, do you still need to make technical improvements?

“I would always say yes. Always try and get to the best possible technical version of a site, even if your users are happy. You've got to keep the users happy, but also the bots that are crawling your site (Google Bot, Bing Bot, GPT Bot, etc.).

The happier the bots are, the more they're going to crawl. The faster they can crawl your site, and the more valuable content they find, the more frequently and the faster they'll recrawl your site. That will keep the index fresh and make sure that you're serving the most relevant content to your users.”

How far should you future-proof your site to cope with larger amounts of traffic?

“I would go for something that's scalable. It depends on what you estimate is going to happen. If you're running a really viral PR campaign and you haven't got your site's bandwidth set up to deal with that, you're going to be in for some problems. If the PR team is going to make a massive push, you want to increase capacity prior to that, so the site can deal with any potential bandwidth that's going to be used.

Communication is the key. Make sure that any person who is working on your site knows what's happening – whether that's the developer fiddling around with the back end or a PR person getting links and traction on an organic level. There needs to be great communication between every member.”

When talking with other departments, how much technical SEO knowledge should you share?

“As much as they're happy to absorb. Always start with the basics of what technical SEO is, the three pillars of SEO, how it all pulls into the wider marketing view, how technical SEO impacts developers, etc. If they’re happy with that, by all means, start training your clients on further technical topics. The only limit is their thirst for knowledge.

We offer training for a lot of our clients. If they're not particularly clued up on technical SEO, it can be very valuable to offer them training on specific topics, so they understand a little bit more about why we're doing what we're doing. That can give great fuel to the fire for getting stuff implemented.”

How do you measure the financial value of technical SEO improvements?

“That's a very tricky question and it doesn’t have a simple answer. If you make a change on a site, it usually comes with other changes as well. You’re rarely going to have a single thing happening at a time, so it can be hard to report on specific implementations. When you change a technical aspect of something, it can be hard to attribute that directly.

It's good to understand the trends. If you removed a noindex tag and the page started going up in search, that's kind of obvious. However, if you change a few redirects around, optimize speed a little bit, and add some further structured data, it can be a little trickier to understand which change resulted in a specific impact.

But the longer you do these sorts of things, the more you understand what is likely to have a bigger impact. In regards to reporting, it's about literally tracking everything. You won't put everything in a report, but you should make sure to track every possible metric that you would like to have visibility on, so you can report on it if you need to.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time on technical SEO in 2024?

“Stop faffing about with stuff you don't need. We’re all focused on trying to do the latest and greatest things, and sometimes you don't need to do that. Just do the basics and then build upon those basics. If you get the basics down, 90% of the time, you'll be all good.

If something you're doing is boring and repetitive, and it's something that you would like to not do, consider finding a way to automate that and take the load off. That doesn't mean finding the latest and greatest solution, it just means finding a way to get a machine to do that work for you.

You could use Python to do large-scale data analysis. If you take an export from Screaming Frog that you typically analyse in Google Sheets or Excel, it can be rather painful once that export is over a certain size. If you use Python to do that, not only will you save yourself the time of loading it up in the spreadsheet, but it will also make that task highly repeatable in the future. You can run the same analysis for a different client, with exactly the same script, and it will run in the same way.”

Tom Pool is Technical and Training Director at Blue Array, and you can find him over at BlueArray.co.uk.