SEO Technical Metrics. Tools, Tips, and Guides.

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Eli Schwartz Online Marketing Manager SurveyMonkey The Technical SEO Metrics You Should Care About SMX West 2013

description

This is the presentation that I gave on Technical SEO Metrics that matter at SMX West 2013. The focus was on 6 areas of low hanging fruit to address when starting any SEO project. Additionally, I shared some results from a survey we did analyzing SEO impact with real users.

Transcript of SEO Technical Metrics. Tools, Tips, and Guides.

Page 1: SEO Technical Metrics. Tools, Tips, and Guides.

Eli SchwartzOnline Marketing Manager

SurveyMonkey

The Technical SEO Metrics You Should Care About

SMX West 2013

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Poll: Have you woken up to or inherited this?

EMD, DMCA, Top Heavy, Venice, Freshness

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Overview

• Significant impacts from basic technical SEO changes:

URL Issues

Robots.txtJavascript and CSS links404 pagesRedirectsCanonicals

• User benefit to technical changes

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Look for URL Issues

www.wufoo.com Username.wufoo.com

• Check for http:// vs https://• www vs non-www• Index page does not redirect to the root• Subdomain duplication

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Check Robots.txt

Could this be important?

www.irs.gov/robots.txt

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Browse without Javascript and CSSDisable Javascript

Afterwards Disable CSS

Links being hidden by CSS might suddenly appear

Plugin: http://bit.ly/devel-plugin

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Crawl entire domain with Screaming Frog

http://bit.ly/scfrog

A Screaming Frog crawl can help you discover 404 pages

Optimum settings

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Download landing pages from GA

Change to 25

URL will now show:

Change to 2500

1) 2)

3)

4)

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Discover new 404 pages

Upload the CSV that you downloaded from GA to Screaming Frog with the list option

Discover pages that had received traffic but now 404

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Redirect Path Plugin – Header responses

http://bit.ly/ayima

Visually shows server header response as well as redirect path

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Screaming Frog shows all redirects

Sort Screaming Frog crawl by status code to find 302’s and 301’s

Update 302 redirects to 301’s; use direct links when possible for internal links that 301

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Tamper for Firefox finds redirect path

http://bit.ly/Tamper-Tool

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Discover canonicals with Screaming Frog

Canonical column will contain a URL if a canonical exists

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Find incorrect canonicals in Excel

Excel Formula: IF(A1=B1,TRUE,FALSE)

Export Screaming Frog crawl into Excel

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See results in Google Webmaster Tools

Are impressions trending higher?

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Google’s Webmaster Technical Guidelines

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

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User impact from technical changes

• Random selection from general US population

• Random assignment into 1 of 2 surveys with 16 questions

• Survey sent to 3,000 people

• Survey was open for 5 days

• 615 people participated• Comparison of means

over a variety of indicatorshttp://bit.ly/sma-research

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What happens when a search user does not find what they expected on the page?

60% of users

bounce

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Other interesting survey results

User trust of guest posts

Why would users block a site from Google results?

22% decrease

in trust for a guest

post

t(237,345)=-9.47,p < .001

Top Heavy

Panda

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Takeaways and homework

• Always focus on the user, but look out for:

• Missing pages• Redirects• Broken canonicals

• Download: Screaming Frog, Tamper for Firefox, Ayima Redirect plugin, any developer plugin that controls CSS and Javascript

• Be a hero

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Thank you!

Eli Schwartz, SurveyMonkey [email protected] @5le @surveymonkeyDownload slides: http://bit.ly/SEO-Tech