Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today we're going to be talking about cannibalization, which here in the UK we spell like this: cannibalisation. With that out of the way, what do we mean by cannibalization?

What is cannibalization?

So this is basically where one site has two competing URLs and performs, we suspect, less well because of it. So maybe we think the site is splitting its equity between its two different URLs, or maybe Google is getting confused about which one to show. Or maybe Google considers it a duplicate content problem or something like that. One way or another, the site does less well as a result of having two URLs. 

So I've got this imaginary SERP here as an example. So imagine that Moz is trying to rank for the keyword "burgers." Just imagine that Moz has decided to take a wild tangent in its business model and we're going to try and rank for "burgers" now.

So in position one here, we've got Inferior Bergz, and we would hope to outrank these people really, but for some reason we're not doing. Then in position two, we've got Moz's Buy Burgers page on the moz.com/shop subdirectory, which obviously doesn't exist, but this is a hypothetical. This is a commercial landing page where you can go and purchase a burger. 

Then in position three, we've got this Best Burgers page on the Moz blog. It's more informational. It's telling you what are the attributes to a good burger, how can you identify a good burger, where should you go to acquire a good burger, all this kind of more neutral editorial information.

So we hypothesize in this situation that maybe if Moz only had one page going for this keyword, maybe it could actually supplant the top spot. If we think that's the case, then we would probably talk about this as cannibalization.

However, the alternative hypothesis is, well, actually there could be two intents here. It might be that Google wishes to show a commercial page and an informational page on this SERP, and it so happens that the second best commercial page is Moz's and the best informational page is also Moz's. We've heard Google talk in recent years or representatives of Google talk in recent years about having positions on search results that are sort of reserved for certain kinds of results, that might be reserved for an informational result or something like that. So this doesn't necessarily mean there's cannibalization. So we're going to talk a little bit later on about how we might sort of disambiguate a situation like this.

Classic cannibalization

First, though, let's talk about the classic case. So the classic, really clear-cut, really obvious case of cannibalization is where you see a graph like this one. 

So this is the kind of graph you would see a lot of rank tracking software. You can see time and the days of the week going along the bottom axis. Then we've got rank, and we obviously want to be as high as possible and close to position one.

Then we see the two URLS, which are color-coded, and are green and red here. When one of them ranks, the other just falls away to oblivion, isn't even in the top 100. There's only ever one appearing at the same time, and they sort of supplant each other in the SERP. When we see this kind of behavior, we can be pretty confident that what we're seeing is some kind of cannibalization.

Less-obvious cases

Sometimes it's less obvious though. So a good example that I found recently is if, or at least in my case, if I Google search Naples, as in the place name, I see Wikipedia ranking first and second. The Wikipedia page ranking first was about Naples, Italy, and the Wikipedia page at second was about Naples, Florida.

Now I do not think that Wikipedia is cannibalizing itself in that situation. I think that they just happen to have... Google had decided that this SERP is ambiguous and that this keyword "Naples" requires multiple intents to be served, and Wikipedia happens to be the best page for two of those intents.

So I wouldn't go to Wikipedia and say, "Oh, you need to combine these two pages into a Naples, Florida and Italy page" or something like that. That's clearly not necessary. 

Questions to ask 

So if you want to figure out in that kind of more ambiguous case whether there's cannibalization going on, then there are some questions we might ask ourselves.

1. Do we think we're underperforming? 

So one of the best questions we might ask, which is a difficult one in SEO, is: Do we think we're underperforming? So I know every SEO in the world feels like their site deserves to rank higher, well, maybe most. But do we have other examples of very similar keywords where we only have one page, where we're doing significantly better? Or was it the case that when we introduced the second page, we suddenly collapsed? Because if we see behavior like that, then that might,  you know, it's not clear-cut, but it might give us some suspicions. 

2. Do competing pages both appear? 

Similarly, if we look at examples of similar keywords that are less ambiguous in intent, so perhaps in the burgers case, if the SERP for "best burgers" and the SERP for "buy burgers," if those two keywords had completely different results in general, then we might think, oh, okay, we should have two separate pages here, and we just need to make sure that they're clearly differentiated.

But if actually it's the same pages appearing on all of those keywords, we might want to consider having one page as well because that seems to be what Google is preferring. It's not really separating out these intents. So that's the kind of thing we can look for is, like I say, not clear-cut but a bit of a hint. 

3. Consolidate or differentiate? 

Once we've figured out whether we want to have two pages or one, or whether we think the best solution in this case is to have two pages or one, we're going to want to either consolidate or differentiate.

So if we think there should only be one page, we might want to take our two pages, combine the best of the content, pick the strongest URL in terms of backlinks and history and so on, and redirect the other URL to this combined page that has the best content, that serves the slight variance of what we now know is one intent and so on and so forth.

If we want two pages, then obviously we don't want them to cannibalize. So we need to make sure that they're clearly differentiated. Now what often happens here is a commercial page, like this Buy Burgers page, ironically for SEO reasons, there might be a block of text at the bottom with a bunch of editorial or SEO text about burgers, and that can make it quite confusing what intent this page is serving.

Similarly, on this page, we might at some stage have decided that we want to feature some products on there or something. It might have started looking quite commercial. So we need to make sure that if we're going to have both of these, that they are very clearly speaking to separate intents and not containing the same information and the same keywords for the most part and that kind of thing.

Quick tip

Lastly, it would be better if we didn't get into the situation in the first place. So a quick tip that I would recommend, just as a last takeaway, is before you produce a piece of content, say for example before I produced this Whiteboard Friday, I did a site:moz.com cannibalization so I can see what content had previously existed on Moz.com that was about cannibalization.

I can see, oh, this piece is very old, so we might — it's a very old Whiteboard Friday, so we might consider redirecting it. This piece mentions cannibalization, so it's not really about that. It's maybe about something else. So as long as it's not targeting that keyword we should be fine and so on and so forth. Just think about what other pieces exist, because if there is something that's basically targeting the same keyword, then obviously you might want to consider consolidating or redirecting or maybe just updating the old piece.

That's all for today. Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

In 2009, by issuing a call to arms to “make the web faster”, Google set out on a mission to try and persuade website owners to make their sites load more quickly.

In order to entice website owners into actually caring about this, in 2010 Google announced that site speed would become a factor in its desktop (non-mobile) search engine ranking algorithms. This meant that sites that loaded quickly would have an SEO advantage over other websites.

Six years later, in 2015, Google announced that the number of searches performed on mobile exceeded those performed on desktop computers. That percentage continues to increase. The latest published statistic says that, as of 2019, 61% of searches performed on Google were from mobile devices.

Mobile’s now-dominant role in search led Google to develop its “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project. This initiative is aimed at encouraging website owners to create what is essentially another mobile theme, on top of their responsive mobile theme, that complies with a very strict set of development and performance guidelines.

Although many site owners and SEOs complain about having to tend to page speed and AMP on top of the other 200+ ranking factors that already give them headaches, page speed is indeed a worthy effort for site owners to focus on. In 2017, Google conducted a study where the results very much justified their focus on making the web faster. They found that “As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.”

In July of 2018, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile searches, and today Google will incorporate even more speed-related factors (called Core Web Vitals) in its ranking algorithms.

With the average human attention span decreasing all the time, and our reliance on our mobile devices growing consistently, there’s no question that page speed is, and will continue to be, an incredibly important thing for website owners to tend to.

How to optimize a website for speed

Think like a race car driver

Winning the page speed race requires the same things as winning a car race. To win a race in a car, you make sure that your vehicle is as lightweight as possible, as powerful as possible, and you navigate the racetrack as efficiently as possible.

I’ll use this analogy to try to make page speed optimization techniques a bit more understandable.

Make it lightweight

These days, websites are more beautiful and functional than ever before — but that also means they are bigger than ever. Most modern websites are the equivalent of a party bus or a limo. They’re super fancy, loaded with all sorts of amenities, and therefore HEAVY and SLOW. In the search engine “racetrack,” you will not win with a party bus or a limo. You’ll look cool, but you’ll lose.

Image source: A GTMetrix test results page

To win the page speed race, you need a proper racing vehicle, which is lightweight. Race cars don’t have radios, cupholders, glove boxes, or really anything at all that isn’t absolutely necessary. Similarly, your website shouldn’t be loaded up with elaborate animations, video backgrounds, enormous images, fancy widgets, excessive plugins, or anything else at all that isn’t absolutely necessary.

In addition to decluttering your site of unnecessary fanciness and excessive plugins, you can also shed website weight by:

• Reducing the number of third-party scripts (code snippets that send or receive data from other websites)

• Switching to a lighter-weight (less code-heavy) theme and reducing the number of fonts used

• Implementing AMP

• Optimizing images

• Compressing and minifying code

• Performing regular database optimizations

On an open-source content management system like WordPress, speed plugins are available that can make a lot of these tasks much easier. WP Rocket and Imagify are two WordPress plugins that can be used together to significantly lighten your website’s weight via image optimization, compression, minification, and a variety of other page speed best practices.

Give it more power

You wouldn’t put a golf cart engine in a race car, so why would you put your website on a dirt-cheap, shared hosting plan? You may find it painful to pay more than a few dollars per month on hosting if you’ve been on one of those plans for a long time, but again, golf cart versus race car engine: do you want to win this race or not?

Traditional shared hosting plans cram tens of thousands of websites onto a single server. This leaves each individual site starved for computing power.

If you want to race in the big leagues, it’s time to get a grown-up hosting plan. For WordPress sites, managed hosting companies such as WP Engine and Flywheel utilize servers that are powerful and specifically tuned to serve up WordPress sites faster.

If managed WordPress hosting isn’t your thing, or if you don’t have a WordPress site, upgrading to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) will result in your website having way more computing resources available to it. You’ll also have more control over your own hosting environment, allowing you to “tune-up your engine” with things like the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Varnish caching, and other modern web server technologies. You’ll no longer be at the mercy of your shared hosting company’s greed as they stuff more and more websites onto your already-taxed server.

In short, putting your website on a well-tuned hosting environment can be like putting a supercharger on your race car.

Drive it better

Last, but certainly not least, a lightweight and powerful race car can only go so fast without a trained driver who knows how to navigate the course efficiently.

The “navigate the course” part of this analogy refers to the process of a web browser loading a webpage. Each element of a website is another twist or turn for the browser to navigate as it travels through the code and processes the output of the page.

I’ll switch analogies momentarily to try to explain this more clearly. When remodeling a house, you paint the rooms first before redoing the floors. If you redid the floors first and then painted the rooms, the new floors would get paint on them and you’d have to go back and tend to the floors again later.

When a browser loads a webpage, it goes through a process called (coincidentally) “painting.” Each page is “painted” as the browser receives bits of data from the webpage’s source code. This painting process can either be executed efficiently (i.e. painting walls before refinishing floors), or it can be done in a more chaotic out-of-order fashion that requires several trips back to the beginning of the process to redo or fix or add something that could’ve/should’ve been done earlier in the process.

Image source: WebPageTest.org Test Result (Filmstrip View)

Here’s where things can get technical, but it’s important to do whatever you can to help your site drive the “track” more efficiently.

Caching is a concept that every website should have in place to make loading a webpage easier on the browser. It already takes long enough for a browser to process all of a page’s source code and paint it out visually to the user, so you might as well have that source code ready to go on the server. By default, without caching, that’s not the case.

Without caching, the website’s CMS and the server can still be working on generating the webpage’s source code while the browser is waiting to paint the page. This can cause the browser to have to pause and wait for more code to come from the server. With caching, the source code of a page is pre-compiled on the server so that it’s totally ready to be sent to the browser in full in one shot. Think of it like a photocopier having plenty of copies of a document already produced and ready to be handed out, instead of making a copy on demand each time someone asks for one.

Various types and levels of caching can be achieved through plugins, your hosting company, and/or via a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDNs not only provide caching, but they also host copies of the pre-generated website code on a variety of servers across the world, reducing the impact of physical distance between the server and the user on the load time. (And yes, the internet is actually made up of physical servers that have to talk to each other over physical distances. The web is not actually a “cloud” in that sense.)

Getting back to our race car analogy, utilizing caching and a CDN equals a much faster trip around the racetrack.

Those are two of the basic building blocks of efficient page painting, but there are even more techniques that can be employed as well. On WordPress, the following can be implemented via a plugin or plugins (again, WP Rocket and Imagify are a particularly good combo for achieving a lot of this):

• Asynchronous and/or deferred loading of scripts. This is basically a fancy way of referring to loading multiple things at the same time or waiting until later to load things that aren’t needed right away.

• Preloading and prefetching. Basically, retrieving data about links in advance instead of waiting for the user to click on them.

• Lazy loading. Ironic term being that this concept exists for page speed purposes, but by default, most browsers load ALL images on a page, even those that are out of sight until a user scrolls down to them. Implementing lazy loading means telling the browser to be lazy and wait on loading those out-of-sight images until the user actually scrolls there.

• Serving images in next-gen formats. New image formats such as WebP can be loaded much faster by browsers than the old-fashioned JPEG and PNG formats. But it’s important to note that not all browsers can support these new formats just yet — so be sure to use a plugin that can serve up the next-gen versions to browsers that support them, but provide the old versions to browsers that don’t. WP Rocket, when paired with Imagify, can achieve this.

Image source: WP Rocket plugin settings

Optimize for Core Web Vitals

Lastly, optimizing for the new Core Web Vital metrics (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift) can make for a much more efficient trip around the racetrack as well.

Image source

These are pretty technical concepts, but here’s a quick overview to get you familiar with what they mean:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) refers to the painting of the largest element on the page. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will tell you which element is considered to be the LCP element of a page. A lot of times this is a hero image or large slider area, but it varies from page to page, so run the tool to identify the LCP in your page and then think about what you can do to make that particular element load faster.
  

• First Input Delay (FID) is the delay between the user’s first action and the browser’s ability to respond to it. An example of an FID issue would be a button that is visible to a user sooner than it becomes clickable. The delay would be caused by the click functionality loading notably later than the button itself.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a set of three big words that refer to one simple concept. You know when you’re loading up a webpage on your phone and you go to click on something or read something but then it hops up or down because something else loaded above it or below it? That movement is CLS, it’s majorly annoying, and it’s a byproduct of inefficient page painting.

In conclusion, race car > golf cart

Page speed optimization is certainly complex and confusing, but it’s an essential component to achieve better rankings. As a website owner, you’re in this race whether you like it or not — so you might as well do what you can to make your website a race car instead of a golf cart!

In 2019, it was estimated that Magento accounted for 30% of the e-commerce market share. Using BuiltWith data, we can see that 1.04% of the top 1 million sites utilize the platform, and Magento’s share of the market grows to 1.77% in the top 10,000 sites.

If you’re an SEO working in the e-commerce space, it’s going to be important to learn how to work with Magento. Fortunately, there are a lot of really good things that Magento does out of the box from an SEO perspective. However, there are definitely some considerations you’ll need to take into account with any Magento site.

What is Magento SEO?

Magento SEO is a set of SEO adjustments that are unique to the Magento platform. Magento has great features for SEO such as a robots.txt file, sitemap.xml and multiple ways to redirect pages. Magento SEO issues include duplicate content from the faceted navigation, improper canonical tags, and a lack of blogging functionality.

Below you can see our recommendations for improving SEO on the Magento platform:

1. Crawling & indexing

Duplicate content & faceted navigation

One of the biggest SEO issues with any Magento site is likely going to be the faceted navigation. Faceted navigations create huge crawling and indexing issues since their existence exponentially increases the number of pages that can be crawled. As pages in the faceted navigation will only either sort or narrow existing products, these pages create duplicate and similar content. Alsol, if you think about the fact that every single combination of parameters could be considered a unique page, the number of pages a faceted navigation creates can be enormous. In this example, Google showsa video from Google, they indicate how a store with 158 SKUs actually created 380,000 unique URLs that Googlebot could crawl. Not ideal!

If your Magento store utilizes faceted navigation, you’re likely going to need to take steps to control the crawl. While a how-to on controlling the crawl of a faceted navigation could warrant multiple blog posts, I’ll try to summarize steps that should be taken.

1. Audit to find low-quality, indexed pages from the faceted navigation. Identify steps to remove them from the index (noindex, canonical tag)

2. Review the site’s log files to find any low-quality pages that are getting crawled

3. Block the crawl of any low value parameters through the robots.txt

4. Consider only allowing pages with high search potential to be indexed

Of course, the steps taken here are going to vary a lot depending on the site. The overall point is that if you utilize a faceted navigation on your Magento site, one of the most important things you’ll need to do is review how Google is crawling and indexing the pages that are being generated and take steps to remove the indexation and then block the crawl of low quality or duplicate pages.

Product & category page canonical tags

By default, a Magento site’s canonical tags won’t be set for both product and category pages. This isn’t ideal, as it’s best practice to ensure that product and category pages have self-referential canonical tags. This indicates to the search engines that these pages are the pages that should be ranking well.

Fortunately, you can adjust this in vanilla Magento:

1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration

2. In the “Catalog” dropdown, select “Catalog”

3. Select the “Search Engine Optimization” dropdown

4. Ensure that “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories” and “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products” are set to “Yes”

5. Select “Save Config”

By adjusting these settings, this should ensure that all of the site’s product and category pages will have self-referential canonical tags applied to them.

Canonical tags in pagination

When looking at paginated URLs of Magento sites, we can see that, by default, proper canonical tags are not set. In Magento, all of the paginated URLs in a given series have a canonical tag that points back to the root category page. For example, here is how the canonical tag of “Page 2” of a particular category would look:

URL: www.example.com/category?p=2

Canonical Tag: www.example.com/category

Technically, this is not best practice from an SEO standpoint. Canonical tags should only be used to consolidate duplicate content. Since paginated content are not duplicates of the root versions (as they contain different products), they should not have canonical tags that point to this version. Instead, every page within the pagination series should have it’s own self-referential canonical tag. This will tell Google that the paginated URL contains unique content and should be crawled accordingly.

URL: www.example.com/category?p=2

Canonical Tag: www.example.com/category?p=2

You might need to have a developer create a custom solution that allows the site’s pagination to utilize self-referential canonical tags instead of pointing to the root category page.

Indexable internal search pages

Another Magento SEO issue is that internal search pages are indexable out of the box. This means that Google can crawl and index these low-quality pages. These pages will generally be in the /catalogsearch/ URL path.

For example, here’s a Magento site where over 4,000 internal search pages have gotten caught in Google’s index:

In order to ensure that these pages don’t get indexed by Google, you’ll want to be sure the “noindex” tag is applied to them. We recommend having a developer implement this for you and providing this article as a reference point for them.

After you’ve implemented the “noindex” tag, you’ll want to be sure that none of your internal search URLs are actually getting indexed. Perform a search for “site:example.com inurl:/catalogsearch/”. If you see URLs appearing in the index, we recommend waiting until Google removes the majority of them. If you don’t see the URLs in the index, you might consider blocking them by using a robots.txt command.

Robots.txt

Within Magento, you can also configure the robots.txt file. You’ll want to utilize the robots.txt file in order to limit how many pages of your Magento site that Google is eligible to crawl. This is especially important to configure if your site utilizes a faceted navigation that allows users to select from a variety of attributes.

Fortunately, Magento does allow you to control the robots.txt of your site. To do this, you can perform the following steps:

1. In the Admin sidebar, navigate to Content > Design > Configuration

2. Find the “Store View” you want to adjust and select “Edit”

3. Expand the “Search Engine Robots” dropdown

4. Add your robots.txt commands in the “Edit custom instruction of robots.txt File” field

How you adjust the robots.txt is going to depend on your particular store. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all option here. The main objective will be to block the crawling of any low value pages (that aren’t indexed) while allowing the crawl of high priority ones.

Below are some general things you might consider blocking in the robots.txt:

1. Low value pages created by the faceted navigation and sorting options

2. The site’s internal search pages

3. Login pages

4. The user’s shopping cart

Sitemap.xml

Sitemap.xml files ensure that Google has a pathway of discovering all of your site’s key URLs. This means that regardless of the site’s architecture, the sitemap.xml gives Google a way of finding important URLs on the site.

Fortunately, Magento has the capability of creating a sitemap.xml file and does a good job of this in it’s default settings. You can technically configure the XML sitemap settings in Magento’s “Catalog” menu. However, most of these should be okay.

While these settings are configured, you might need to generate your sitemap.xml file so it will actually be published on the site. Fortunately, that process is very straightforward. You can do this by:

1. Navigating to Marketing > SEO & Search > Site Map

2. Click the “Add Sitemap” button

3. For “Filename” add the text “sitemap.xml”

4. For “Path”, choose the URL path you want to be associated with your sitemap.xml file. This is generally at the “/pub/” URL path

5. Click “Save & Generate”

This should correctly set up your sitemap.xml on Magento. You’ll then want to be sure to submit your sitemap.xml file to Google Search Console so Google can discover your sitemap.xml file.

2. JavaScript rendering

Something else that you’ll want to be mindful of on Magento sites is any content that is loaded through JavaScript. Magento frequently utilizes JavaScript to load key content on the store. While this isn’t inherently a negative thing for SEO, it is something you’ll want to be sure you’re reviewing.

If JavaScript is required to load key content on a page, this means that Google must perform a two-step indexing process where it processes the initial HTML, and then must return to the site to render any content loaded via JavaScript. Where SEOs need to check is in the second stage of the indexing process, to ensure that Google was able to “see” all of the content that is on the page. If any elements are loaded via JavaScript, it’s worth checking whether they’re indexed.

For instance, here’s an example of a product page in Magento where JavaScript is enabled in the browser. We can see thumbnail images, text in tabs, and a related products section at the bottom:

However, most of that content is reliant on JavaScript to load. When turning JavaScript off using the Web Developer extension for Chrome, most of those elements do not render. Notice how we can only see the initial three tabs on the page:

Since JavaScript is required to load a lot of the content on the page, we’ll want to ensure that it’s getting indexed properly. Fortunately, we can use tools such as The Mobile Friendly Testing Tool and The Rich Results Test to determine what Googlebot is able to render on the page.

We also like to manually check the index by identifying content that’s loaded via JavaScript, and then using a “site:” search operator to verify that Google is able to read that text on the page. JavaScript SEO is a very expansive subject and I suggest reading this guide by Pierce Brelinsky for more information. Just understand that if you use Magento, some of your content is likely loaded through JavaScript.

3. URL paths

Out of the box, Magento will add the URL extension “.html” to the end of the site’s product and category URLs. While this isn’t necessarily “bad” for SEO, it does create lengthier URLs that are harder to read from a user perspective. URLs without the “.html” extension will have a much cleaner format for users.

To remove the .html extension from the end of URLs, you can take the following steps:

1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration

2. In the “Catalog” dropdown, select “Catalog”

3. Select the “Search Engine Optimization” dropdown

4. Find “Product URL Suffix” & “Category URL Suffix”

5. Replace the “.html” field with “/”

6. Select “Save Config”

The result will be cleaner and easier to read URLs for your store.

Please note that this is best done for a brand new Magento site. This change will automatically adjust all of the URLs on your Magento store. If your store has already existed for some time, without proper migration planning, changing this field could actually result in ranking drops. Therefore, tores that have been established a while may want to consider keeping the “.html” extension.

In addition, the old URL paths won’t automatically redirect back to the new URLs without the “.html” extension. This means that you might need to implement global redirect rules to ensure that the old pages will redirect both users and search engines.

4. Redirects

Global redirects

Magento does implement global redirects on your site. This means that if your store utilizes a “www” subdomain or “https”, if a user doesn’t enter those attributes, Magento will still redirect the user to the correct destination URL. This is great for the user experience of the site, as users should land on the correct content even if they don’t type in the exact destination URL in those instances.

However, Magento does this through 302 redirects instead of 301 redirects:

Back in 2016, there was a famous study by Wayfair that showed that 302 redirects could significantly dilute link equity. While Google has claimed that 302 redirects pass link equity, this argument is still a never-ending debate in SEO. While we believe that 302 redirects do distribute much more link equity then they once did, we take the stance that you should never utilize 302 redirects unless you absolutely need to.

For this reason, we recommend adjusting this in the Magento platform. Fortunately, this is a very straightforward change:

1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration

2. In the “General” dropdown, select “Web”

3. Select the “Url Options” dropdown

4. Change “Auto-redirect to Base URL” to “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)”

This should ensure that your Magento website’s global redirects now utilize 301 status codes instead of 302:

Custom redirects

Of course, aside from the site’s global redirects, you’re also going to want to implement 1:1 redirects for individual pages. This ensures that if you ever need to implement redirects for old pages, you can do so. Fortunately, Magento offers this functionality out of the box.

In order to implement redirects for individual pages, you can perform the following steps:

1. In the Admin sidebar, navigate to Marketing > SEO & Search > URL Rewrites

2. Select “Add URL Rewrite”

3. Enter the URL you wish to redirect in the “Request Path”. This must be a relative URL

4. Enter the destination page in the “Target Path”. This must be a relative URL

5. Choose the “Redirect Type”. Generally, you’ll want to choose “Permanent (301)”

6. Select “Save”

Please note that in order to implement redirects, the page must be completely deleted from Magento, as you can’t redirect active pages. This makes redirects very “all or nothing”, as they need to be completely removed from the platform first.

Automatic redirects

One thing that’s good to know about redirects in the Magento platform is that it will automatically create redirects when you change the URLs. For example, here I’m changing the URL path of a page:

FROM: dash-digital-watch

TO: dash-digital-watches

We can see how there is an option to “Create Permanent Redirect for old URL”

This is a really nice feature that makes it easier to handle the site’s redirects, and is definitely a best practice if you plan on changing URL paths for any key pages of the site.

5. On-page content

Title tags & meta descriptions

Want to set your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for an individual product? No worries, Magento includes this SEO feature by default.

When you’re on an individual product or category page, simply scroll down and find the “Search Engine Optimization” dropdown. From there you can enter your title tag in the “Meta Title” field and your meta description in the “Meta Description” field.

Related products

Another great feature that Magento allows you to implement is “Related Products”. You can set this on individual product pages. Adding “Related Products” to all of the site’s product pages is a fantastic way to improve several SEO aspects of your site:

1. This can help improve the overall UX and engagement by showing users other products that are similar to the one they’re on

2. This can result in more revenue from showing users upsell opportunities

3. The internal links from these products can help Google easily discover and distribute link equity to them

On Magento product pages, you can manually set “Related Products” for a particular product. To do this, navigate to the product and then find “Related Products, Up-Sells, and Cross-Sells”. You can then select “Add Related Products” and add any other SKUs you offer that users might be interested in. This should add these internal links to the bottom of your product page!

6. Blogging functionality

One of the biggest weaknesses of Magento from an SEO perspective is that the platform doesn’t contain blogging functionality out of the box. While generally an e-commerce site’s category and product pages are going to be the most important from a revenue perspective, blogs can still be very important for e-commerce sites.

In recent years, there has definitely been a shift towards more informational content ranking for keywords where we would expect a category or product page to rank instead. We can see that, more and more, Google is choosing to rank content such as guides, affiliate sites, or “how to” content above product and category pages. This means that not having a place for informational content to live can limit Magento stores’ SEO success.

For instance, let’s say we set up a store that sells cameras that are great for selfies. Naturally, we might want to create a page to rank for the term “selfie cameras”. However, when we check the SERPs, some of the top ranking results are informational pieces of content.

In the screenshot below, you can see how ShotKit (#2) and B&H (#3) actually rank above Best Buy and Amazon for this query with “Best Selfie Camera” pages:

When we look at the B&H page, we can see how they’ve set up a blog post that ranks the best selfie cameras that they offer. They’ve then intelligently linked to the products in their store. Instead of trying to force a category or product page to rank, they were able to use this listicle-style blog post to improve their visibility for an important query:

A blog allows a natural place for your informational content to live. Without informational content, Magento stores might not be able to rank for some of their target keywords by only using product and category pages.

Fortunately, there are extensions that you can utilize such as the Magento 2 Blog Extension from Magefan. You could also consider setting up a blog on WordPress and creating a subdomain for your Magento store (blog.example.com). We highly recommend setting up one of these options to give your site the ability to host informational content.

7. Structured data

Structured data is code you can add to your site that gives Google a better understanding of what an individual page is about. As Magento sites can be quite large, structured data can be a great way to improve Google’s understanding of the site at scale.

For e-commerce sites, here is our ideal mapping of which structured data types should go on different page templates:

1. Home Page: Organization

2. Category Page: CollectionPage, BreadcrumbList

3. Product Page: Product, BreadcrumbList

4. Blog: Article

This mapping can help give Google a stronger understanding of your store’s content. Below is a little more detail about CollectionPage and Product structured data, as these will be included on the most important pages of your site.

CollectionPage

By using CollectionPage schema, you can signal to Google that your category pages contain a collection of different products, and provide key information about each one. Here are some of the properties you can include about each product:

• Name

• URL

• Position on the page

For example, here is some CollectionPage structured data that we’ve been able to implement:

Product

Of course, Product structured data is a staple of e-commerce sites. Product schema tells Google and other search engines that the page contains information about a particular SKU. Ideally, this structured data will contain key properties such as:

• Name

• Description

• Image

• Price

• SKU

• aggregateRating

One of our favorite properties to include both on-page and within the structured data is the “SKU” property. It’s very common on Magento sites to see queries for SKU numbers appearing in Search Console’s “Performance” report. These are high-intent queries where users could be looking to purchase the exact product that you’re offering in your store. You’ll definitely want to be sure you’re including this in both the on-page content and Product schema markup.

Conclusion

Overall, the good news for Magento store owners is that the platform is built well for SEO. Since it’s open source, store owners have a lot of control over a particular site’s SEO elements such as the robots.txt, sitemap.xml, redirects, metadata, and more. While there are a few SEO issues that store owners might run into, such as duplicate content through the faceted navigation and no blog functionality, Magento does give store owners and SEOs the tools they need in order to fix these issues.

If you have any other strategies that you use to improve the SEO on Magento sites, let us know on Twitter @moz and @gofishchris. 

Technical SEO work ensures that the time you’ve spent on on- and off-page SEO pays off — if a website can’t be crawled and indexed, the content on that site can’t rank no matter how high-quality or link-worthy it is. For that reason, SEO pros know that a comprehensive search marketing strategy should include periodic audits of a website’s technical health and its opportunities for improvement. But as you uncover these opportunities, how do you know which ones are most important? What information can you provide to your managers and web developers so that they know which issues deserve their time and attention?

Every website’s technical SEO situation is different, depending on platform, code base, history, and complexity. As the SEO Manager here at Moz, I use information from our Campaign tools to make recommendations about the urgency and predicted impact of our site’s technical SEO needs. Our devs use these insights to plan their sprints, making sure to prioritize the most pressing fixes and those that are most likely to move the SERP needle.

Book a walkthrough

The Site Crawl tools within Moz Pro can help you identify a wide variety of issues that may affect the crawling, indexing, and ranking of the content you’ve worked so hard to develop. In this series of Daily Fix videos, we’ll show you where to find those issues and, just as importantly, how to use the tools’ sorting, filtering, and CSV export functions to organize them by the impact they’ll have on your overall technical SEO health.

How do you prioritize your technical SEO work? Let us know which metrics mean the most to you and your website in the comments!

Prioritize Crawl Issues

Once the Moz crawler has finished its crawl of your website, the All Crawled Pages report will offer a full list of crawling, indexing, and content errors discovered during the process. With such comprehensive coverage, this list can be overwhelming!

Zac demonstrates how to filter and sort your full list of issues within your Moz Pro Campaign and using a CSV export, allowing you to focus on pages with the most issues or those with the highest Page Authority.

Analyze Crawl Depth of Important Pages

The Crawl Depth metric describes how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to any other page within your site. Both search engines and users visit easy-to-reach pages more often, so it’s important that all pages with user value are quickly accessible.

Eli shows how to analyze your site’s architecture via crawl depth, so you can adjust your internal linking structure to ease access to your most important pages and save on valuable crawl budget.

Identify and Fix Duplicate Content

The Content Issues tool within Site Crawl provides a fast and easy way to identify potential duplicate content on your site, which can cause search engines to index and rank the wrong version of a page.

Jo uses the Duplicate Content feature to find pages that would benefit from canonicalization, redirection, or rewriting of content to avoid SERP confusion.

Prioritize Site Performance/CWV Improvements

As of June 2021, Google uses important site performance metrics called Core Web Vitals to inform its SERP rankings. Sites that load slowly or otherwise provide poor user experiences could get left behind in the wake of this newest algorithm update.

Using Moz’s robust Performance Metrics tool, Emilie shows how to audit your pages’ Core Web Vitals in bulk, saving you time and helping you understand where your site developers should concentrate their efforts.

Want to try the Moz Pro tool? First sign up for our 30 day free trial and then book a walkthrough with one of our onboarding specialists.

We would love to hear about your SEO goals and how we can help!

However, if we look beyond their inherent functionality, facets can offer us considerable potential. By centering your secondary navigation on long-tail keyword opportunities, you’ll be able to strategically utilize consumer intent, secure additional web conversions, and boost revenue levels.

Match consumer intent with long-tail search queries

Having an established brand and a solid domain backlink profile won’t guarantee success. This is great news for smaller brands, as industry giants aren’t necessarily going to win at this game.

If we search for “long sleeve wedding dresses”, we can see how David’s Bridal’s optimized facet page (Domain Authority: 67/100, Page Authority: 47 / 100) has obtained the top ranking position, while Nordstrom’s result (Domain Authority: 87/100, Page Authority: 39/100) appears in the third position for this particular query. We’ll take a look at what makes this page so effective later.

When looking at how we can optimize faceted navigations, it’s important to recognize that product attributes convey consumer needs and aspirations. If, for example, I’m looking for a wedding dress, then I may tailor my search by the color, fabric, neckline shape, and the sleeve length.

According to the search demand curve, long-tail queries account for up to 70% of all organic searches. They are highly targeted queries that offer big traffic-driving opportunities.

In the last few years, we’ve seen a big shift in the industry towards capitalizing this intent with long-form content. Blog articles and style guides have become the go-to methods for many to capture these visitors, as we can see from the examples taken from Marks & Spencers’ "Inspire Me" section:

People often look for inspiration when they’re shopping, and these pages provide an effective way to add more internal links to category and product pages. But relying on this approach is one-dimensional, given that these deeper content pages tend to have lower PageRank. An extensive amount of time and effort will, therefore, be required to achieve the desired result.

In comparison, Product Listing Pages usually target broader search terms, and faceted navigations typically exist as passive functions. This is because they’re often blocked from crawlers, making them devoid of any SEO value. Waterstones (a well-known British bookstore) is one retailer that applies this rule for their on-page filters:

In this particular example, I’ve applied a filter to only show me books for 5 – 8 year olds, but the appended URL (https://www.waterstones.com/category/childrens-teenage/facet/498) is blocked in the robots.txt file. This is going to prevent such pages from being served in the SERPs despite them having the potential to meet specific customer needs. This shows that there can be a fundamental disconnect in matching customer intent to the pages we’re providing them in the organic results.

From the diagram below, we can see how editorial content typically focuses on the “awareness” and “interest” stages, whilst Product Listing Pages tend to be more in line with the “consideration” and “purchase” phases:

Serving the right content to users throughout their buying journey is pivotal to success. For many retailers, competitors are continuing to prioritize broader, high-volume keywords in saturated markets. They’re targeting the same terms to secure a proportion of the same search traffic. This is a very challenging prospect to face, and without carving out a gap in the marketplace, they won’t necessarily deliver the results they seek to secure. Likewise, relying on informational guides to target long-tail keywords means that you’re missing a large percentage of users who have very specific buying requirements. Yes, they’re ready to make a purchase!

By shifting your focus to address your customer’s real needs and expectations, you’ll be able to deliver a satisfying, frictionless experience at every interaction and all the way through to that final purchase.

The solution

Step 1: Conduct long-tail keyword research

Build a really comprehensive view of your potential customers by harnessing data from a variety of sources, including:

a) Keyword research tools like Moz, Google Keyword Planner, and Answer The Public.

b) The SERPs — get inspiration from the auto-suggest results, People Also Ask, and the related search links at the bottom of the page.

c) Competitor activity — aside from using SEO monitoring software, you can use a data mining extension tool like Scraper, which will extract faceted options directly from competitor Product Listing Pages. These tools are often free to download and allow you to quickly transfer product categories.

d) Your Google Search Console, Analytics, and PPC accounts to determine which keywords and URLs are securing the highest number of visits and web conversions. Internal search data can also give you great consumer insights.

e) Speak to your merchandising team to understand product demands and fulfillment capabilities.

Step 2: Group into meaningful sub-topics

Once you’ve collated all this information into a spreadsheet, you’ll be able to discover long-tail, consideration-orientated keywords. While individually they may not boast huge monthly search estimates, they can collectively highlight where purchase intentions can be better fulfilled.

To help illustrate this point, we can look at a small subset of lingerie keywords and the facets the searches represent:

From the table above we can quickly see a pattern emerging with color and material variations appearing across the search terms. We can then substantiate this information with session and revenue estimates with the use of a recognized CTR model. This enables us to help forecast the potential organic uplift and quantify the size of the prize for a number of different scenarios that are on offer from each new facet combination. This may include estimations for securing position 10, 7, 5, 3 and 1 in Google.

One thing to note here is that it’s worth excluding synonyms, as they will falsely inflate your calculations. An example here would be to exclude “storage drawers” (22.2k monthly searchers) when reviewing the performance for “chest of drawers” (201k m/s). Including both variants will cause a false positive result and will lead you to draw incorrect conclusions.

Step 3: Dig deeper into broader terms around offers, ratings, and price

These product filters are found in the “Sort” dropdown box and, from my experience, these are set to “noindex” from the outset as they simply allow users to re-order page results. Certainly, content management systems like Shopify and Shopware have this as a default.

This makes sense since their purpose is to allow visitors to simply sort or narrow page content rather than offering alternative results and additional value (which is offered through faceted navigation). As such, filter typically produce duplicate results which should not be discoverable beyond the immediate moment. But this hard-and-fast rule doesn’t always apply perfectly in the real world. This is why we need to look at our individual industries and understand what’s important to our unique set of customers.

If we look at the world of gifting, we often see people shopping with a particular budget in mind. Therefore, terms like “birthday gift under £20” (40 m/s) or “Secret Santa gift under £10” (2.9k m/s) are reasonably common, and opening up relevant listing pages could be useful for shoppers.

Step 4: The technical steps

Facet taxonomies are hugely complex and the number of attributes that can be strung together increases with the size of the domain. We, therefore, need to carefully manage the flood gates and mitigate against any potential risks including crawl inefficiencies and link equity dilution.

We can do this by:

1. Avoiding thin/doorway pages by regularly re-assessing your product offering. For instance, you may consider there to be little value in creating a new listings page if you’re selling a very small range of low price point products. In this case, you may decide against opening up an additional Product Listing Page when you sell as few as 10 eligible products. However, this is not a fixed rule, so it’s quite possible that your criteria may be lower for particular product lines. Either way, these numbers will change over time. Consider seasonal trends, when new collections are launched, and when they become discontinued. Setting up a product retirement strategy to manage expired products and categories at scale in parallel with this step is also highly recommended.

2. Prevent content cannibalization by arranging selected facets according to their value and significance. “Size” is very important for some electrical goods like TVs, laptops, and cameras, but is less so for beauty accessories or vacuum cleaners. You must also make sure page content is distinctive and reflects the focus of your chosen facet(s). Refer to step 5 for more details.

3. Follow the sequence in which adjectives and facets are typically selected by your customers. This can vary depending on where your audience lives. So, whilst products generally have five or more distinguishable features, English vernacular determines that we use more than four adjectives (e.g. size + color + material + shape) to describe something.

4. Control the controllables by dealing with overlapping variations. This typically occurs when multiples co-exist and each exhibits good search metrics. For instance, it’s reasonable for someone to simultaneously look for several color and/or fabric combinations in the different ways below.

When this situation occurs, we should follow the same linguistic rules as above and choose a preferred sequence. In this case, it would be color + material + product type.

In comparison to the noindex tag suggested for on-page filters you should canonicalize unnecessary facets to their parent page (remembering that this is merely a hint and not a directive). This will enable you to control how crawlers deal with highly comparable result pages and will, therefore, help to prevent your site from being demoted in the SERPs. Dynamic search parameters should continue to be defined with a “noindex, nofollow” meta robots tag, disallowed in the robots.txt file, and configured through Google’s URL parameter tool (within your Search Console account) to tell crawlers the purpose of your parameters and how you would like them to be treated. This is a helpful guide on parameter handling for Googlebots, but bear in mind that this last tip won’t influence how Bing or Yahoo user-agents interpret these pages.

5. Open your facets in phases and cultivate it into a test-and-learn process. This will enable you to identify issues a lot sooner and implement facet-wide solutions in a timely manner. Without having to unravel these additional layers of complexity, problems such as crawl inefficiencies, PageRank dilution, or excessive indexation can be swiftly resolved.

To show you what this could look like, I’ve provided a phasing plan that was created for one of our e-commerce clients. Our research showed a significant SEO opportunity for opening up some of the facets and filters: potential +£263Kpcm for the “colour + type” facet (UK):

What’s more, when we extended our forecast to include other facet combinations, we calculated an additional revenue opportunity of up to +£207K/pcm (before filtering out combinations with no products offering).

Step 5: Optimize your facet URLs

Optimize your new facet category URLs to establish relevancy for your selected search terms. The key on-page elements to focus on include:

• URL

• Page title

• Breadcrumb anchor texts

• H tags

• Content snippets (e.g. introductory text and FAQ copy)

• Image ALT texts

• Product names

• Link out to similar facet category pages (i.e. via a “You May Also Like” feature box)

David’s Bridal is a good example of a retailer that has done this well. Looking back at the ‘Long Sleeve Wedding Dress’ Product Listing Page, we can see that they’ve curated unique content and followed fundamental optimization tactics on the landing page in a way that feels helpful to the user.

URL: davidsbridal.com/long-sleeve-wedding-dresses

Page Title: Long Sleeve Wedding Dresses & Gowns | David's Bridal

Meta Description: Do you dream of wearing a long sleeve wedding dress on your big day? Shop David's Bridal wide variety of wedding gowns with sleeves in lace & other designs!

6. Provide accessibility and build page authority

Once you’ve opened up your new facet Product Listing Pages, you need to begin cultivating link equity towards them. This will ensure that they don’t exist as orphan URLs with no PageRank:

1. Ensure they’re referenced in your product XML sitemap.

2. If you have one feature per facet URL, then add them to your faceted navigation across CLP and Product Listing Page pages.

3. If you have two or more features per facet URL, then create a “Popular Searches” or “Related Searches” option within your CLPs.

4. Utilize your mega menu to showcase your new category landing pages. This will not only allow you to direct a large proportion of link equity, but it will also secure the highest click-through rate amongst your visitors.

5. Integrate your editorial strategy by creating engaging content with in-copy links. Think about how you can use descriptive long-tail anchor text about the Product Listing Page you want to link to rather than relying on “click here” or “see more”.

6. Connect to them via href links so you’re not solely relying on links from the main navigation or content hyperlinks. As this is difficult to do at scale, it can be done through modules such as “related categories”, “other subcategories”, “related products”, etc.

7. Devise strategic outreach campaigns that will secure quality, external backlinks to them.

Implementing this holistic and robust strategy will help you to secure exponential growth from your new commercial landing pages.

Conclusion

There is a great deal of organic opportunity that exists within your faceted navigation if you begin to leverage mid- and long-tail search terms.

Seek out the opportunity from extended keyword research and competitor analysis before deciding which variants fulfill consumer demands and deliver optimal organic sessions and onsite conversions. Configure a single faceted URL for each opportunity and open them up for crawl and indexation. Ensure PageRank is distributed to them (both internally and externally) and develop your landing page content in line with quality optimization practices. This approach will help you to avoid having crawl inefficiencies, over indexation, cannibalization, or having thin doorway pages. In turn, your website will be better suited to attract highly-targeted users and guide them down the purchase funnel.

Maximizing UX and reducing reliance on other marketing channels means that your faceted navigation can truly deliver organic ROI. We have seen this work for our clients.

As an SEO consultant, I was always on the lookout for a good SEO audit checklist. One that I could use and present to my clients. One I could modify to my own needs. One that covered all the important SEO bases. One that was up-to-date. And importantly, one that I didn't have to pay several hundred dollars for.

This, my SEO friends, is that checklist. And Moz is making it available to you.

One cool thing about this audit checklist is that you can perform it almost entirely 100% for free, or using free versions of SEO tools. This is important for SEO starting out on a budget, or small business owners who want to learn to audit a small site on their own.

That said, if you're looking to audit medium/large sites or more than a few pages at a time, you likely want to look into more scalable solutions, such as our Moz Pro Site Crawl including our new Performance Metrics Beta.

Regardless, you're probably ready to dive in...

Get The Audit Checklist

Admittedly, we're big fans of a lot of good SEO audit checklists out there, including Annielytics Site Audit Checklist, Andy Drinkwater's Checklist, and the audits available at SEOSLY. We're also a fan of Dana Dana DiTomaso's Technical SEO course on LinkedIn.

We also like the audit checklist by Benjamin Estes over at BrainLabs, in particular, the pass/fail selector for each item. While our own audit is substantially different, we stole incorporated this feature into our own.

Site Audit Coverage

Originally, we set out to create a solid technical SEO audit checklist — one that covered all the important technical SEO areas which could have a significant impact on rankings/traffic and could be completed in a short amount of time.

As we created the audit, we realized that SEOs also want to check other traffic-impacting site issues that aren't necessarily technical. Hence, we ended up with a more complete Technical SEO and beyond site audit — one that covers nearly every important SEO area with the potential to impact traffic and rankings.

Briefly, the audit checklist covers:

1. Basics

Here you take a few quick steps to set your audit up for success: making sure you have analytics installed, Search Console access set up, and optionally, running a site crawl. Go to Basics.

2. Crawling & Indexing

Covering the foundations of technical SEO, the crawling and indexing section of the audit makes sure that search engines can find, crawl, and index your content without challenge. Go to Crawling & Indexing.

3. Meta & Structured Data

Both metadata and structured data have become increasingly complex in SEO. Here we include 8 quick checks to ensure maximum visibility in all types of search results. Go to Meta & Structured Data.

4. Content

Content isn't often considered "technical" SEO, but many technical issues with the content itself can impact indexing and rankings. Beyond the quality of the content itself, these technical issues need to be checked and addressed. Go to Content.

5. Links & Navigation

Links are the roads that hold your site together and connect it to the larger internet around the world. Google uses links in a variety of ways to rank content, so here we include 8 brief audits to make sure your links are optimized for crawling and ranking. Go to Links & Navigation.

6. Images

Images not only add relevance to web pages, but also improve engagement, and can help with rankings. Additionally, Google Images is one of the largest search engines by itself in the world. Here we include 5 quick checks to make sure your images are up to snuff. Go to Images.

7. Video

Videos play an increasingly important role on the web, but in truth, many sites pay no attention to video SEO. This is one area where Google simply won't "figure it out" without solid, technical SEO. Here are 4 audit items to make sure your videos can rank. Go to Video.

8. Mobile

Google is now mobile-first! (Well, almost there.) Most SEO audits take place on desktop, but doing a few quick mobile checks can make the difference between ranking or not. Go to Mobile.

9. Speed

Ready for Core Web Vitals? In truth, page speed has been important to SEO for years, and now there's more attention to it than ever. Go to Speed.

10. Security

Many SEOs often overlook security issues, but Google takes it very seriously. Beyond implementing HTTPS, there are a couple of areas you want to check if your site experiences problems. Go to Security.

11. International & Multilingual Sites

This optional section applies if your site targets multiple languages and/or regions. Implementing hreflang and international targeting is a technically tricky area, so you want to make sure you get it right. Go to International & Multilingual Sites.

12. Backlinks

While backlinks are only rarely included in a technical SEO audit, a lack of relevant backlinks is often the number one reason good, relevant content struggles to rank. While this doesn't represent a complete link audit, we recommend a few quick link checks to make sure you aren't leaving rankings behind. Go to Backlinks.

Get The Audit Checklist

This is a living document. That means we'll work to keep this audit checklist up-to-date as SEO changes, so be sure to check back for new updates. If you have any additions or suggestions, please let us know in the comments below.

To your SEO auditing success!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. I've been doing SEO since 2016, and today I work for a large outdoor retailer helping our technical SEO strategy come to life. Thank you so much for attending this series on SEO and accessibility.

I hope that you've gained a broad perspective and new tips and tricks for creating content that not only is resonating with your audience, performs well in search, but is also accessible to more people. Today we're going to talk about technical SEO and accessibility. 

Technical SEO and accessibility

Let's dive in. Last time we talked about Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and you might remember that the four principles of WCAG are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

Perceivable

As a technical SEO, you're probably most concerned with perceivable because your day-to-day operations, your day-to-day work stream involves making sure that the pages, the content, the experiences you're creating are accessible to search engines and perceivable to search engines. 

A lot of times when we go through SEO recommendations or SEO audits, I hear a lot of common themes, like the header tag is baked into the image and so a search engine can't see it, or the content I'm producing is visible to bots but it's not visible to people. These are issues with base level perception. I want you to take that mindset and consider if you apply that to your whole audience as well. So can all of your people that are hoping to engage with your service or product or experience, are they able to perceive all the things you have to offer at a base level?

1. Styles

Some things you might be thinking would be similar to what you would be seeing in this audit, like: Is all of my text on the page visible? Is it active text? Is it native to the page, so can I select it and copy and paste it, or is it baked into the image and unreachable by assistive technology or browsers or what have you? You might also be thinking: Is the color contrast to my background and my text, is it the right contrast?

Is there enough clarity and crispness between my layout elements? If things seem a little bit fuzzy or it's not quite clear that something is accessible to a search engine and a user, go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make both of those things work out well. 

2. Rich media

We also like to add images, text, video, and audio to the pages that we're building for our customers. It's important that these rich elements, now that we're kind of past the basic text and the styling elements, the rich elements we're putting on the page are perceivable by all of your users as well. There's a couple of things we can do to make that happen. For images, giving them a text alternative and providing something that is in addition to that imagery will help it be seen by a screen reader and understood by someone who has a visual disability.

Also naming things with human-friendly names versus "DSC1352.JPEG" is going to help search engines as well as assistive technology see that image and understand what it is. On-page context, it's also important that you put images on pages that add value. You want to enlighten a user with some additional content to give them a little bit more of a feeling or give them some more context on what you're talking about. Add images for value, not just to show up in Google image search. 

What about video? So video is a little bit different. Video has a series of moving images. So every time I think about movement, I think to myself, "How can I make sure that if a user wants to stop this movement, they can?"

Having clear playback controls is crucial when we're talking about accessibility as well as having a great video player experience for any user. In addition, synchronous equivalents for those text alternatives. We talked about images having text alternatives. Videos need to have text alternatives as well, but they need to be synchronized to time with that video. Otherwise they won't make sense in context. 

Then making sure that they're distinguishable. This is the same between video and audio. We want to make sure that the foreground and the background are easily distinguishable from one another. If your video feels muddy, if your audio feels muddy and it takes me straining my ear or straining my eyes to be able to see that content and understand what's happening, you need to be a little bit more crisp, a little bit more clear on those two distinctions.

Then text transcripts. Just like you need closed captions for videos, for audio you want to have a text transcript, so if I'm maybe in a loud place and I can't hear the audio or I don't have my headphones plugged in or I needed to use assistive technology, I'm able to access that audio. 

These are all things that you'll be seeing as you're reviewing code as a technical SEO and you should be aware of.

If you don't have these things going on, on your website, I would empower you to ask those questions, the hard questions like: Hey, is there a text alternative to this image? How will a person with a visual disability, how will a person with an auditory disability access these things? 

3. Page structure

Three and four are about page structure and semantic HTML. So this is a little bit less about is this perceivable and is it kind of understandable.

It's kind of grazing the understandable, but it should be a little bit about perception, too. Having a bunch of H1s on a page, as you can imagine, a search engine might perceive as very confused, right? They're like, okay, there's a bunch of H1s on this page. I'm not really sure what this page is about. Adding structure and cascading headings to signify parent-child relationships is going to help your content be a little bit more perceivable. It's going to be easier to understand what's happening. 

4. Semantic HTML

Same thing with semantic HTML. We tend to put lots of divs and spans and unidentifiable elements in our HTML. But by marking them up in more appropriate ways, so that we understand what their meaning is, understand what those tags contain, whether it's navigation or forms or tables, providing that extra layer of information and understandability is going to allow search engines and assistive technology to be able to parse through those things, to allow them to perceive the things you're putting on your page that are different from one another and provide a richer experience.

Operable

Okay, so we're able to perceive the content. But how do we make sure that it's operable? 

1. HTML sitemaps

A couple of SEO recommendations that I often see people making are build an HTML sitemap and put breadcrumbs on your page. A lot of times you might get some pushback from that. The HTML site map is super important we know for SEO, for discoverability of those pages deep in our website's hierarchy.

We know that breadcrumbs are also pretty equally important for discoverability. Both of these elements help users with assistive technology better navigate the website. The HTML site map allows for if your menu doesn't include all the pages on your website or if it's confusing or you're using JavaScript or some other technology that's not accessible to my tech stack.

2. Breadcrumbs

Then breadcrumbs allow me to parse up and down the particular let's say it's a product search page on an e-commerce website without having to go back to the menu and then parse through every single menu item again. So these two are super important for navigation but also especially for people who are navigating with a keyboard and using assistive technology.

3. Develop keyboard-first

Then a non-SEO thing but important nonetheless and relatable, develop your website and your experience keyboard first. Not everyone has a mouse or the ability to use a mouse because of a movement disability or because of an impairment or because of a lack of technology or hardware. So make sure you develop keyboard first, and you're going to kind of encapsulate more of those people that you're looking to encapsulate with your audience.

Understandable

1. Language

Understandable. So we talk about in international SEO, when we're dealing with different countries and different languages, how important it is to use the HTML on our page to signify what the language of the page is. It helps search engines provide the right results in the right maybe national or international context. It also helps screen readers read your content aloud in the right language.

2. Navigational layout

Then navigational layout and interstitials I think are pretty common, but nobody likes a navigation or a layout of a website that's confusing. The easier you make it, the easier it is for people to convert or do what you're looking for them to do with this website, whether it's learn, whether it's buy, whether it's engage in a service. That's easier when the navigation and layout is streamlined and we're not using different words in different places to mean the same thing. It's even more important for people with assistive technology. 

3. Interstitials

Interstitials, nobody likes those pop-ups in our face, that don't allow us to browse the rest of the website. Google doesn't love them either. But especially people with assistive technology, if we're not treating those pop-ups in the right way, we're going to end up in a scenario where users may be in a keyboard trap and they can't get out of the interstitial, or they don't understand that an interstitial is even put up on the page. So it's important to be very mindful when using interstitials. 

Robust

Last but not least is robust. How do we make sure that the content we're putting on the page is compatible for a large variety of devices and scenarios? 

1. Validation

Just using proper HTML is a big way to do this. You can use a validator and you can look at your HTML, your CSS, and your JSON-LD. Creating the right code and especially when you're using semantic HTML as well providing meaning to that code, you're going to have a lot better experience and everything your building is more digestible. 

2. Responsive

Is your website responsive? You should be doing this already. But if you're not, make sure it's operating on a mobile and a desktop and a tablet device and the layout stays the same, it's just maybe resized or re-imaged in a different way.

3. Interactable

Make sure it's interactable. If a user wants to be able to zoom in because they have a visual disability or they want to be able to change the colors, does your technology on your website allow them to do that? It should. If you do these three things on the bottom, I think it's going to do a lot of heavy lifting and you're going to have to do a lot less work because you've kind of built in the framework, the foundation to be accessible.

That's technical SEO and accessibility. If you have more questions or want some validation tools, there are some on the right-hand side here, or you can hit me up on Twitter @cooperhollmaier for some more advice. But thank you so much for listening to Whiteboard Friday and accessibility along with SEO. I hope that you take this and you become more and more inclusive in the way that you're doing SEO in the future.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Resources

• HTML sitemaps
• WCAG
• Markup validation
• Rich results tests
• International Association of Accessibility Professionals

Build your strategy around new user retention

When undertaking a link building campaign, it’s important to remember that much of the traffic you generate will be from first-time users. These users are less likely to wait around for slow loading content and less likely to return if you don’t make a good impression. So whether your campaign is a brand-focused PR push, content-focused outreach strategy, or something in between, it’s worth investing in a robust technical SEO framework that helps users connect to and engage with your brand, for years to come.

To make the most of campaign traffic, ensure that users can smoothly connect and engage with your site from a range of channels and sources. Your SEO priorities should be broadly divided into tasks that encourage social shareability, create opportunities for site-wide SEO gains, and maximize the viability of your campaign as part of your broader marketing activity.

Let's explore the SEO tactics you can use to optimize and improve the performance of your link building campaign. As part of your campaign, you should aim to:

• Increase shareability by making the site load faster and display more consistently for the predominantly mobile audience that discovers your content via social media channels.

• Improve opportunity for site-wide SEO gains through optimizations to internal linking, improvements to E-A-T indicators, and on-page SEO from landing pages.

• Optimize for the viability of the campaign by improving tracking, channel integration, and planning for long-term link traffic.

In addition to being great for users, retention-based optimizations are efficient to manage because they can be planned and put in place well ahead of core campaigns. They’re also applicable to every type of link building campaign, and work in tandem with fundamental backlink management tactics.

Lay the groundwork with a backlink audit

Before undertaking the work to gain new backlinks, carry out a backlink audit for actionable data on the quantity of your existing backlinks and the quality of your referrers.

In the campaign planning stages, popular content identified in your audit can give you strategic insights into the kind of content that will perform well with your existing audiences and networks. The overall quantity of links will give you valuable benchmarks for evidencing campaign performance, and the quality and distribution of your inbound links will help your team set targets for which referrers, target pages, and anchor text will give you the most benefit.

Use a backlink audit tool to find out:

• How many external sites are linking to your pages?

• Which external sites are linking to your pages?

• What is the quality of the external sites backlink profile?

• Which pages have existing external backlinks?

• Which backlinks are identified as "target errors" because they’re going 404 pages?

• Which backlinks are going to 301s pages?

If your inbound links include a significant proportion of toxic or poor quality links, then you may wish to take corrective actions like creating and submitting a disavow list in Google Search Console before the campaign starts in earnest. But if your links are of decent quality, then your next focus should be to reclaim broken links to 404s and reduce links to 301 pages.

Why should you fix backlink navigation errors?

You should fix backlink errors to 301s and 404s to regain the link value and build momentum ahead of your campaign. When traffic arrives on a site via a 301 redirect link, you may lose some PageRank value from that connection and receive almost zero PageRank value from links pointing to a 404 page. Fixing these links re-establishes these connections and can help increase the organic performance of your campaign target pages by improving the overall domain authority.

These improvements also reduce user connection times and improve tracking data. Tools like Google Analytics find it difficult to attribute the original source of the click, often leading to referral traffic being incorrectly attributed as direct — which is less than helpful for marketers who want to know who their best performing referrers are.

How should you fix backlink navigation errors?

During the link reclamation process, you will want to update links to the best possible new URL. To improve the value of links you already have, carry out these actions:

• Assign 301 redirects to any backlink “target errors” that are going to 404 pages. When assigning the new page, try to match it with like-for-like content. An old link to a page about “shoes” should not be redirected to a page about “sharks”, it should go to a page that is also about shoes.

• Ensure that any existing 301s are linking to the final destination. Where possible, redirect chains should be removed to maintain as much link value as possible, reduce demands on the server, and optimize for crawl budget.

• Where you have control over the linking page — for instance, on social profiles, directory listings, internal project sites, or partner sites — update any 301 or 404 links to a relevant 200 URL. This is something that's often overlooked, but it's common for sites that have recently adopted HTTPS to have the old HTTP link on their social profiles and listings. You can and should update these.

Improving these links makes it easier for bots to crawl and index your site, improves user connection speeds, and gives more consistency for your brand messaging before you begin your outreach activity.

SEO optimizations to improve social share effectiveness during link building campaigns

Optimizing for social media should be a key part of your link building strategy because social media drives around 25% of website referral traffic worldwide. This means that social media has become a core part of content promotion and should be an expected component of the link building process. You can optimize for this mobile-first audience by:

• Securing network connections to reduce delays from referrals

• Improving page speed for mobiles

• Updating open graph data to improve social shareability

Improve security to reduce connection delays

Security is an element of technical SEO that is often oversimplified. Yes, HTTPS is a ranking signal, but many believe this is achieved simply by obtaining an SSL certificate. That is part of it — you do need an SSL, but it’s only the start.

Security optimizations often involve server-side updates that can improve the speed and quality of your connections across the web by streamlining the security verification process.

This is particularly important for social media sites like Facebook, which have high levels of encryption and security on their end and equally high expectations for referred domains. Security layers can slow down connection times and affect user trust, so investing time here can help campaign performance overall.

Upgrade your SSL to reduce connection time

Not all SSLs are equal, and the benefits of a secure website extend beyond achieving a lock icon in the search bar. An optimized SSL certificate will be using the latest transport layer security protocols and be error-free.

Test the quality of your SSL

There are several tools that allow you to check the performance of your existing SSL. Each tool runs different diagnostics, so it’s worth running them in tangent to get a full picture of where action should be taken. It's possible to pass an inspection on one tool and not on another, so taking a layered approach will yield better results.

First perform a top-level SSL check

For a quick snapshot, run your site through the SSL Checker from SSL Shopper. They give you a top-level rundown of expiry dates and whether your SSL is trusted by all web browsers. You want all green ticks here. Any errors should be flagged and addressed directly with your certificate issuer.

In my experience, improving errors here can have an impact on site speed. One client saw an almost 70% reduction in overall server connection time and over 60% reduction in Average Page Loads on Chrome by resolving chain issues.

Run a full diagnostic

Using the SSL Server Test, you can get a more detailed diagnostic of your security configuration. This test gives your site a grade and assesses a range of security indicators. To support a link building campaign, you’ll want to confirm that your server is running the “modern” Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, specifically TLS 1.2 and ideally TLS 1.3.

TLS 1.3 came into use around 2018 and has since become the preferred connection protocol for large scale CDNs and operating systems. Not only is it more secure, but TLS 1.3 can improve connection latency by around 45% by removing network connection steps.

Cloudflare, Facebook, and Android use this protocol as a default, and a matching upgrade for your site could improve performance for a significant number of web users. As a point of reference, Cloudflare alone is used by around 16% of all websites worldwide and 81% of those with CDNs, so upgrading your TLS could help more users to quickly access your site from each new (and established) link.

Speed improvements

With the introduction of Google’s Core Web Vitals, speed metrics and upcoming algorithm updates have put additional emphasis on mobile page loading times in general. In a link building campaign, you could see spike in traffic to a single page. But Google is watching, and if your page doesn’t deliver high quality UX as measured by CWV for at least 75% of users, this traffic could affect your page ranking.

Monitor your target pages in GA and Search Console to identify any challenges that should be addressed.

Open Graph meta tags

Social shares will almost certainly form part of your link building campaign — with good reason. With updates to your Open Graph (OG) tags, you can tailor your tags for better rendering and performance.

If the hero image for your page doesn’t display when you post links to social media, then you need to update your OG meta tags. It could be that your page doesn’t have the tags in place, or that the fields are not populating automatically. In either case, this is something you can fix.

Using post validators for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you can inspect individual pages for performance.

At scale, you can use a Custom Xpath Extraction in Screaming Frog to crawl your site. Then review your site for the best regex to populate the fields automatically, and brief your dev team to update accordingly.

Create opportunities for site-wide organic growth

Your link building campaign can bring benefits to other pages on your site with careful planning.

On-page SEO

Whether your link building campaign is based on a short-term campaign landing page, a thought leadership piece, or a core service, your on-page SEO should be optimized to encourage organic traffic as well.

This is because humans forget things.

So while a user may discover a campaign or promotion via direct link building activities, they should also be able to find it again or look it up to transfer any offline buzz into online knowledge.

Your target page should be supported by solid on-page SEO that includes:

• Keyword-optimized content with H1s and H2s

• Relevant images optimized with alt text, titles, and structured data

• Metadata that is optimized for campaign keywords

Internal linking

If you’ve received a juicy backlink from a relevant source, don’t let the benefits stop at a single page. Ensure that your target page has links to other, relevant content across your site that will keep users coming back.

Build links from your target page

Map out your internal links to ensure that any pages being used as backlink landing pages include links to similarly-themed pages on your site. You'll get the most SEO benefit if your internal link structure includes links to pages with:

• Optimizations for keywords that are lexicographically similar

• A relevant parent folder

• Good authority or low bounce rate

• 200 response codes for maximum crawlability

This allows users and web crawlers that are enabled for natural language search to understand that your content is part of a wider bank of knowledge and expertise. It also makes it more likely that users will return to other content on your site in the future.

Build links to your target page for better indexing

Internal linking goes both ways, so don’t forget to create internal links into campaign content. For short-term campaigns, marketers sometimes create bespoke campaign landing pages with minimal links across the wider site.

This can result in slower indexing for campaign pages, making it more difficult for users to find you via search. To address this, create an announcement-style blog post that links to the campaign target page. In this way, both pages can be entered into the updated sitemap and submitted for indexing.

E-A-T optimizations

As mentioned previously, humans may not remember every detail of your campaign target page when they try to find it again. However, they may remember the person that shared, created, or was featured in the content. So include information about the team behind the content or campaign in order to build Expertise, Authority, and Trust for your brand, and increase the impact of social shares. This is particularly useful for thought leadership campaigns, where expertise signals like author biographies can be optimized with structured data.

For short-term campaigns like those for new events or products, including trust indicators like dynamic reviews can assist with conversions.

Optimizing for the viability of the campaign

You aren’t building links for links’ sake. You’re doing so to meet wider business objectives like driving sales, increasing market share, or generating leads.

Review and customize tracking

Once you’ve built your links, traffic to your target page becomes an opportunity to generate valuable data for your conversions funnel. Your tracking should be designed to give you data that supports your overall business objectives.

During your campaign, you should keep your business goals in mind and understand how your target page contributes to those goals. Update the tracking for your target pages to include metrics that correspond to your aims and the content type. Users visiting a data rich 5,000-word industry report are at a different stage in the customer funnel than those visiting from a quality niche directory.

Creating target page metrics can also help with KPIs, reporting, and evidencing campaign ROI, which clients and managers adore.

Channel integration

Once your business metrics are in place, use the data you’ve collected from link traffic to inform performance on other channels. For example:

• Scroll depth data from users who access a piece of high-quality content could be used for re-marketing content on YouTube or display advertising.

• Demographic data from users who visit for niche relevant “awareness month” content could improve audience targeting for advertising or PR activity around the same topic.

• Email signups for an outreach event can be added to Facebook as Custom and Lookalike audiences for more direct conversions.

As technical SEOs, be aware of your team’s potential uses for customer data so that you can manage tags and script integration into the site overall. Tracking tools like Facebook Pixel and Google Tag Manager tend to require active third party javascript management. Test and optimize for any new scripts before your campaign gets underway.

Planning for long-term link traffic

Consider the lifecycle of your link building campaign target page.

Ideally, you want to be driving traffic to a URL that can accrue page authority over time. If you spend time creating traffic for a URL that needs to change soon after the campaign ends, you’ll eventually be driving traffic to a 301 link. As we discussed before, this doesn't give as much PageRank value for your site as an active 200 link does.

So, plan for ways to keep a consistent, live URL for an extended period of time. Depending on your link building strategy, you may be able to employ one of the following techniques:

• Use evergreen URLs for long-term content: Thought leadership, cornerstone content like a white paper, or one-off reports are likely to remain on your site for a long time. For this content, consider removing dates from your URL to make the content more evergreen, as this allows for content to be updated and reduces future redirect requirements.

• Create permanent pages for recurring campaigns: Landing pages for recurring outreach content like annual event sponsorship or awareness campaigns should become part of permanent navigation. This allows you to build links every year to a well-optimized, annually updated, static page, rather than starting from scratch with blogs to different URLs every year.

• Avoid building links to PDFs: Put any downloadable resources into an HTML landing page and build links to that page. Links to PDFs can be difficult to redirect because of how they’re configured in your htaccess file.

• Plan for any unavoidable redirects: For short-term campaigns like sales promotions, plan for which page will become the permanent page. Include common copy on both domains to help Google understand that it’s not a soft 404.

In summary

Technical SEO can help you gain and maintain backlinks, connect with mobile users, and improve the quality of your connections when you:

• Secure network connections to reduce delays from referrals

• Improve page speed for mobile users

• Update open graph data to improve social shareability

• Update on-page SEO

• Optimize internal links

• Include E-A-T optimizations

• Customize tracking

• Plan for channel integration

• Plan for long-term link traffic

These tactics will help the links you build to add value for your customers, your rankings, and your business for many years to come.

This year, one of the most interesting projects that we worked on at Go Fish Digital revolved around helping a large media company break into Google’s Top Stories for major single-day events.

When doing competitor research for the project, we discovered that one way many sites appear to be doing this is through use of a schema type called LiveBlogPosting. This sent us down a pathway of fairly deep research into what this structured data type is, how sites are using it, and what impact it might have on Top Stories visibility.

Today, I’d like to share all of the findings we’ve made around this schema type, and draw conclusions about what this means for search moving forward.

Who does this apply to?

With regards to LiveBlogPosting schema, the most relevant types of sites will be sites where getting into Google’s Top Stories is a priority. These sites will generally be publishers that regularly post news coverage. Ideally AMP will already be implemented, as the vast majority of Top Stories URLs are AMP compatible (this is not required, however).

Why non-publisher sites should still care

Even if your site isn’t a publisher eligible for Top Stories results, the content of this article may still provide you with interesting takeaways. While you might not be able to directly implement the structured data at this point, I believe we can use the findings of this article to draw conclusions about where the search engines are potentially headed.

If Google is ranking articles that are updated with regular frequency and even providing rich-features for this content, this might be an indication that Google is trying to incentivize the indexation of more real-time content. This structured data may be an attempt to help Google “fill a gap” that it has in terms of providing real-time results to its users.

While it makes sense that “freshness” ranking factors would apply most to publishers, there could be interesting tests that other non-publishers can perform in order to measure whether there is a positive impact to your site’s content.

What is LiveBlogPosting schema?

The LiveBlogPosting schema type is structured data that allows you to signal to search engines that your content is being updated in real-time. This provides search engines with contextual signals that the page is receiving frequent updates for a certain period of time.

The LiveBlogPosting structured data can be found on schema.org as a subtype of “Article” structured data. The official definition from the site says it is: “A blog post intended to provide a rolling textual coverage of an ongoing event through continuous updates.”

Imagine a columnist watching a football game and creating a blog post about it. With every single play, the columnist updates the blog with what happened and the result of that play. Each time the columnist makes an update, the structured data also updates indicating that a recent addition has been made to the article.

Articles with LiveBlogPosting structured data will often appear in Google’s Top Stories feature. In the top left-hand corner of the thumbnail image, there will be a “Live” indicator to signal to users that live updates are getting made to the page.

Two Top Stories Results With The “Live” Tag

In the image above, you can see an example of two publishers (The Washington Post and CNN) that are implementing LiveBlogPosting schema on their pages for the term “coronavirus”. It’s likely that they’re utilizing this structured data type in order to significantly improve their Top Stories visibility.

Why is this Structured Data important?

So now you might be asking yourself, why is this schema even important? I certainly don’t have the resources available to have an editor continually publish updates to a piece of content throughout the day.

We’ve been monitoring Google’s usage of this structured data specifically for publishers. Stories with this structured data type appear to have significantly improved visibility in the SERPs, and we can see publishers aggressively utilizing it for large events.

For instance, the below screenshot shows you the mobile SERP for the query “us election” on November 3, 2020. Notice how four of the seven results in the carousel are utilizing LiveBlogPosting schema. Also, beneath this carousel, you can see the same CNN page is getting pulled into the organic results with the “Live” tag next to it:

Now let’s look at the same query for the day after the election, November 4, 2020. We still see that publishers heavily utilize this structured data type. In this result, five of the seven first Top Stories results use this structured data type.

In addition, CNN gets to double dip and claim an additional organic result with the same URL that’s already shown in Top Stories. This is another common result of LiveBlogPosting implementation.

In fact, this type of live blog post was one of CNN’s core strategies for ranking well for the US Election.

Here is how they implemented this strategy:

1. Create a new URL every day (to signal freshness)
2. Apply LiveBlogPosting schema and continually make updates to that URL
3. Ensure each update has its own dedicated timestamp

Below you can see some examples of URLs CNN posted during this event. Each day a new URL was posted with LiveBlogPosting schema attached:

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/us-election-news-11-02-2020/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/election-results-and-news-11-03-20/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/election-results-and-news-11-04-20/index.html

Here’s another telling result for “us election” on November 4, 2020. We can see that The New York Times is ranking in the #2 position on mobile for the term. While the ranking page isn’t a live blog post, we can see underneath the result is an AMP carousel. Their strategy was to live blog each individual state’s results:

It’s clear that publishers are heavily utilizing this schema type for extremely competitive news articles that are based around big events. Oftentimes, we’re seeing this strategy result in prominent visibility in Top Stories and even the organic results.

How do you implement LiveBlogPosting schema?

So you have a big event that you want to optimize around and are interested in implementing LiveBlogPosting schema. What should you do?

1. Get whitelisted

The first thing you’ll need to do is get whitelisted by Google. If you have a Google representative that’s in contact with your organization, I recommend reaching out to them. There isn’t a lot of information out there on this and we can even see that Google has previously removed help documentation for it. However, the form to request access to the Live Coverage Pilot is still available.

This makes sense, as Google might not want news sites with questionable credibility to access this feature. This is another indication that this feature is potentially very powerful if Google wants to limit how many sites can utilize it.

2. Technical implementation

Next, with the help of a developer, you’ll need to implement LiveBlogPosting structured data on your site. There are several key properties you’ll need to include such as:

1. coverageStartTime: When the live blog post begins
2. coverageEndTime: When the live blog post ends
3. liveBlogUpdate: A property that indicates an update to the live blog. This is perhaps the most important property:
   1. headline: The headline of the blog update
   2. articleBody: The full description of the blog update
   3. datePublished: The time when the update was originally posted
   4. dateModified: The time when the update was adjusted

To make this a little easier to conceptualize, below you can find an example of how CNN has implemented this on one of their live blogs. The example below features two “liveBlogUpdate” properties on their November 3, 2020 coverage of the election.

Case study

As I previously mentioned, many of these findings were discovered during research for a particular client who was interested in improving visibility for several large single-day events. Because of how agile the client is, they were actually able to get LiveBlogPosting structured data up and running on their site in a fairly short period of time. We then tested to see if this structured data would help improve visibility for very competitive “head” keywords during the day.

While we can’t share too much information about the particular wins we saw, we did see significant improvements in visibility for the competitive terms the live blog post was mapped to. When looking in Search Console, we can see lifts of between +200% and +600%+ improvements in YoY clicks and visibility for many of these terms. During our spot checks during the day, we often found the live blog post ranking in the 1-3 results (first carousel) in Top Stories. The implementation appeared to be a major success in improving visibility for this section of the SERPs.

Google vs. Twitter and the need for real-time updates

So the question then becomes, why would Google place so much emphasis on the LiveBlogPosting structured data type? Is it the fact that the page is likely going to have really in-depth content? Does it improve E-A-T in any way?

I would interpret that the success of this feature demonstrates one of the weaknesses of a search engine and how Google is trying to adjust accordingly. One of the primary issues with a search engine is that it’s much harder for it to be real-time. If “something” happens in the world, it’s going to take search engines a bit of time to deliver that information to users. The information not only needs to be published, but Google must then crawl, index, and rank that information.

However, by the time this happens, the news might already be readily available on platforms such as Twitter. One of the primary reasons that users might navigate away from Google to the Twitterverse is because users are seeking information that they want to know right now, and don’t feel like waiting 30 minutes to an hour for it to populate in Google News.

For instance, when I’m watching the Steelers and see one of our players have the misfortune of sustaining an injury, I don’t start to search Google hoping the answer will appear. Instead, I immediately jump to Twitter and start refreshing like crazy to see if a sports beat writer has posted any news about it.

What I believe Google is creating is a schema type that signals a page is in real-time. This gives Google the confidence to know that a trusted publisher has created a piece of content that should be crawled much more frequently and served to users, since the information is more likely to be up to date and accurate. By giving rich features and increased visibility to articles using this structured data, Google is further incentivizing the creation of real-time content that will retain searches on their platform.

This evidence also signals that sites indicating to search engines that content is fresh and regularly updated may be an increasingly important factor for the algorithm. When talking to Dan Hinckley, CTO of Go Fish Digital, he proposed that search engines might need to give preference to articles that have been updated more recently. Google might not be able to “trust” that older articles still have accurate information. Thus, ensuring content is updated may be important to a search engine’s confidence about the accuracy of the results.

Conclusion

You really never know what types of paths you’re going to go down as an SEO, and this was by far one of the most interesting ones during my time in the industry. Through researching just this one example, we not only figured out a piece of the Top Stories algorithm, but also gained insights into the future of the algorithm.

It’s entirely possible that Google will continue to incentivize and reward “real-time” content in an effort to better compete with platforms such as Twitter. I’ll be very interested to see any new research that’s done on LiveBlogPosting schema, or Google’s continual preference towards updated content.

To find out more about the state of technical SEO in 2021, we asked seven industry experts for their thoughts. The overwhelming answer? Keep doing what you’re doing.

“The core essentials in 2021 will remain about the same — every SEO needs to understand the fundamentals of crawling vs. indexing and the technical basics that have to be met before a site can rank,” says Moz Search Scientist, Dr. Pete Meyers. “All the fancy footwork in the world won’t get you anywhere if there’s no floor beneath you.”

But what should that floor be constructed of? Read on to find out!

1. Focus on the fundamentals

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Technical best practices are the “best” for a reason, so having a strong foundation of basic technical SEO skills is still a must.

“For me, the most underrated technical SEO strategy has always been the fundamental best practices,” says consultant Joe Hall. “It might sound surprising to some, but the vast majority of my clients have a difficulty in grasping the importance of best practices or just the basic fundamentals of SEO. I think this is in large part because of our community's focus and attention on the ‘next best thing’, and not very often talking about the basic fundamentals of technical SEO.”

Those fundamentals include hard skills like understanding how to recognize and fix crawlability, indexation, accessibility, and site performance issues, but also how to prioritize the issues you come across.

SEO expert Lily Ray notes that prioritization is an area of improvement that novice technical SEOs need to address first, as they may be more inclined to cite small things as major problems when they’re really not: “It is common for new or junior SEOs to send a laundry list of technical items as exported by [SEO tools] directly to clients, without prioritizing which ones are the most important to fix, or knowing which ones can be ignored,” she says. “In many cases, the tools don’t even flag some of the more severe technical issues that may be affecting crawling, indexation, or rendering… Good technical SEOs are able to pinpoint real problems that are having a significant impact on the website’s ability to rank well, and they know which tools or other resources to use to be able to solve those problems.”

So start taking note of not just the what when it comes to technical issues, but also the influence those issues actually have on your site.

Need to brush up or build on these hard skills? Not to worry — Moz Academy recently released a Technical SEO Certification that can help you do just that!

Beyond the more hands-on, practical skill sets required for building and maintaining search-optimized websites, our experts agree that basic soft skills are just as important, with several citing the need for cross-team collaboration abilities.

“Technical SEO implementations generally require working with multiple teams... which means there’s a lot of partnership, persuasion, give and take collaborations,” says Alexis Sanders, the SEO Director at Merkle. “Having project management, client services, storytelling, and communication skills will support implementation.”

So don’t get stuck in the weeds of your technical work — make sure you’re in constant communication with the teams and stakeholders who will help support your initiatives.

2. Gear up for Core Web Vitals

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One of the hottest topics in the industry right now is no doubt Core Web Vitals, the new Google ranking factors update expected in May 2021. But do technical SEOs really need to worry about them?

The experts say yes, but to work as a team to address them, and make your SEO voice heard. Alexis Sanders puts it this way: “The page experience update consists of Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, web app security, and removing interstitials. Regardless of how teams are structured, making progress is going to require a wide array of talents, giving SEO a more involved seat at the table, as these elements affect our bottom-line.”

When prioritizing what to focus on, make sure that improving site speed is at the top of your list.

“If you only work on one area of Technical SEO in 2021, make it site speed,” advises Kick Point President Dana DiTomaso. “Site speed is one of those great parts of technical SEO where the benefit isn't only for search engines — it also helps the people visiting your website. Remember, not everyone is coming to your website using the latest technology and fastest internet connection.”

When asked about their favorite ways to optimize, here’s what the experts suggested:

1. Start using a content delivery network, such as cloudflare.com.
2. Implement server-side caching for markup and design assets like CSS and JavaScript, and minimize the number of individual requests made for each page by bringing CSS and JavaScript in-line.
3. Optimize media files by converting to next-generation formats and compressing for size and use of data.
4. Use tools like BuiltWith, Wappalyzer, and Lighthouse to investigate what third party scripts have been loaded on a page, and remove them if you no longer need them, or move as many as compatible to a tag management tool.
5. Focus on image performance optimization.
6. Work with analytics and other internal teams to establish processes and expectations for adding and removing tagging.
7. Set requirements and expectations around page speed early in the development process.

Addressing any site speed and usability issues now will set you up to better weather rankings shake-ups caused by Core Web Vitals.

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3. Use schema and structured data strategically

To ensure that crawlers can read, index, and serve the content of their sites to searchers, many SEOs rely on structured data and schema frameworks to organize everything — as well they should. But when implementing structured data, the experts agree, make sure you’re using it to achieve specific goals, and not just because you can.

“Some structured data has material impact on search results or how Google can process and understand a site, while other structured data will be totally irrelevant to any given site or have no measurable impact,” says Dr. Pete. “We need to use structured data with clear intent and purpose in order to see results.”

Lily Ray agrees, pointing out the debate on the topic of schema within the industry:

“There is a wide range of opinions on this topic within the SEO community, with some SEOs wanting to ‘mark up all the things’ and others not believing schema is important if it doesn’t generate Rich Results. Personally, I like to apply structured data if I believe it can provide search engines with more context about the entities included in our clients’ websites, even if that schema does not generate Rich Results. For example, I believe that adding Schema attributes related to your brand and your authors is a good approach to help solidify information in Google’s Knowledge Graph.”

The takeaway? Get clear on your goals, and implement structured data if it makes sense for your strategy, but don’t “mark up all the things” if doing so will create unnecessary work for you and your team without bringing about the results you’re looking for.

4. Leverage automation to get things done

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Emerging technologies don’t always stick around long enough to become useful, but one innovation that won’t be going away anytime soon is using languages like Python to help automate various workflows, like data analysis and research.

“The technical SEO industry has been exploding with new ideas and innovations in the past couple of years, particularly related to analyzing data at scale and automating SEO processes, which has resulted in programming languages like Python moving into the spotlight,” says Lily Ray.

Why is automation important? Not only can it make your day-to-day work easier and more streamlined, it can have positive effects on your business as well.

“I still think that improving time to task completion (performance optimization) is core to every business,” says Miracle Inameti-Archibong, the Head of SEO at Erudite. “Not just because of the page experience update coming in May, but because it affects all channels and directly affects the bottom line of the business (sale, leads) which is what key decision-makers are interested in.”

In 2021, explore ways in which automation can help you achieve both your technical SEO and broader business goals more effectively.

5. Don’t forget about analytics and reporting

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SEO success is incremental and gradual, usually taking months to years before you can definitively show how the work you put in has paid off. But if something goes wrong? Well, Dr. Pete has the perfect analogy: “The truth is that technical SEO is often like washing dishes — no one gives you much credit for it, but they sure notice when you break something.”

While technical SEO is the basis for all other SEO work, your non-SEO co-workers and managers will likely pay attention more when things are going wrong than when they’re going right. To help mitigate this issue, he suggests steering clear of “vanity metrics”, such as pages indexed, and instead “showing how a clear plan of action led to improvements in relevant rankings, traffic, and sales.”

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Make sure you’re outlining specific metrics and goals from the start of every campaign, which will help guide your efforts and give you an easier framework for reporting on things down the line. And don’t forget to factor in outside forces that may be affecting your results.

“Organic traffic can be impacted by a lot of external factors, or your other, non-technical SEO campaigns,” says Tom Capper, Moz’s Senior Search Scientist (say that five times fast). “Tactics like SEO split-testing or, at a more primitive level, counterfactual forecasting, can help to isolate these effects in many cases, and happily technical changes tend to have a quicker, more direct impact than some other types of change that don’t see returns until the next core update.”

So when analyzing and reporting, remember: quantity isn’t always quality, and make sure you have the full picture before gleaning insights.

Conclusion

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While the core of your technical SEO work will stay the same in 2021, there is plenty of opportunity to build and improve on foundational skills, implement structured data and automation, clarify the way you analyze and report your results, and plan for Core Web Vitals to take effect. And while technical work can sometimes feel isolating, remember that cross-team collaboration is key to success, and that you’re part of a community of SEOs with similar goals!

Speaking of community, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the amazing work of Areej AbuAli and the Women in Tech SEO network.

“If you identify as a woman, do join the Women in Tech SEO Slack channel and subscribe to its newsletter,” advises Miracle Inameti-Archibong. “I wish I had a community like that at the beginning of my career. There are loads of people always willing to help with not just technical SEO issues, but mentoring and sharing of opportunities.”

Have questions for the experts, or advice not mentioned here? Let us know in the comments!