Thank you to my sponsors for keeping this newsletter free:
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence and digital marketing agency North Star Inbound. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.
This might come as news to many people, but nailing a perfect score on technical SEO will not drive any additional traffic if there isn’t already a great website that provides value to users. Technical SEO focuses mostly on optimizing a website to known best practices for search visibility.
There is tremendous value in having a well-optimized site from a technical standpoint; however, technical SEO can only help a site improve on the visibility it ALREADY should have. The technical SEO enhances and reveals the value blocked by not following SEO best practices.
Misinformation beware
Some people and agencies within the SEO industry have created an expectation that technical SEO fixes will do more for the growth of a site’s traffic than it can actually do. In this paradigm, the company may specifically look to make technical SEO their core effort when they would be better off focusing on great content or, even better, an SEO product, as I go into great detail in my book Product-Led SEO.
[Sponsored]
How to Create Helpful Content: Ignore the SERP!
With the helpful content update finished, this week's tip is about making...helpful content. What’s the key to making your content go from good to great?
Ignore the SERP.
Here’s one framework for understanding a query better than most and producing outstanding content that outranks the rest.
Understand the Query: Yes, you still need to Google it to grasp the basics of search intent.
For instance, what formats are ranking? What’s the core angle on the query? Are people trying to solve problems quickly? Or is thorough research more of a match?Don’t Click the Results: Don’t click through to the results.
Read WHY avoiding the SERP is crucial and 4 more steps to take instead in my newsletter here. Check out our work here.
Organizations spend vast sums to improve technical aspects of a site to bring them up to SEO best practices but neglect to determine if there will be ROI from these efforts before making an investment. Remapping every redirect, removing error pages, and even improving site speed may not actually add enough additional users to justify the effort that might have to be invested in making these changes.
I have seen companies prepare to spend millions of dollars to enhance their site speed and page load times specifically for SEO because an agency told them this is what they needed to do. In my experience, they would unlikely have ever seen any return from this investment in increased search visibility.
When I started as a full-time consultant five years ago, one of my first clients had paid $30,000 to a large, well-known agency for an SEO audit that only recommended technical changes. They had hired me to help implement the audit recommendations; I successfully lobbied for them to instead focus on building out a new strategy that incorporated Product-Led SEO best practices rather than the backward-focused recommendations from the audit. I was confident that spending engineering cycles updating a few dozen 302 redirects to 301s, compressing already compressed images, and fixing broken links on pages no user sees would not be worthwhile.
Managing expectations
The purpose of technical SEO is really to unlock opportunity and value that has been hidden away by inefficient technical SEO infrastructure; however, if there is no value to unlock, SEO improvements will not add user acquisition.
The best way of explaining this is to think of this in a home purchase analogy. Technical SEO is the structure of the home that lives underneath the sheetrock. When a prospective buyer decides how much they will pay for this home, the technical infrastructure may weigh into their calculation, but it will be a very small.
Yes, it is nice to know that if an earthquake or fire hits the home, it can withstand the onslaught, but the buyers are paying for the location, design, and square footage.
Translating this back into SEO, website users only care about satisfying whatever their immediate need might be. It is ideal that when they click on links, they don’t get redirected often, but they will never notice if those redirects are 301 or 302’s. The same goes for internal linking. From a user perspective, it’s nice to have that they can find additional pages/products within the site, but even if they can’t, they can always use the search box.
Technical SEO will, of course, add users to a website, but those users should be weighed against other investments that might bring in even more users. The vast sums that might be required to improve a website’s speed might be better used to hire engineers who build additional features that might generate more search or other traffic.
As an aside, I believe that site speed does not necessarily improve a website’s visibility in search; rather, it is a tool to increase on-page conversions. Therefore, in making an investment case for site speed, I would only use that conversion improvement as a part of the ROI calculation and not make any assumptions about additional traffic.
The technical SEO that matters
Similarly, several other areas of technical SEO might serve a dual purpose of being both technical and content/product improvements. The addition of schema or FAQ’s while some might consider to be technical, I think those are value adds to a page that are actually content efforts implemented technically. (Note in the case of FAQ’s the visibility of this featured in search results has been deprecated, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add it if it helps your users.)
Another area of technical SEO that I think always adds a lot of value on larger sites is to improve internal linking (connecting all pages to other pages), but this will only have a high impact on larger sites that currently are under-optimized for internal links. Small sites (sub 100 pages) are unlikely to be impacted by adding more internal links.
I am sure some of you will disagree with my sentiments about technical SEO, and I would love to hear from you. Just hit reply!
[Sponsored]
How to build backlinks for SEO in mainstream news outlets in 6 steps.
We got massive links for our fitness client with expert commentary PR about how to burn your love handles.
This is how we’ve done it:
☑️ Noticed that journalists always write about how people can burn their belly fat
☑️ Also noticed they always quote fitness experts in those articles
☑️ Gathered some great tips from our client on what is the best way to lose your love handles (waistline fat) Read the case study
so true. i've helped companies who were so concerned about technical SEO but then no one came to the site b/c they underinvested in content. makes no sense
Epic article. And will probably rub a lot of SEO "experts" the wrong way. But 100% truth nontheless.