Why Effective, Modern SEO Requires Technical, Creative, and Strategic Thinking - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

There's no doubt that quite a bit has changed about SEO, and that the field is far more integrated with other aspects of online marketing than it once was. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand pushes back against the idea that effective modern SEO doesn't require any technical expertise, outlining a fantastic list of technical elements that today's SEOs need to know about in order to be truly effective.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm going to do something unusual. I don't usually point out these inconsistencies or sort of take issue with other folks' content on the web, because I generally find that that's not all that valuable and useful. But I'm going to make an exception here.

There is an article by Jason DeMers, who I think might actually be here in Seattle -- maybe he and I can hang out at some point -- called "Why Modern SEO Requires Almost No Technical Expertise." It was an article that got a shocking amount of traction and attention. On Facebook, it has thousands of shares. On LinkedIn, it did really well. On Twitter, it got a bunch of attention.

Some folks in the SEO world have already pointed out some issues around this. But because of the increasing popularity of this article, and because I think there's, like, this hopefulness from worlds outside of kind of the hardcore SEO world that are looking to this piece and going, "Look, this is great. We don't have to be technical. We don't have to worry about technical things in order to do SEO."

Look, I completely get the appeal of that. I did want to point out some of the reasons why this is not so accurate. At the same time, I don't want to rain on Jason, because I think that it's very possible he's writing an article for Entrepreneur, maybe he has sort of a commitment to them. Maybe he had no idea that this article was going to spark so much attention and investment. He does make some good points. I think it's just really the title and then some of the messages inside there that I take strong issue with, and so I wanted to bring those up.

First off, some of the good points he did bring up.

One, he wisely says, "You don't need to know how to code or to write and read algorithms in order to do SEO." I totally agree with that. If today you're looking at SEO and you're thinking, "Well, am I going to get more into this subject? Am I going to try investing in SEO? But I don't even know HTML and CSS yet."

Those are good skills to have, and they will help you in SEO, but you don't need them. Jason's totally right. You don't have to have them, and you can learn and pick up some of these things, and do searches, watch some Whiteboard Fridays, check out some guides, and pick up a lot of that stuff later on as you need it in your career. SEO doesn't have that hard requirement.

And secondly, he makes an intelligent point that we've made many times here at Moz, which is that, broadly speaking, a better user experience is well correlated with better rankings.

You make a great website that delivers great user experience, that provides the answers to searchers' questions and gives them extraordinarily good content, way better than what's out there already in the search results, generally speaking you're going to see happy searchers, and that's going to lead to higher rankings.

But not entirely. There are a lot of other elements that go in here. So I'll bring up some frustrating points around the piece as well.

First off, there's no acknowledgment -- and I find this a little disturbing -- that the ability to read and write code, or even HTML and CSS, which I think are the basic place to start, is helpful or can take your SEO efforts to the next level. I think both of those things are true.

So being able to look at a web page, view source on it, or pull up Firebug in Firefox or something and diagnose what's going on and then go, "Oh, that's why Google is not able to see this content. That's why we're not ranking for this keyword or term, or why even when I enter this exact sentence in quotes into Google, which is on our page, this is why it's not bringing it up. It's because it's loading it after the page from a remote file that Google can't access." These are technical things, and being able to see how that code is built, how it's structured, and what's going on there, very, very helpful.

Some coding knowledge also can take your SEO efforts even further. I mean, so many times, SEOs are stymied by the conversations that we have with our programmers and our developers and the technical staff on our teams. When we can have those conversations intelligently, because at least we understand the principles of how an if-then statement works, or what software engineering best practices are being used, or they can upload something into a GitHub repository, and we can take a look at it there, that kind of stuff is really helpful.

Secondly, I don't like that the article overly reduces all of this information that we have about what we've learned about Google. So he mentions two sources. One is things that Google tells us, and others are SEO experiments. I think both of those are true. Although I'd add that there's sort of a sixth sense of knowledge that we gain over time from looking at many, many search results and kind of having this feel for why things rank, and what might be wrong with a site, and getting really good at that using tools and data as well. There are people who can look at Open Site Explorer and then go, "Aha, I bet this is going to happen." They can look, and 90% of the time they're right.

So he boils this down to, one, write quality content, and two, reduce your bounce rate. Neither of those things are wrong. You should write quality content, although I'd argue there are lots of other forms of quality content that aren't necessarily written -- video, images and graphics, podcasts, lots of other stuff.

And secondly, that just doing those two things is not always enough. So you can see, like many, many folks look and go, "I have quality content. It has a low bounce rate. How come I don't rank better?" Well, your competitors, they're also going to have quality content with a low bounce rate. That's not a very high bar.

Also, frustratingly, this really gets in my craw. I don't think "write quality content" means anything. You tell me. When you hear that, to me that is a totally non-actionable, non-useful phrase that's a piece of advice that is so generic as to be discardable. So I really wish that there was more substance behind that.

The article also makes, in my opinion, the totally inaccurate claim that modern SEO really is reduced to "the happier your users are when they visit your site, the higher you're going to rank."

Wow. Okay. Again, I think broadly these things are correlated. User happiness and rank is broadly correlated, but it's not a one to one. This is not like a, "Oh, well, that's a 1.0 correlation."

I would guess that the correlation is probably closer to like the page authority range. I bet it's like 0.35 or something correlation. If you were to actually measure this broadly across the web and say like, "Hey, were you happier with result one, two, three, four, or five," the ordering would not be perfect at all. It probably wouldn't even be close.

There's a ton of reasons why sometimes someone who ranks on Page 2 or Page 3 or doesn't rank at all for a query is doing a better piece of content than the person who does rank well or ranks on Page 1, Position 1.

Then the article suggests five and sort of a half steps to successful modern SEO, which I think is a really incomplete list. So Jason gives offering a;

• Good on-site experience
• Writing good content
• Getting others to acknowledge you as an authority
• Rising in social popularity
• Earning local relevance
• Dealing with modern CMS systems (which he notes most modern CMS systems are SEO-friendly)

The thing is there's nothing actually wrong with any of these. They're all, generally speaking, correct, either directly or indirectly related to SEO. The one about local relevance, I have some issue with, because he doesn't note that there's a separate algorithm for sort of how local SEO is done and how Google ranks local sites in maps and in their local search results. Also not noted is that rising in social popularity won't necessarily directly help your SEO, although it can have indirect and positive benefits.

I feel like this list is super incomplete. Okay, I brainstormed just off the top of my head in the 10 minutes before we filmed this video a list. The list was so long that, as you can see, I filled up the whole whiteboard and then didn't have any more room. I'm not going to bother to erase and go try and be absolutely complete.

But there's a huge, huge number of things that are important, critically important for technical SEO. If you don't know how to do these things, you are sunk in many cases. You can't be an effective SEO analyst, or consultant, or in-house team member, because you simply can't diagnose the potential problems, rectify those potential problems, identify strategies that your competitors are using, be able to diagnose a traffic gain or loss. You have to have these skills in order to do that.

I'll run through these quickly, but really the idea is just that this list is so huge and so long that I think it's very, very, very wrong to say technical SEO is behind us. I almost feel like the opposite is true.

We have to be able to understand things like;

• Content rendering and indexability
• Crawl structure, internal links, JavaScript, Ajax. If something's post-loading after the page and Google's not able to index it, or there are links that are accessible via JavaScript or Ajax, maybe Google can't necessarily see those or isn't crawling them as effectively, or is crawling them, but isn't assigning them as much link weight as they might be assigning other stuff, and you've made it tough to link to them externally, and so they can't crawl it.
• Disabling crawling and/or indexing of thin or incomplete or non-search-targeted content. We have a bunch of search results pages. Should we use rel=prev/next? Should we robots.txt those out? Should we disallow from crawling with meta robots? Should we rel=canonical them to other pages? Should we exclude them via the protocols inside Google Webmaster Tools, which is now Google Search Console?
• Managing redirects, domain migrations, content updates. A new piece of content comes out, replacing an old piece of content, what do we do with that old piece of content? What's the best practice? It varies by different things. We have a whole Whiteboard Friday about the different things that you could do with that. What about a big redirect or a domain migration? You buy another company and you're redirecting their site to your site. You have to understand things about subdomain structures versus subfolders, which, again, we've done another Whiteboard Friday about that.
• Proper error codes, downtime procedures, and not found pages. If your 404 pages turn out to all be 200 pages, well, now you've made a big error there, and Google could be crawling tons of 404 pages that they think are real pages, because you've made it a status code 200, or you've used a 404 code when you should have used a 410, which is a permanently removed, to be able to get it completely out of the indexes, as opposed to having Google revisit it and keep it in the index.

Downtime procedures. So there's specifically a... I can't even remember. It's a 5xx code that you can use. Maybe it was a 503 or something that you can use that's like, "Revisit later. We're having some downtime right now." Google urges you to use that specific code rather than using a 404, which tells them, "This page is now an error."

Disney had that problem a while ago, if you guys remember, where they 404ed all their pages during an hour of downtime, and then their homepage, when you searched for Disney World, was, like, "Not found." Oh, jeez, Disney World, not so good.

• International and multi-language targeting issues. I won't go into that. But you have to know the protocols there. Duplicate content, syndication, scrapers. How do we handle all that? Somebody else wants to take our content, put it on their site, what should we do? Someone's scraping our content. What can we do? We have duplicate content on our own site. What should we do?
• Diagnosing traffic drops via analytics and metrics. Being able to look at a rankings report, being able to look at analytics connecting those up and trying to see: Why did we go up or down? Did we have less pages being indexed, more pages being indexed, more pages getting traffic less, more keywords less?
• Understanding advanced search parameters. Today, just today, I was checking out the related parameter in Google, which is fascinating for most sites. Well, for Moz, weirdly, related:oursite.com shows nothing. But for virtually every other sit, well, most other sites on the web, it does show some really interesting data, and you can see how Google is connecting up, essentially, intentions and topics from different sites and pages, which can be fascinating, could expose opportunities for links, could expose understanding of how they view your site versus your competition or who they think your competition is.

Then there are tons of parameters, like in URL and in anchor, and da, da, da, da. In anchor doesn't work anymore, never mind about that one.

I have to go faster, because we're just going to run out of these. Like, come on. Interpreting and leveraging data in Google Search Console. If you don't know how to use that, Google could be telling you, you have all sorts of errors, and you don't know what they are.

• Leveraging topic modeling and extraction. Using all these cool tools that are coming out for better keyword research and better on-page targeting. I talked about a couple of those at MozCon, like MonkeyLearn. There's the new Moz Context API, which will be coming out soon, around that. There's the Alchemy API, which a lot of folks really like and use.
• Identifying and extracting opportunities based on site crawls. You run a Screaming Frog crawl on your site and you're going, "Oh, here's all these problems and issues." If you don't have these technical skills, you can't diagnose that. You can't figure out what's wrong. You can't figure out what needs fixing, what needs addressing.
• Using rich snippet format to stand out in the SERPs. This is just getting a better click-through rate, which can seriously help your site and obviously your traffic.
• Applying Google-supported protocols like rel=canonical, meta description, rel=prev/next, hreflang, robots.txt, meta robots, x robots, NOODP, XML sitemaps, rel=nofollow. The list goes on and on and on. If you're not technical, you don't know what those are, you think you just need to write good content and lower your bounce rate, it's not going to work.
• Using APIs from services like AdWords or MozScape, or hrefs from Majestic, or SEM refs from SearchScape or Alchemy API. Those APIs can have powerful things that they can do for your site. There are some powerful problems they could help you solve if you know how to use them. It's actually not that hard to write something, even inside a Google Doc or Excel, to pull from an API and get some data in there. There's a bunch of good tutorials out there. Richard Baxter has one, Annie Cushing has one, I think Distilled has some. So really cool stuff there.
• Diagnosing page load speed issues, which goes right to what Jason was talking about. You need that fast-loading page. Well, if you don't have any technical skills, you can't figure out why your page might not be loading quickly.
• Diagnosing mobile friendliness issues
• Advising app developers on the new protocols around App deep linking, so that you can get the content from your mobile apps into the web search results on mobile devices. Awesome. Super powerful. Potentially crazy powerful, as mobile search is becoming bigger than desktop.

Okay, I'm going to take a deep breath and relax. I don't know Jason's intention, and in fact, if he were in this room, he'd be like, "No, I totally agree with all those things. I wrote the article in a rush. I had no idea it was going to be big. I was just trying to make the broader points around you don't have to be a coder in order to do SEO." That's completely fine.

So I'm not going to try and rain criticism down on him. But I think if you're reading that article, or you're seeing it in your feed, or your clients are, or your boss is, or other folks are in your world, maybe you can point them to this Whiteboard Friday and let them know, no, that's not quite right. There's a ton of technical SEO that is required in 2015 and will be for years to come, I think, that SEOs have to have in order to be effective at their jobs.

All right, everyone. Look forward to some great comments, and we'll see you again next time for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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