SEO Site Monitoring

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When fruit goes bad it rots, telling you something is wrong and needs throwing. Your website is being worked on by lots of different people, monitoring allows you to similarly know when something is broken.
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What is Site Monitoring and what is involved?

Modern, enterprise websites often release changes to their code several times a day, preferring to tolerate mistakes but not taking a long time to find them. My site monitoring platform allows for sites with millions of URLs to be monitored daily and includes a helpful Looker report for stakeholders and all the requisite data to replicate issues.
Crawling

Crawling

Crawling at an hourly, daily or weekly cadence is setup and run so to find and aggregate issues on the site.
Reporting

Reporting

Data from the crawl is aggregated and feed into a Looker report, which showcases both current versus previous crawl numbers and trends for 30 days previous. Additionally all of the data required to fix the indicated issues is included and available in a onedrive folder which updates after every crawl.
Data Gathering

Data Gathering

A secondary but useful side effect of crawling your website so often is I can also pull and aggregate data from across your site. Want a count of pages which have ‘Staff Writer’ instead of an actual author, this can be collected and provided daily.

How the Process Works

Step 1

Setup

Working with your engineering teams I create a route for daily crawling, which typically involves whitelisting my IP, UserAgent and header token. Once whitelisted I setup the crawls and begin a series of tests to confirm we won’t be blocked.
Step 2

Reporting and training

I connect the aggregated data collected from the crawls to a looker template which outlines current vs previous crawl deltas and provides a 30 day lookback of crawl stats. In recognition of the fact people ignore reporting they do not understand, I am happy to provide training.
Step 3

Alerting

Once reporting is being populated we begin looking at alerting. I will work with you to setup thresholds and/or categories that must always result in alerts, pushing them either by email or slack messages.
Have a question about the process?
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FAQ's

I'm not technical or a SEO, will I understand the report?
All of my reports assume minimal SEO experience and are meant to be accessible regardless of technical know-how. I also provide tickets with all site audits; which are meant to be used by engineers and remove the need for you to have to do it yourself.
How long does an average site audit take?
Whilst it’s true to say bigger and more complex sites typically take longer, an average site audit is done and back with you roughly 6 days after the agreed start date. This may be a little longer than other technical SEO specialists quote you, however the difference is due to the level and thoroughness of the work I am to provide.
What if we struggle with implementing your recommendations?
Firstly, that’s often the case so please do not worry. I am happy to work with you and your teams in whatever way is most conducive to getting the job done. If more calls or little code examples are what is necessary to make it clear, than I’m more than happy to support.
What tools do you use?
I typically use screaming frog for my site crawls with heavily customised config files. I also have a treasure chest of custom scripts I’ve developed to allow for more robust testing of pages. To share an example, I have a script which will test each directory on your website to ensure your URLs are correctly consolidated using redirects.
Are you going to just share low-value things like missing alt attributes or non-SSL internal links?
I do pass on a ‘Low Value Issues’ list which I hope is helpful however I try to focus my time on the recommendations which are going to have the biggest impact. Having worked in-house for more than half my career, I know that engineers and Product managers are expensive and have to pick between several things to work on - so the aim is always to get the best value for you.
How to Contact Me
Drop me an email
hello@tomgregan.co.uk
Book a Meeting
tomgregan.co.uk/calendar
Visit my Contact Page
tomgregan.co.uk/contact