SEO Site Planning

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Picking the right technology for your upcoming site is hugely important, and the right choices can avoid both feeling stuck and a tonne of extra work to make your website SEO friendly
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What is SEO site planning and what is involved?

Choosing the right technology and services for your website is ultimately a balancing act. You’re required to gather requirements from stakeholders across the business, all of which are able to tell you what they want and how they see it working. SEO site planning is where I can help answer what should be considered for search engines.
Consultation

Consultation

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

SERP Standards

As a reference for all engineering teams I support I share my SERP Standards toolkit – which outlines universal best practices mapped to common features. The toolkit includes recommendations for generators, linting and validating tools and any relevant documentation coming from the major search engines.
Problem statements & acceptance criteria

Problem statements & acceptance criteria

Having held two roles in Product teams I appreciate the value of a clear and comprehensive set of problem statements and acceptance criteria! As I see it, being detail orientated when scribing out the problems you want to solve and what success looks like, avoids a lot of tears when the site is live.
Technology review and recommendations

Technology review and recommendations

Whilst modern search engines are reasonably good at parsing most popular website frameworks, and conversely they tend to make accommodations to be more SEO friendly – it remains that there are still friction-points and gotchas to be conscious of. For example, does shiny framework A require 3 weeks of work to build a non-native Server Side Rendering system which would be not an issue if you went for framework B?
Future proofing quiz

Future proofing quiz

Does your new website need to support other languages or countries? No? What about if all goes well and you hit this years targets? Will different markets be a consideration? If yes, does that mean that whilst platform A has the cool button that makes the site spin and slide in, the better long-term platform is B? This is a great point to discuss future plans and I can help with laying out what needs to be considered and why.

How the Process Works

Step 1

Kick-off orienteering

I start most site planning projects getting up to speed with the intentions behind the project, noting down what’s the current scope and where possible the future subsequent projects which are expected once live.
Step 2

Problem statements, acceptance criteria and toolkits

Once I have a view of what is the scope of work for the project I can begin helping. I then move into being as exhaustive as is possible listing our best practices and SEO considerations as part of all requirements gathering work. Whilst I can make direct suggestions where necessary, my preference is to be clear about the expected inputs and outputs, as this is considerate of the engineers who want to unpick and solve business problems.
Step 3

Feedback and Quality Assurance

Assuming a typical process of content goes to designers, who then pass it to engineering, who then have it reviewed and when bug free sent live – I can help at almost every step. I can help with reviewing suggested features and layouts with the design team, adding requirements to the engineers tickets as they move from design to engineering and lastly quality assure the finished project before it is deemed fit to send live.
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