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

There's not much mention of SEO in the above, how comes?
The conventional wisdom here is that if users enjoy being on your website, meander around and complete whatever it is that they came to do – then search engines will favour you in their results. Whether that’s due to bounce rate, pogo-sticking, scroll depth or a long list of other considerations is largely academic, what’s important is that the more people who access and accomplish their task using your website the less you’ll have to worry about in terms of SEO.
How do I know if my site is slow?

Firstly it’s worth clarifying that your website can be slow to load and slow in terms of interactivity (I.e. when you click on a button nothing happens).

Whilst tools exist that I can share which list how well you score on a scale of 1 – 100 or A – F, a more practical and simpler test is simply to disconnect from wifi on your phone and click around your website. If the pages are taking a long time to finish loading, things randomly shift around and when you click on something it takes a noticeably long time for anything to happen – then it’s probably slow enough to warrant having a conversation.

The aim here is to keep people in the flow of what they’re doing, a button not doing anything when I click on it creates rage clicks and is usually a good reason for someone to go back to a search engine and try someone else.

What's the difference between lab testing and RUM testing?

Lab testing, sometimes called synthetic testing, refers to using tools which try to emulate the experiences of users and in doing so measures and scores what they expect will be your scores. Lab testing is integral for measuring whilst working on improvements, it allows engineers to see what the expected difference in timing will be once released to the website.

RUM, or Real User Measurement, testing is when you proactively measure users experiences when using your website. The benefit here is that it is 1st party data, which means it’s more dependable and carries no erroneous assumptions.

A fun bit of trivia is that Google actually provides you with RUM data by discreetly measuring users experiences in the chrome browser. This means that even if you have not been actively measuring your users interactions you can gather some data from Chrome.

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