The state (or statelessness) of technical SEO in 2019
What do we need to know about technical SEO in 2019? Here’s an overview to keep in mind, based on a presentation by Mike King of iPullRank at TechSEOBoost.
What do we need to know about technical SEO in 2019? Here’s an overview to keep in mind, based on a presentation by Mike King of iPullRank at TechSEOBoost.
What do we need to know about technical SEO in 2019? Here’s an overview to keep in mind.
Technical SEO is different from what we know as standard SEO. It dives deeper into the analysis of content and it can help you draw very interesting conclusions.
Mike King from iPullRank delivered a highly informative presentation in Catalyst’s TechSEO Boost and it can give us a better idea of the state, or actually, the statelessness of technical SEO.
Whether you’re an SEO expert or you’re just getting started, here are some key points to consider from Mike’s session.
The first challenge that comes with technical SEO has to do with its actual definition. It’s not always easy to explain it.
In fact, it’s even hard for SEO professionals to define it.
Mike King asked 300 people to provide their own definition to what technical SEO really is. Unsurprisingly, there was no consistency in its definition. Many respondents indicated that web performance and information architecture are parts of what technical SEO does. However, these are tasks that other roles typically perform.
As Mike King said, “everything we do is someone else’s job.”
The best way to define technical SEO as a profession then is to think of it as the state of being curious. Technical SEO experts are curious enough to play with things that they can change.
What we need to remember is that there is no technical SEO as a definitive discipline. It can be the job of putting things together to make things scale and solve problems that affect SEO.
Thus, if we want to explain the difference between technical and standard SEO, we need to remember that technical SEO is about scalability, depth, detail, advanced cross-functional understanding, and also execution.
Another challenge that we’re seeing in technical SEO — and SEO in general sometimes — is that the metrics are too opaque.
There are many tools to measure our own definition of success but we still don’t have peer-reviewed and transparent definitions of any proprietary link metrics.
How can we tell which metrics matter most of all? How do we define success and how can we all agree to it?
These bring out the need to standardize SEO.
We need to standardize three things:
These can help us improve our SEO expertise by sharing a common understanding with everyone in the industry.
If you want to improve your technical SEO skills in 2019, here are some key things to consider.
There are three types of tests that are most relevant to technical SEO:
Headless browsers can be very useful in the process of test-driven development. We tend to use them for Javascript-rendered content but they are actually made for automated testing.
From this perspective, we can think of technical SEO professionals as product managers. They are focusing on a test-driven development to run tests and experiment with different scenarios.
Here are some additional tips that have to do with technical SEO:
If you want to start using the right tools for technical SEO, here is the list that Mike provided in his presentation.
You can also find out more about free technical SEO tools in our own list.
What we need to remember when it comes to technical SEO is that it’s all about being curious. You don’t need to have a clear definition of your role and your tasks. These may depend on the company that you’re working for.
But you still need to be comfortable with figuring out how things work. You need to have the inquisitive mind to investigate why one thing succeeded over another.
And this is probably the best way to dive into it with the right mindset.