Prioritizing Technical SEO Fixes

How do you determine which SEO activities to tackle when you have so many to worry about?

Ola walks you through the essential technical SEO adjustments

that should be at the top of your audit list in today’s edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video Transcription

You’re probably already aware of the notion of technical SEO,

but if you aren’t, there are plenty of tools available.

However, technical SEO is arguably the most essential aspect of

SEO because even if you have the finest content on

the web and the most backlinks, if your site is not

technically sound, you may not receive the best results from all of your work.

So your technical SEO is the bedrock upon which everything else is built.

There are several tools available, such as Sitebulb and Screaming Frog,

that may help you examine your technical SEO difficulties.

However, even if you have a list of concerns, you may not always know how to prioritize your efforts.

So the goal of today’s lesson is to assist you to get a better grasp on it once you’ve identified the difficulties.

Indexing

The first thing search engines will do with your website in terms of technical SEO is crawl it.

So you must ensure that your sitemap is properly configured,

and then you must ensure that your robots.txt is properly configured

so that search engines may scan your most relevant pages on your site.

Pages to index

However, after they’ve scanned your site, you’ll want

to make sure that the crawl budget is spent indexing the relevant pages on your site.

So today we’ll go through the sites that you should be indexing,

as well as how you can repair those pages or prioritize your efforts to update those pages.

So, first and foremost, index.

The pages you should be indexing are those that are critical to your business.

So, start with your KPI, what’s going to drive leads to your site, what’s going to drive traffic,

or are there strategic sites that you’re trying to get better outcomes from.

Know what those are and what you want to make sure are indexed.

Of course, the larger your website, the more attention you must give to these.

When you’re working on your own, it could be alright to index everything at first.

However, as your site expands, you may want to be more cautious.

Of course, you don’t want to index all of the sensitive and private sites.

Consider your login and privacy policies pages.

Of course, they should exist on your site, but they don’t have to be indexed.

So you want to make sure that meta no-index is put up for those sites,

and you can do so from the beginning by configuring your robots.txt to prevent

those pages from being crawled in the first place.

in terms of indexing for your site, the pages with

the highest traffic value should be prioritized.

these are pages that you want to get more traffic to or

that are already getting a lot of traffic to, and they could

also be pages that aren’t getting a lot of traffic but are strategic in

the sense that they bring quality traffic to your website or

that you expect them to bring quality traffic to your site.

Then there’s the high link value.

You want to make sure that the pages on your website that are used to drive links are indexed.

Alternatively, if they are already driving links, you don’t want to screw it up.

Make certain that you are not interfering with pages that provide value to other pages.

So, even if they don’t have external connections,

if they are essential in terms of internal linkages, you should index them as well.

A high keyword value is also present.

If a page is receiving a lot of your keywords, you should make sure that the page is indexed as well.

The user’s part in the adventure.

Some pages may not have much SEO value, yet they are extremely beneficial to your customer experience.

As an example, consider your assistance pages.

To be honest, they probably won’t rank for many keywords.

However, if your client goes to a search engine and looks for a

solution to a problem, you want to lead them to

those assistance pages and make sure they can readily discover them.

So it doesn’t have much SEO value in the traditional sense,

but it is still highly beneficial for your user experience.

Pages that are prominently displayed on your site, like your homepage, should also be indexed.

Almost certainly, no link on your page should lead to a dead end.

It should direct consumers to the intended destination,

so no 404 errors on your homepage or other sites that are critical to your user experience.

To avoid this, put up a Google Analytics custom report so

that each time there is a problem on a page like that, you are immediately notified.

These are the pages you should be indexing.

Please let me know if you believe something should  included.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list.

But this is based on my experience thus far, on what I’ve discovered, and you may know something I don’t.

Please let me know if this is the case.

Prioritizing fixes

So, in terms of repairs, this is how you should prioritize what has to be fixed.

Prioritization factors

So these are the reasons for prioritizing.
So, once more:

Page value: You should prioritize repairing pages

that are ranking, receiving links, and receiving clicks above other pages.

Pages that coincide with your goal or have an influence on your KPI should most likely  prioritized as well.

Ranking potential: Some pages may not be doing well, yet they have a high ranking potential.

So, if a page is on page 2 and you know it’s targeting a term that isn’t too tough,

you might want to prioritize improving that page so that you can start seeing results much sooner.

Then there’s the issue kind.

Some topics are worth pursuing and resolving more quickly than others.

Also, the technological effort.

Some problems are much easier to resolve.

This is not for you to decide if you are not technically savvy.

You could want to chat with your engineers and have them assess how difficult or easy it would be to fix a page.

Prioritizing by issue type

Of course, if you’re a technical person, you can decide for yourself.

However, in terms of issue kind, below is a list of typical concerns and how to prioritize them:

So you’re dealing with serious crawler difficulties.

So the 4XX pages or errors might be due to a server problem or a broken page.

Make sure to address these issues as soon as possible because they influence your user journey and prospective rankings.

There are also metadata problems.

So, for example, missing descriptions are something you want to address once the pages are already available.

Redirection issues are also present.

Nobody wants a chain of redirects.

So, when you’ve resolved your metadata issues, make sure that’s repaired.

Minor changes to the content  made here and there.

So they’re important, yet they’re low on your priority list.

if you discover that you don’t have the right keyword,

for example, in your URL, it may not always be very

important to fix it right away because the effort to fix

it may not be worth the result, in the sense that just

fixing a URL issue would result in performing an audit

to ensure that you’re not breaking anything else on your site.

So, for something that may not have a large impact, it is resulting in a lot of labour that is not beneficial to you.

Conclusion

So, sure, these are the things I think about while I’m troubleshooting a website’s technical difficulties.

There are still numerous stages to do in this process.

Due to time constraints, we are unable to cover everything.

However, because I stated the technological effort,

you might want to utilize things like

T-shirt sizing to decide what concerns are small, medium, big, extra-large, and so on.

Depending on your project management software,

you may be able to set up a sorting feature to accomplish this automatically.

So, once you’ve uploaded your URLs, for example,

into a Google Sheet, you should be able to build up a script that lets you, once you’ve picked the effort,

problem kind, and value to you, to sort it automatically as well, making this job much faster.

But, yes, I’d want to hear your thoughts on this, and I’d also like to learn from you.

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