Maximising traffic acquisition through good SEO practices is a key strategic goal of any commercial website.
Recently I’ve been working with some brands on SEO optimisation from a technical perspective and have spent some time trying to map out what exactly “Good SEO” means.
So what is Good SEO?
That’s a tough question!
In my opinion Good SEO goes far beyond any particular discipline. It means great health and performance across a number of overlapping broad areas from technical to the quality of content and beyond. To execute effectively in each area entails strong process, execution and ongoing health checks.
The broad area’s I look at SEO through are as follows:
- Technical Best Practices
- Crawlability / Indexation optimisations so crawlers can efficiently discover the entire site
- On Page HTML optimisations so crawlers can understand the intent and content of your page displaying relevant information in Search Engine Results Pages
- International domain strategy linking content across languages and markets
- Off Page brand health contributing to a brands authority
I attempted to map SEO considerations in these areas out in the diagram below. For diagramming simplicity each point is allocated to a particular area but I acknowledge that many of the points can overlap multiple areas. Please feel free to leave a comment below if you see something I have omitted.
SEO with Optimizely
Optimizely CMS and Commerce Clouds provides the framework to enable really strong SEO practices.
By practices I mean both high quality performant technical implementations coupled with the tooling to enable good content planning & management processes across your organisation.
There are great community add-ons that are extendable to provide really strong SEO foundations.
Site Health Checks
Websites we work with often have tens of thousands of pages or more. A stray piece of code released on production or content management mistakes can cause real SEO issues. These issues will often be invisible… until they are discovered. So the challenge is discovering the issue before they cause a commercial impact.
I’ve worked with and recommend SEMRush as a tool. You can automate SEO Site Audits to execute regularly and email metric driven reports detailing areas like HTML Markup errors, International SEO errors, Crawlability, Site Performance and a number of other metrics. It also plugs into Google Search Console and Google Analyics so you can view current performance within the reports.
Regularly tracking these metrics means you can identify issues early as you improve your site health scores over time.
Next Post
In this post I’m simply sharing details about something I have been working on in the hope that someone will find it useful.
This is a really big topic so am happy to extend to posts on more specific areas with regard to good technical practices. If it’s useful, let me know 🙂
Johnny Mullaney 