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Hello!I’m Bernard Huang
SEO specialist and partner at Mushi Labs.
You can find me at:
@bernardjhuang
Overview
● What is programmatic SEO?● Elements of programmatic SEO● Research & discovery● Commonly overlooked technical
mistakes● Does Google actually like your
content?● How to fix your SEO content woes
Programmatic SEO
Creating SEO landing pages that target search queries using metadata on a large scale.
Websites that have successful programmatic SEO:
● Yelp● TripAdvisor● Zillow
Elements of Programmatic SEO
Research & discovery● How’re people
searching for things related to your business?
● What types of pages does Google think are relevant for search queries?
● How many searches are happening per month?
Technical
● Can Google crawl all the pages on your website?
● Can Google actually view the content on each of the pages?
● How do we get Google to constantly crawl the pages we want?
Content
● How trustworthy does Google think our website is?
● Does Google think our content is relevant for the search queries we’re targeting?
3.Research & discovery
Quantify searcher intent, competitive analysis, identify modifiers
How’re people searching for keywords that will be relevant to your business?
● quantify searcher intent● competitive analysis● identify modifiers
Research & discovery
R&D - quantify searcher intent
SEO is about figuring out how to capture the most relevant search traffic for your business.
Search intent varies based on keywords:
● [housekeeper] - informational● [house cleaning ny] - location● [need house cleaning services near me] -
transactional + location
R&D - quantify searcher intent
Start by identifying the head keywords you want to rank:
● [house cleaning]● [home cleaning]● [maid services]● [kitchen cleaners]
R&D - competitive analysis
Learn what keywords your competitors are ranking for using competitive analysis tools:
● SEMrush● SimilarWeb● SpyFu
SEMRushExport competitor’s keywords and look for interesting terms you never thought of.
R&D - identify modifiers
Google likes to help users with their searches by providing popular automatic search suggestions
R&D - identify modifiers
Find all those suggestions by using Ubersuggest with your head keywords to create lists of keyword modifiers:
R&D - identify modifiers
Bucket keyword modifiers by categories and intent:
R&D - quantify search intent
Determine size of search opportunity by looking at monthly search volume and keyword intent.
R&D - quantify searcher intent
Now we know how people are searching for things related to our business.
Looks like people searching for [home cleaning] want to know rates and see options for kitchens, bathrooms, and garages.
4.COMMON TECHNICAL
MISTAKESInternal linking, URL parameters, pagination, crawl
errors, sitemaps, and other stuff
Common technical mistakes
Large websites usually suffer from these technical mistakes:
● internal linking● URL params● pagination● crawl errors● sitemaps
Internal linking
Google views your internal distribution of links as internal votes for your most important pages.
Coverage - not linking to every page somewhere in your website.
Prioritization - not correctly linking enough to your high SEO value pages.
Depth - the SEO pages you want to rank in Google take too many clicks to get to from the homepage.
Internal linking - problems
Internal linking - coverage
If Google can’t find a way to get to pages on your website, how will Google know the page exists?
When you don’t link to a page on your website, that’s like a vote of no confidence for that page.
Internal linking - coverage [fix]
Make sure that every page on your website is linked to within your website.
This provides search engine bots a crawl path to discover all of the content on your site.
● Common places to stuff links include: footer, nav bar, user sitemap
Internal linking - prioritization
Internal links are valued differently.
For example,
● STRONG - homepage, above the fold link● MEDIUM - every page, nav bar links● LOW - some pages, side bar links● TRASH - every page, footer links
The type and # of incoming links to each of the webpages are internal votes.
Vote wisely:
Internal linking - prioritization
TripAdvisorNotice how TripAdvisor carefully targets their “popular destinations” pages
Internal linking - prioritization [fix]
Make sure SEO pages you want to rank are linked to properly throughout your website.
● Use a nav bar menu to target your highest value SEO pages.
● Strengthen your internal linking with the use of breadcrumbs schema.
Internal linking - depth
Link depth is the # of clicks that it takes to get from your homepage to other pages.
“Keep important pages within
several clicks from the homepage.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/10/importance-of-link-architecture.html
Internal linking - depth
The deeper pages are in your website, the less valuable they are to Google.
AmazonNav bar mega menus gives Google a link depth 1 crawl path to many important pages.
Internal linking - depth [fix]
Make sure you can get to your highest value SEO pages within 2 clicks and almost all of your pages within 5 clicks from the homepage.
● Create a user sitemap to decrease the link depth of all your pages.
● Use a nav bar mega menu to target your highest value SEO pages.
URL parameters
URL parameters are common ways to pass data to a page through its URL.
For example,
https://website.com/page?data=value
https://website.com/page,data=value
URL parameters
Google treats every URL parameter as a separate and unique URL.
Which means these are 3 different pages in Google’s eyes:
● https://website.com/page● https://website.com/page?data=value● https://website.com/page?data=value2
Duplicate content - URL params can accidentally create lots of duplicate pages.
Crawl inefficient - Googlebot resources are spent crawling URL param pages which may bottleneck crawling your other pages.
URL clutter - URLs may look messier which can lower click-through-rates (CTR).
URL parameters - problems
Google is confused about which page to show…
URL parameters - duplicate content
Google tries the different URL param pages in the search engine results page.
Most of the time, it’s duplicate content…
URL parameters - duplicate content
Google only crawls a certain % of pages on your website every day:
Letting your crawl budget go to unexpected URL param pages bottlenecks the crawling of your other content!
URL parameters - crawl inefficient
Do you have URL param pages accidentally being shown in the SERPs?
Search Console:
Pages filter containing “?”
URL parameters - crawl inefficient
Which URL looks most friendly for a Canon Powershot SD400 Camera?
Amazon.com - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007TJ5OG/102-8372974-4064145?v=glance&n=502394&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&n=3031001&s=photo&v=glance
Canon.com - http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=145&modelid=11158
DPReview.com - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canonsd400/
URL parameters - URL clutter
URL parameters - [fixes]
Depending on how your website uses URL parameters, you could:
● <link rel canonical> URLs with params back to non-params URLs
● disallow URL params in robots.txt● configure URL params in Search
Console● replace params pages with unique non-
params URLs
Pagination
Websites use pagination to divide the content on a page into several component pages.
Pagination - problems
Crawl inefficient - Google will crawl all the paginated pages if you let it, which can bottleneck your crawl rate for other pages.
Duplicate content - if implemented improperly, the content on your website could look duplicate on paginated pages.
Thin content - paginated pages often don’t have significant amounts of quality content.
Pagination - [fixes]
The preferred pagination implementation referenced by Google:
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/?page=1">
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/?page=2">
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en
ThumbtackDo you even need pagination? Purposely no pagination, just “top 10” lists.
https://www.thumbtack.com/ca/san-francisco/roofing/
YelpPagination for user experience but doesn’t allow Google to index paginated pages.
Sitemaps
Creating a valid sitemap and submitting them to Google and Bing will help the search engines better understand the site.
Bing relies more heavily than Google on sitemaps to crawl websites.
Sitemaps - problem
Cleanliness - your sitemap should only contain URLs of SEO value.
“Your Sitemaps need to be clean. We
have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap. Examples of dirt are if we
click on a URL and we see a redirect, a 404 or a 500 code. If we see more
than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap
https://www.stonetemple.com/search-algorithms-and-bing-webmaster-tools-with-duane-forrester/
Sitemaps - cleanliness [fixes]
Make sure each of the URLs in the sitemap:
● are unique● return status code 200● aren’t <link rel=’canonical’> to a
different URL● aren’t `no indexed` in robots.txt or on
the page
Crawl errors
Crawl errors occur when Googlebot crawls a page on your website and receives an error.
Google correlates the # crawl errors with website quality.
Crawl errors - problems [fix]
Go to Google Search Console and resolve the underlying cause of your crawl errors.
Other potential technical issues
site load speed - how fast is your website loading?
mobile friendliness - Is your website mobile friendly?
5.DOES GOOGLE LIKE YOUR
CONTENT?Indexation %s, last cache date, crawl budget
Does Google like your content?
There are quite a few ways to figure out if Google likes your content:
● Indexation %s● Last cache date● Crawl budget
Content - indexation %s
Just because Google crawls all the pages on your website does not mean it will put all those pages into the SERPs.
Indexation % is the ratio of pages Google has chosen to index divided by the total # of pages on your website.
Content - indexation %s
● Google “site:yourwebsite.com”
How does the # compare to how many pages you have total?
Content - indexation %s
How does the # compare to how many pages you have in total?
● Check Search Console > Google Index > Index Status
Split up sitemaps into different buckets for granular content analysis of your pages:
Content - indexation %s
Content - last cache date
Every time Google crawls your page, they save a snapshot of what they find in their database.
Last cache date is the last date which Google came to a page and saved its contents into their database.
Content - last cache date
Which’ll bring up a page where you can see the last date Google cached your page:
screenshot taken 6/10
Content - last cache date
For competitive queries, most search results on the first page have been cached within the last 14 days.
screenshots taken 6/10
Content - last cache date
When last cache dates are > 1 month it’s an indication of poor content on the page.
Or if Google hasn’t even cached your page:
screenshots taken 6/10
Depending on a variety of factors, Google will only crawl a certain % of pages on your website every day:
Content - crawl budget
Crawl budget isn’t distributed evenly. Internal linking and content quality play big roles in deciding where the crawlers go:
Content - crawl budget
You can see if you have content problems by looking at the following stats:
● avg. pages crawled per day / total pages● submitted / indexed pages (sitemap)● last cache dates on pages > 1 month old
Content - problems
6.HOW TO TACKLE YOUR SEO CONTENT WOES
de-index / remove pages, enhance existing content, get more user generated content
Content - [fixes]
The common fixes to content problems include:
● de-index / remove pages based on content criteria
● enhance existing content with more unique data, editorial content, etc.
● get more user generated content through onboarding or incentives
Google grades your website as a whole. Which means poor content on some pages actually drag down the quality of your entire site.
De-indexing, removing, or consolidating pages is a great way to recover crawl budget and improve website quality.
Content - de-index / remove pages
Determine poor performing SEO pages by looking at:
● last cache date● organic traffic to page (Google Analytics)
Content - de-index / remove pages
Content - de-index / remove pages
Axe the pages that aren’t getting search traffic:
de-index
● <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
remove
● return status code 410
consolidate
● can categories / geos pages be grouped into more content rich pages?
Content - enhance existing content
Find ways to enhance existing content that’ll benefit the user based on what types of content Google is already showing in SERPs:
● photos● videos● market reports● more listings● editorial content
KhanAcademyGoogle recognizes video content can be more relevant than other content types.
42FloorsCreating market reports from crunching #s in your database can be easy & fruitful
YelpHaving almost all the restaurants in Yelp’s database has secured its Google rankings.
Content - user generated content
Find ways get more user generated content:
● extracting more information from onboarding process
● incentivize users to create content● displaying anonymized user content
ThumbtackAsk unique questions while onboarding forces user to create unique content.
stackoverflowGive user privileges based on the quality of content users produce.
ThumbtackAnonymize recent user inquiries into unique and relevant content.
Feel free to reach out:
@bernardjhuang
http://www.mushilabs.com/
Thanks!Any questions?
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