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Tyson Stockton
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Tyson Stockton.
Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the Voice of Search Podcast. My name is Tyson from Previsible IO. Joining me today is Chris Band, who's the senior Technical SEO at Lumar, which is a large scale crawler, technical SEO and accessibility platform. Yesterday, Chris and I talked about rising SEO security awareness. Today we're going to continue the conversation and we're going to jump into actionable and effective technical SEO insights.
Chris Spann
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Tyson Stockton
All right, here's my conversation with Chris Spann, Senior Technical SEO at lumar. Chris, welcome back.
Chris Spann
Nice to be back. I've talked a lot the first half. I'm going to try and make this more of a conversation the second half.
Tyson Stockton
No, no, no, no. No worries. Love the insights yesterday that you gave to the listeners, that was a nice, it was a topic, you know, that I don't think gets spoken about enough in SEO. And yeah, so I mean if anyone didn't listen to yesterday's episode, check it out where we talk about security, certainly risk or areas of concern from an SEO perspective, but also quite a bit that we can offer more of like an organization too from the security perspective. But today we're shifting gears and we're talking more tactics, insights. So first off, like from your perspective, thinking about actionable and effective insights. What are you meaning by that? Exactly.
Chris Spann
So my big thing, so my day to day job. So I love talking about security stuff, but that's just because I'm interested in it, right? My day to day stuff. As part of the professional services team, we kind of like a technical SEO agency within the business. So when you purchase the Luma tool, you can also purchase some of my time as well. So a lot of my day to day is having client meetings and essentially providing insights on sites, right? Because obviously you get given, you have a, let's say you're brand new into a role at a business, you get handed a 15 year old 10 million URL website and kind of get told, right, there you go, off you go. So you bring on a large scale crawler, well what the hell do you do then, right? So a lot of people, a lot of businesses and a lot of CMOs, things like that, the first thing that I always hear them say is, oh, we want everything, we want to crawl everything. Nobody, nobody wants everything. I can tell you now, I don't want everything. Whenever I'm crawling a site within the tool like Luma, I'm going to point out, I'm going to talk about how good Luma is. I should say I was a Luma user before I joined the company. I do genuinely think it's really good. It's why I came and worked there or reply to work there. You know, we can add log files and GA and backlinks and we can crawl the site and sitemaps and lists and all this different stuff, but all it ever does is generate noise. And the biggest thing to do, especially if you own, if you look after a big site or worse a lot of big sites. I talked about this in the last Bryton SEO about starting to split that up and work on this stuff, right? So for me, actual insights, I mean the name's kind of the clues in the name, right? It's insights that you can use to actually get stuff done or get stuff Fixed, Right. Or that you can use. So it's not like wading through tar just to try and get something of use, you know what I mean? Or even better insights that you can farm out to other teams or to other people that you don't have to look at anymore. Right. You know what I mean? Again, like, I know product and marketing will hate me for saying this, but I know that nobody on earth wakes up every morning and thinks, great and brand new day. Another eight hours to spend looking at reports in Luma. Right? Nobody. Nobody wants that. They want, right? Let's go in. Oh, hey, the new release went live last night. Let's just double check that everything went fine in that. Yeah, okay. There's no fires there. You know, let's make sure. Yeah, okay. Oh, that fix that I asked for last week. Yep, that's gone in. Great. We can see that. So it's this stuff, right? It's getting a framework set up of a nice combination of things that, you know are problems that you're trying to get fixed and things that you don't want to happen. So your catastrophic errors and things like that. And then quite often the third category, which is, let's be honest again, whenever Team X does an update, they break something. Right? Something always goes wrong whenever this team does it. So let's track the sort of things they break and we can check then every. They do their releases on every other Wednesday. Right. Well, let's check Thursday morning and see if they've broken anything this time. Right. So it's kind of your three bits. It's. Are my changes getting done? Has anything catastrophic happened? Catastrophic happened. Or has anyone introduced any new annoying problems? So that's kind of in my head. What actionable is fair?
Tyson Stockton
And I think maybe it's worth to just kind of taking a little. A little tangent on this because you made the comment of nobody wants to crawl everything. And I fullheartedly believe this. But it's like I have been in many conversations where, you know, clients could be asking for like, okay, no, I want to crawl the entire website every week. It's like, well, probably not especially depending on the size of website. Like, yeah, probably really? Definitely not.
Chris Spann
Your CFO doesn't want you doing that, I can tell you that much.
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. Or even just enough time in the day. But I think one just for like SEOs out there, maybe because we have the full spectrum, I think of listeners to this podcast, you have those SEOs that are in the enterprise space, other SEOs that are maybe in Smaller websites. So everyone's going to have familiarity with Screaming Frog from your perspective and your experience of working hands on with client's website. At which point one, do you feel like a website should really consider a cloud based crawler? Whether it's Lumar, any others in the space, like what's kind of the point that you would recommend someone looking into a more sophisticated crawler and also how do you think about that determining of what volume of pages, what frequency of pages should I be doing in my like day to day?
Chris Spann
So I would look at it one of two ways, right? There's going to be one of two things that where I think Screaming Frog you'll start to run into problems with and again I should point out we internally use Screaming Frog. It's a great tool for Lumar is brilliant at great big enormous scale crawls. We aren't great at going let's just crawl these 10 URLs and check whether something's changed. Screaming Frog. You're going to run into one of two problems with it. Either you're going to want to know whether something that you're seeing was like that last week or last month and you might not have the tracking that a lot of the cloud based tools have, or you're going to hit a point where your poor MacBook or your ThinkPad or whatever you've got simply cannot handle the size of your site. That's always going to be the one of the two things that you're running. There's a third one again maybe where again maybe a security team demands something that has, you know, an SLA behind it and all that stuff, an SSO and things like that. But again, normally screen frogs running on your machine, that stuff's kind of mitigated a little bit. But yeah, for me they're one of the two things. It's either you're going to want that backup of data or you're going to just running out of ability to do it with your MacBook. And I'm going to ask you to remind me the second half of that question. I'm sorry.
Tyson Stockton
No, no, no, all good. And the second one would be great. Decided that's what's needed for like the work at hand. What recommendations would you have for frequency and volume of crawls?
Chris Spann
So if you're looking after one website, what I would probably say is a crawl of what's the best way to put this? Because I'm almost going back on what I was saying now and saying everything, but I don't mean everything. I mean, everything that's got some commercial value. So make sure you're crawling your category pages. Make sure you're crawling all that stuff. What you want to do is make sure that, okay, maybe you run your first crawl and it finds some weird infinite pagination issue. Cool, okay, we know about that. We can raise a ticket for that, exclude them, work out what it is that's paginating them and exclude it. We don't need to crawl that every month, every week or whatever. So that's step one. Work out what you don't need. And actually, sometimes the best way to do that is just to do a completely unrestrained crawl and then just go, right, don't need that, cut that out, don't need that, cut that out. And then what we do. So again, for the big E commerce site that we were talking about earlier, who have, I mean, they don't know how many URLs they have. I can tell you their search console has the word billions in it for them. We do things like just scroll the top 50,000 pages, start at the homepage and just go for 50,000 URLs, see what you find. Because in theory, all of your top commercial pages should be within that 50,000. Okay, let's also do a crawl of the top 50,000 pages in GSC. And if you're feeling really spicy, let's compare the two and see what is and isn't in both crawls. So we can do things like that for them. That's a relatively frequent crawl. Obviously, they're talking a very, very large budget. I would say at the absolute minimum, you'd want to be crawling your. And I'm thinking now, if you're working for a very small business, maybe you're the sole SEO, maybe you're the only SEO that's ever worked on the site, or you're the first in house and you've got a very small budget. I would be crawling all of your money pages, the top 10, 20%, the stuff that the business probably relies on. Right, crawl them. If you're using Screaming Frog and you want, crawl them daily, at least weekly. Right, crawl them. Make sure that there's no particular issues there. For businesses of most sizes, I would recommend whatever your definition of a full site crawl is every month or so. And again, that's just to really start picking up issues, scale issues, or if you have real, real budgetary problems, crawl almost at the template level or crawl 10 pages that I know are built on this template. So I know that if these 10 pages have changed, then these other thousand pages have changed because they're all on that one template, then I'm going to crawl 10 representative blog pages. Okay. I'm not going to pick up every broken image and every broken link. But the, that's less of an issue than picking up the fact that the blog is just down or something like that. So we can start to do those things. It sounds overly simple, but whenever I'm building a crawl strategy out for a client, it broadly boils down to we're going to crawl the stuff that matters to you quite a lot at a frequency where put it like this. If you can't survive those pages being down, your top pages being down for a week, crawl more often than a week, I think is the best way to put it. Crawl pages at a frequency that's slightly faster than you can afford for them to be down by.
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. And I think the common denominator and all that is you're having a purpose behind it. It's not just, hey, I want to crawl every single page every single week. Because I heard that was best practice. Like there is uniqueness to different types of websites. Your point on crawling like different templates and having almost like your sample set from each page template, I think it's a great one, especially for the really, really big websites where, yeah, it may just even take too long to go through everything and you could go through a few hundred, few thousand and if you're seeing enough repetition of issues, you know that that's going to stem through that entire page template and that scales.
Chris Spann
As well if you're a multinational business. And again, I work with a client where I've seen this and they go, oh, that's happened on France, has it? Yeah, that will have happened on Italy and Spain as well then. And it has because they're on the same code base. So it's not just necessarily at a category template level. Sometimes it's entire websites because they know that they're the same as each other. Right.
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Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. I believe like coming back around, I think like the big takeaway that I would say with people is, and this could even be done, like if you're using Screaming Frog and it's a smaller website, is be deliberate in how you're doing this. Because at the end of the day the value is when you're taking action to something. And I've seen some of like just phenomenal bodies of work, like some exceptional technical audits done that nothing gets implemented. And so there's no value of that body of work. And I think the same thing goes when we're talking about crawling websites and technical fixes. The key has to be coming back to that change, like what have you done with that information to then make a positive impact and change. And with that piece, so we're going through it, some of the findings are falling into like one of those three buckets that you're kind of defining for the listeners. What do you, like, how do you view next steps? Like are you doing more of a prioritization by impact or effort level? Like how do we move forward from data or information to that action side?
Chris Spann
So I kind of look at it more. Yeah, impact versus effort level. And obviously not my effort level necessarily, but again the effort level of the team who are going to be implementing that change. Again, this is where I came back. Like I was talking about yesterday about the idea of having a tame developer. Like I was very lucky when I was in house. Basically I used to sit at the end of the bank with the product team or with the front end dev team as we called them, as we knew them. And that meant it worked both ways. It meant that I would hear things that was going on and get to say, oh, hey, hang on, that's going to cause me some problems. And vice versa. It meant that because I was visibly there, they could say, and again, like I was talking about yesterday with security, sometimes they'd come to me with, oh, hey, we want to change the way that this page works. And it's a page that's three steps into a customer journey that Google's never going to get anywhere near. But they're coming to me and asking me about it. Great, Brilliant. That's fantastic. That means now that I'm being thought about. So again, you can ask that dev and say, hey, how much work would it be to fix this? If it's not a sirens going off issue, you could say, is this a big thing to do? Or hey, I heard that you're doing some work on the. You're putting in a new A B testing engine or something like that. So while you're working on the head of the page, could you change this for me? Sometimes getting stuff in like that is great. But yeah, it's. For me it's that classic matrix. And for the listener, I'm doing a kind of right angle with my arms where you've got ease of the work at the bottom and financial impact at the top. And you kind of start at the top right and work your way backwards. Right. It's kind of that simple. You do the. No, wait, sorry. You start at the top left, don't you? You get the easy, expensive, the easy stuff that's going to make your money done first. And then you, you kind of. The stuff at the bottom you keep in your back drawer for a day where, you know, where someone just says, I don't know, we've got a new dev on the team who's just looking for some tickets to do what have you got? And then you get that stuff fired off. Or more likely, it probably just sits there forever. But if it's something that you can't put an ROI on, unfortunately a lot of pagespeed stuff goes into there. Like, unless your site is diabolically slow. An issue that I used to run into was I would come up with all these great recommendations around things, things with ads. And I would be told we've got to make the page faster. And I would come up with page speed recommendations. And then someone would say, well, will this change make us six figures a year in, you know, in roi? And I'd say no. And they'd say, well, the ads are staying then, aren't they? And I'd say, yes. Okay. That, that makes sense.
Tyson Stockton
So those are always fun ones to be in. And I feel like with this, so we're going through a prioritization now, unlike the actual piece, what's your recommendation from getting something from identification? And so we've crawled the website, we've crawled directories, we've identified those items that have the high impact potential from. And I would say SEO is like outsider, obviously sometimes SEO is within product board, but from that we have our assessment like, okay, this we believe is not a heavy lift item or the effort in is far less than the potential impact from it. What recommendations would you have for those SEOs out there that maybe they're using Limaar, they're using another crawler, they're finding all the gems along the way, but they're still struggling with getting things implemented and maybe it comes in the form of the tickets that they're doing or whatnot. Like, it's one of the most common frustration points that I hear from SEOs. And what, what hints or what tips could you give them to take something from identification to implementation?
Chris Spann
Cool. Okay, so I'm going to give you the very Luma centric answer and then I'm going to give you a slightly broader answer. So within Luma, we suffer this. So we suffer this as a team. We flag stuff to internal SEO teams and they say, yeah, I know we've not been able to do anything about it. We hear it from non pro serve clients. I've been in this boat as well. Everyone's been in this boat. We know it. So we added a few different things. So we have health scores, which are now, I admit there's a bit of secret sauce in this, but we're SEOs, we love an algorithm, right? Where essentially we can say, well, hey, the last change that you made, indexability score was 80, you made this change, it's now 20. Now I know that's one man's view of an issue, or one man, businesses view an issue, but this has had a material effect on this line, right? And no offense to any CMOs out there, CMOs understand lines, right? And they don't like it when the lines go down. So you can flag that sort of thing. Another thing that we have, and I was a little bit dubious about these when we first started using them until I saw them in action. But we do, broadly speaking, like a, I guess you'd call it like a search funnel. So at the far right, we say we've crawled 100,000 URLs and 95,000 have returned to 200. Great. So we'll take that part of 95,000 and then of those 80,000 were indexable. Okay, cool. And then you start going down, but then you get to a point you go, well, actually the big issue is of that 80,000, 70,000 were duplicate pages. And so you can see a sudden drop off in the number of pages and it's really, really stark. So when A and again, CMOs like headlines like we've made changes to 100,000 pages on the website and you can say, yeah, cool, but Google's not seeing 95,000 of them or something like that. Right? So that's Luma stuff. We use those reports a lot internally and they're really useful for demonstrating to dev teams that butterfly flapping its wings. Right. Small change over here scales out across a hundred thousand million URL website cause a problem. Another thing that you can do, and this is actually where we as SEOs are really similar to security team, is that we live in the world of as long as we're doing a good job, you don't notice us. Right? You only notice the SEO team when something's gone wrong. You only notice the security team when something's gone wrong. So in your ticket it is sometimes worth flagging what could happen if we don't do this change? Right, we need to turn off this JavaScript redirect that's on an AB test that's redirecting everybody to a noindex homepage because eventually Google is going to noindex the homepage, right? Be. What's the best word I'm after? Be slightly not dramatic. Don't be afraid to kind of say, look, there are potential real big issues on this. And be honest if there are, you know, because people will check these things. But again, demonstrate what could happen if this isn't fixed, I think is the story, because that's a good way of scaring people. It's always difficult to put an ROI on things and things like that. But you know, even the most line happy of a product manager or whatever will understand. If the homepage doesn't rank, we're in trouble. Right. So I would say again, yeah, just build out that story in your head. You know, what could happen? This is the problem. You know what could happen if that tag stays on that page? Nobody else does. It's a weird Google specific tag that's only on the page because you asked for the ability to put it on there in the first place. And then someone thought, oh, we don't want Google to see this so we'll turn it on, explain what could happen. Ideally, have a little Google round and try and find a case study. Again, there's plenty of case studies from different things. I'm going to bring them up again. The Search Pilot blog is a fantastic repository of what happens if we do X or Y strange thing to a site, have a Google round. Every website that has ever made a mistake, some smug SEO somewhere has noticed it and written 2,000 words about it. Right. Find that blog post, put it in and say, look, this is what we're doing and look what happened to this site.
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. And I think just two key kind of takeaways from that is, and I'm just kind of doubling down here is being specific. And I think sometimes we get used to talking to other SEOs and it'll be like, oh, yeah, this is a problem. And we just know it's a problem, but spell it out. Be specific in those tickets of like, what is the worst case? Like, what is the worst case? What is the best case on these? And I think that tip of being specific, not making the assumption that they're going to recognize that it's as significant as maybe it is you, if it's obvious. But be specific, don't leave it up to subjectivity and the piece too. On like the health scores, I think that it ties into like an element around, like a narrative around it and also like a visualization. So it's like just in your description, I caught that you were, you were naturally picking up on these different languages of the different groups and you're talking to a cmo. It's going to be a totally different language, a totally different conversation than a CTO or even someone on the product. Org. So using that and having some sort of visual, some elements, and even better if you can start to condition them when things aren't necessarily bad. So then when it does drop down, it's like, oh, yeah, I've seen this before and I like seeing that it's green, not red. Yeah. But I think those are like, they probably sound like little things, but I find that a lot of these little things are really what makes a difference when you're actually getting things picked up, brought into like different sprints or just kind of feeling like you're on the sidelines, frustrated because none of your tickets are getting picked up. And a lot of it comes down to just the specifics and the details and the number of tickets that don't get picked up just because they're ambiguous or they're not. Well, Defined is a lot. And that's like one of the easiest things that I think we can prevent doing is give more information than too little information.
Chris Spann
And then I think another thing, we talk about this stuff, I think as SEOs, we sometimes think like, almost like, and I'm not saying this is what you're saying, but we were all guilty of it, I think is like, how can I almost trick dev teams into doing my tickets over somebody else's, right? And it doesn't. Again, like I was talking about with the security teams, if they implement a change for you and it's done, gangbusters for your SEO, send them a screenshot of Search Console or ga and say, hey, thanks so much for that work. I know it was really last minute, I know it was whatever, but look what it's done. Because ultimately that developer, they've probably got a bonus that relies on the company doing well, right? Or shares or something like that. Devs just, they want to know they've done a good job. They want to know they've built a good thing. Good devs, like, knowing they've built cool stuff that works well, right? That's done exactly what they want it to. So go in and say, like, hey, that change you made the other day, we're already seeing like 20% increase in traffic. And it sounds dumb, but if people like you, they're more likely to help you out with things and then you can prove, right, that I've got an eye for noticing things that, you know, I spotted this, we did it, and look, it made a difference. So let's do more of my tickets, right? Because I must be good at finding these things.
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. It's like you're building the credibility. But then also similar to the conversation yesterday where you were, you know, talking about the security teams and typically team that doesn't get very much awareness or like recognition from it. Similar. And it's a, I think more of a human aspect. Similarly, in this case, if someone's spending two weeks working on something, they want to know that there was an impact to it. Just like we want to know that the work and the time that we do is having an impact. And so remembering to come back and kind of close that feedback loop and also have a clear definition of success. Like, we want to do this and this is what we want to see at the income. Like, I found developers too. It's difficult when some of the SEO tickets may take a long time to have that, you know, impact on traffic or something else. So if you can add some Sort of success criteria that's more of a leading KPI than a lagging, then they can at least know, cool, yeah, I did it. We're seeing what it needed to see. Yep, it's going to lead the traffic and then to your point, also making sure you go back to them and say, hey, that was awesome. We did this, we achieved this together. But it's so much of that like snowball effect of building the credibility, building the relationship and then you know, just little by little it getting easier and easier each time.
Chris Spann
Yeah. When I was say, when I joined the SEO team when I was in house, we had a reputation for being link building cowboys, you know what I mean? And then I don't want to say single handed there were other people, but I was certainly very responsible, I think for raising SEO's reputation throughout the business as again as there were people within the SEO team who understood how to build a website. And I won't lie, I was there for nearly 15 years and it was like crawling across glass at times trying to do it. But we got there and I say we got to the point where if anything, the dev teams were coming to me with too much that didn't have anything to do with SEO. But it now means that I'm in this nice position where I speak enough marketing to explain to the dev teams what marketing want and I speak enough dev to explain to the marketing teams. Well, no, I know this sounds simple, but it's actually not. This will take six weeks or you know, it's not really possible or whatever. And being able to do the two as you're saying before, I'm used to having to kind of change my language based on who I'm speaking. And I think the more you do that, you need to learn what means money to different people. CTOs will speak in megabytes and seconds and things like that. Devs, I'll say a lot of devs just want to build something cool and sometimes devs just want to show you how the thing they built is cool. You know what I mean? Oh, here's this really smart way I worked out how we can do this. Or you know, here's how I rebuilt the redirect engine so it doesn't take two seconds to redirect a page anymore. Sometimes I just want to show you stuff I'm bad for again. The listeners can't see there's an arcade cabinet behind me that I've built myself. Right. And my wife is sick of being taken out to be shown the arcade cabinet. People who make things, they just want us talk about it sometimes. So just listen.
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. It's such a good takeaway and it's like it's just a common theme across so many parts of our business. But with that. That wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Chris Spann, the senior Technical SEO at Lumar, for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Chris, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes or you can contact him on Twitter, where his handle isit or visit his website at chris-span S P A.
Chris Spann
N N.co.uk okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O and a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs, because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.com AWT that's Ahrefs a H R E F S. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschapp B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week, so hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.
Tyson Stockton
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Voices of Search Podcast: Actionable And Effective Technical SEO Insights
Episode Release Date: January 7, 2025
Host: Tyson Stockton
Guest: Chris Spann, Senior Technical SEO at Lumar
In this episode of the Voices of Search podcast, host Tyson Stockton engages in an insightful conversation with Chris Spann, the Senior Technical SEO at Lumar, a prominent large-scale crawler, technical SEO, and accessibility platform. Building upon their previous discussion on rising SEO security awareness, Tyson and Chris delve into actionable and effective technical SEO insights, offering listeners practical strategies to optimize their SEO practices.
Chris Spann emphasizes the importance of actionable insights in technical SEO. Rather than generating overwhelming amounts of data, actionable insights are those that can be directly used to implement meaningful changes. "It's about insights that you can use to actually get stuff done or get stuff fixed," Chris explains (03:27). This approach ensures that SEO efforts lead to tangible improvements rather than getting lost in endless reports.
A significant portion of the discussion centers around the strategy of crawling websites effectively. Chris challenges the common misconception that SEOs need to crawl every single page of a website. "Nobody, nobody wants everything," he states (06:48). Instead, he advocates for a more selective approach, focusing on pages that hold commercial value. This means prioritizing category pages and other high-impact sections that drive traffic and conversions.
Chris outlines scenarios where cloud-based crawlers, like Lumar, are preferable over local tools such as Screaming Frog:
Notable Quote:
"Screaming Frog is great, but for enormous scale crawls, Lumar is brilliant because you're not running into limitations with your local machine." — Chris Spann (08:15)
Determining the right frequency and volume for crawls depends on the website's size and the resources available. Chris suggests:
Principle to Follow:
Crawl at a frequency slightly faster than the rate at which you can afford pages to be down or issues to arise.
Once issues are identified through crawls, prioritizing them effectively is crucial. Chris introduces the Impact vs. Effort Matrix as a method to categorize tasks:
Notable Quote:
"Your priority should be items that are easy to implement but have a high financial impact. Those are the ones that get done first." — Chris Spann (16:37)
A recurring challenge for SEOs is getting their recommendations implemented by development teams. Chris offers several strategies to overcome this:
Notable Quote:
"Send them a screenshot of Search Console or GA and say, 'Hey, thanks so much for that work. Look what it's done.'" — Chris Spann (26:33)
Both Tyson and Chris underscore the importance of action and follow-through in technical SEO. It's not enough to identify issues; implementing solutions and maintaining clear communication with relevant teams are essential for driving SEO success. Chris highlights the evolution of his role in his previous company, transitioning from being seen merely as a link-building specialist to a pivotal part of the technical and strategic SEO operations.
Final Takeaway:
The effectiveness of technical SEO lies in the ability to translate data into actionable changes, prioritize tasks based on impact, and foster strong collaborative relationships with development teams.
Chris Spann:
Tyson Stockton:
This episode of the Voices of Search podcast provides a comprehensive exploration of actionable technical SEO insights. By focusing on strategic crawling, prioritizing issues effectively, and fostering strong communication with development teams, SEOs can significantly enhance their website’s search performance. Tyson Stockton and Chris Spann offer valuable perspectives that are both practical and immediately implementable, making this episode a must-listen for SEO professionals aiming to optimize their technical strategies.
For more insights and detailed discussions, visit voicesofsearch.com and subscribe to their podcast for daily SEO and content marketing wisdom.