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Posted by randfish
There's no doubt that quite a bit has changed about SEO, and that the field is far more integrated with other aspects of online marketing than it once was. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand pushes back against the idea that effective modern SEO doesn't require any technical expertise, outlining a fantastic list of technical elements that today's SEOs need to know about in order to be truly effective.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm going to do something unusual. I don't usually point out these inconsistencies or sort of take issue with other folks' content on the web, because I generally find that that's not all that valuable and useful. But I'm going to make an exception here.
There is an article by Jason DeMers, who I think might actually be here in Seattle -- maybe he and I can hang out at some point -- called "Why Modern SEO Requires Almost No Technical Expertise." It was an article that got a shocking amount of traction and attention. On Facebook, it has thousands of shares. On LinkedIn, it did really well. On Twitter, it got a bunch of attention.
Some folks in the SEO world have already pointed out some issues around this. But because of the increasing popularity of this article, and because I think there's, like, this hopefulness from worlds outside of kind of the hardcore SEO world that are looking to this piece and going, "Look, this is great. We don't have to be technical. We don't have to worry about technical things in order to do SEO."
Look, I completely get the appeal of that. I did want to point out some of the reasons why this is not so accurate. At the same time, I don't want to rain on Jason, because I think that it's very possible he's writing an article for Entrepreneur, maybe he has sort of a commitment to them. Maybe he had no idea that this article was going to spark so much attention and investment. He does make some good points. I think it's just really the title and then some of the messages inside there that I take strong issue with, and so I wanted to bring those up.
First off, some of the good points he did bring up.
One, he wisely says, "You don't need to know how to code or to write and read algorithms in order to do SEO." I totally agree with that. If today you're looking at SEO and you're thinking, "Well, am I going to get more into this subject? Am I going to try investing in SEO? But I don't even know HTML and CSS yet."
Those are good skills to have, and they will help you in SEO, but you don't need them. Jason's totally right. You don't have to have them, and you can learn and pick up some of these things, and do searches, watch some Whiteboard Fridays, check out some guides, and pick up a lot of that stuff later on as you need it in your career. SEO doesn't have that hard requirement.
And secondly, he makes an intelligent point that we've made many times here at Moz, which is that, broadly speaking, a better user experience is well correlated with better rankings.
You make a great website that delivers great user experience, that provides the answers to searchers' questions and gives them extraordinarily good content, way better than what's out there already in the search results, generally speaking you're going to see happy searchers, and that's going to lead to higher rankings.
But not entirely. There are a lot of other elements that go in here. So I'll bring up some frustrating points around the piece as well.
First off, there's no acknowledgment -- and I find this a little disturbing -- that the ability to read and write code, or even HTML and CSS, which I think are the basic place to start, is helpful or can take your SEO efforts to the next level. I think both of those things are true.
So being able to look at a web page, view source on it, or pull up Firebug in Firefox or something and diagnose what's going on and then go, "Oh, that's why Google is not able to see this content. That's why we're not ranking for this keyword or term, or why even when I enter this exact sentence in quotes into Google, which is on our page, this is why it's not bringing it up. It's because it's loading it after the page from a remote file that Google can't access." These are technical things, and being able to see how that code is built, how it's structured, and what's going on there, very, very helpful.
Some coding knowledge also can take your SEO efforts even further. I mean, so many times, SEOs are stymied by the conversations that we have with our programmers and our developers and the technical staff on our teams. When we can have those conversations intelligently, because at least we understand the principles of how an if-then statement works, or what software engineering best practices are being used, or they can upload something into a GitHub repository, and we can take a look at it there, that kind of stuff is really helpful.
Secondly, I don't like that the article overly reduces all of this information that we have about what we've learned about Google. So he mentions two sources. One is things that Google tells us, and others are SEO experiments. I think both of those are true. Although I'd add that there's sort of a sixth sense of knowledge that we gain over time from looking at many, many search results and kind of having this feel for why things rank, and what might be wrong with a site, and getting really good at that using tools and data as well. There are people who can look at Open Site Explorer and then go, "Aha, I bet this is going to happen." They can look, and 90% of the time they're right.
So he boils this down to, one, write quality content, and two, reduce your bounce rate. Neither of those things are wrong. You should write quality content, although I'd argue there are lots of other forms of quality content that aren't necessarily written -- video, images and graphics, podcasts, lots of other stuff.
And secondly, that just doing those two things is not always enough. So you can see, like many, many folks look and go, "I have quality content. It has a low bounce rate. How come I don't rank better?" Well, your competitors, they're also going to have quality content with a low bounce rate. That's not a very high bar.
Also, frustratingly, this really gets in my craw. I don't think "write quality content" means anything. You tell me. When you hear that, to me that is a totally non-actionable, non-useful phrase that's a piece of advice that is so generic as to be discardable. So I really wish that there was more substance behind that.
The article also makes, in my opinion, the totally inaccurate claim that modern SEO really is reduced to "the happier your users are when they visit your site, the higher you're going to rank."
Wow. Okay. Again, I think broadly these things are correlated. User happiness and rank is broadly correlated, but it's not a one to one. This is not like a, "Oh, well, that's a 1.0 correlation."
I would guess that the correlation is probably closer to like the page authority range. I bet it's like 0.35 or something correlation. If you were to actually measure this broadly across the web and say like, "Hey, were you happier with result one, two, three, four, or five," the ordering would not be perfect at all. It probably wouldn't even be close.
There's a ton of reasons why sometimes someone who ranks on Page 2 or Page 3 or doesn't rank at all for a query is doing a better piece of content than the person who does rank well or ranks on Page 1, Position 1.
Then the article suggests five and sort of a half steps to successful modern SEO, which I think is a really incomplete list. So Jason gives offering a;
The thing is there's nothing actually wrong with any of these. They're all, generally speaking, correct, either directly or indirectly related to SEO. The one about local relevance, I have some issue with, because he doesn't note that there's a separate algorithm for sort of how local SEO is done and how Google ranks local sites in maps and in their local search results. Also not noted is that rising in social popularity won't necessarily directly help your SEO, although it can have indirect and positive benefits.
I feel like this list is super incomplete. Okay, I brainstormed just off the top of my head in the 10 minutes before we filmed this video a list. The list was so long that, as you can see, I filled up the whole whiteboard and then didn't have any more room. I'm not going to bother to erase and go try and be absolutely complete.
But there's a huge, huge number of things that are important, critically important for technical SEO. If you don't know how to do these things, you are sunk in many cases. You can't be an effective SEO analyst, or consultant, or in-house team member, because you simply can't diagnose the potential problems, rectify those potential problems, identify strategies that your competitors are using, be able to diagnose a traffic gain or loss. You have to have these skills in order to do that.
I'll run through these quickly, but really the idea is just that this list is so huge and so long that I think it's very, very, very wrong to say technical SEO is behind us. I almost feel like the opposite is true.
We have to be able to understand things like;
Downtime procedures. So there's specifically a... I can't even remember. It's a 5xx code that you can use. Maybe it was a 503 or something that you can use that's like, "Revisit later. We're having some downtime right now." Google urges you to use that specific code rather than using a 404, which tells them, "This page is now an error."
Disney had that problem a while ago, if you guys remember, where they 404ed all their pages during an hour of downtime, and then their homepage, when you searched for Disney World, was, like, "Not found." Oh, jeez, Disney World, not so good.
Then there are tons of parameters, like in URL and in anchor, and da, da, da, da. In anchor doesn't work anymore, never mind about that one.
I have to go faster, because we're just going to run out of these. Like, come on. Interpreting and leveraging data in Google Search Console. If you don't know how to use that, Google could be telling you, you have all sorts of errors, and you don't know what they are.
Okay, I'm going to take a deep breath and relax. I don't know Jason's intention, and in fact, if he were in this room, he'd be like, "No, I totally agree with all those things. I wrote the article in a rush. I had no idea it was going to be big. I was just trying to make the broader points around you don't have to be a coder in order to do SEO." That's completely fine.
So I'm not going to try and rain criticism down on him. But I think if you're reading that article, or you're seeing it in your feed, or your clients are, or your boss is, or other folks are in your world, maybe you can point them to this Whiteboard Friday and let them know, no, that's not quite right. There's a ton of technical SEO that is required in 2015 and will be for years to come, I think, that SEOs have to have in order to be effective at their jobs.
All right, everyone. Look forward to some great comments, and we'll see you again next time for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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