This is the presentation that I gave on Technical SEO Metrics that matter at SMX West 2013. The focus was on 6 areas of low hanging fruit to address when starting any SEO project. Additionally, I shared some results from a survey we did analyzing SEO impact with real users.

1. Eli Schwartz
Online Marketing Manager
SurveyMonkey
The Technical SEO Metrics You Should
Care About
SMX West 2013

2. Poll: Have you woken up to or inherited this?
EMD, DMCA, Top
Heavy, Venice,
Freshness

3. Overview
• Significant impacts from basic technical SEO changes:
URL Issues
Robots.txt
Javascript and CSS links
404 pages
Redirects
Canonicals
• User benefit to technical changes

4. Look for URL Issues
• Check for http:// vs https://
• www vs non-www
• Index page does not redirect to the root
• Subdomain duplication
www.wufoo.com Username.wufoo.com

5. Check Robots.txt
www.irs.gov/robots.txt
Could this be
important?

6. Browse without Javascript and CSS
Disable Javascript
Afterwards Disable CSS
Links being hidden by CSS might suddenly appear
Plugin: http://bit.ly/devel-plugin

7. Crawl entire domain with Screaming Frog
A Screaming Frog crawl can help you discover 404 pages
Optimum
settings
http://bit.ly/scfrog

8. Download landing pages from GA
Change to 25
URL will now show:
Change to 2500

9. Discover new 404 pages
Upload the CSV that you downloaded from GA to
Screaming Frog with the list option
Discover pages that had received traffic but
now 404

10. Redirect Path Plugin – Header responses
Visually shows server header response as well as redirect path
http://bit.ly/ayima

11. Screaming Frog shows all redirects
Sort Screaming Frog crawl by status code to find 302’s and 301’s
Update 302 redirects to 301’s; use direct links when possible for internal links that 301

12. Tamper for Firefox finds redirect path
http://bit.ly/Tamper-Tool

13. Discover canonicals with Screaming Frog
Canonical column will contain a URL if a canonical exists

14. Find incorrect canonicals in Excel
Export Screaming Frog crawl into Excel
Excel Formula: IF(A1=B1,TRUE,FALSE)

15. See results in Google Webmaster Tools
Are
impressions
trending
higher?

16. Google’s Webmaster Technical Guidelines
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

17. User impact from technical changes
• Random selection from
general US population
• Random assignment into 1
of 2 surveys with 16
questions
• Survey sent to 3,000 people
• Survey was open for 5 days
• 615 people participated
• Comparison of means over a
variety of indicators
http://bit.ly/sma-research

18. What happens when a search user does not find what they
expected on the page?
60% of
users
bounce

19. Other interesting survey results
Why would users block a
User trust of guest posts site from Google results?
Top
22% Heavy
decrease
in trust for Panda
a guest
post
t(237,345)=-9.47,p < .001

20. Takeaways and homework
• Always focus on the user, but look out for:
• Missing pages
• Redirects
• Broken canonicals
• Download: Screaming Frog, Tamper for
Firefox, Ayima Redirect plugin, any
developer plugin that controls CSS and
Javascript
• Be a hero

21. Thank you!
Eli Schwartz, SurveyMonkey
eli@surveymonkey.com
@5le @surveymonkey
Download slides: http://bit.ly/SEO-Tech