SEO Site Planning
Picking the right technology for your upcoming site is hugely important, and the right choices can avoid both feeling stuck and a tonne of extra work to make your website SEO friendly
What is SEO site planning and what is involved?
Choosing the right technology and services for your website is ultimately a balancing act. You’re required to gather requirements from stakeholders across the business, all of which are able to tell you what they want and how they see it working. SEO site planning is where I can help answer what should be considered for search engines.
Consultation
Crawling at an hourly, daily or weekly cadence is setup and run so to find and aggregate issues on the site.
SERP Standards
As a reference for all engineering teams I support I share my SERP Standards toolkit – which outlines universal best practices mapped to common features. The toolkit includes recommendations for generators, linting and validating tools and any relevant documentation coming from the major search engines.
Problem statements & acceptance criteria
Having held two roles in Product teams I appreciate the value of a clear and comprehensive set of problem statements and acceptance criteria! As I see it, being detail orientated when scribing out the problems you want to solve and what success looks like, avoids a lot of tears when the site is live.
Technology review and recommendations
Whilst modern search engines are reasonably good at parsing most popular website frameworks, and conversely they tend to make accommodations to be more SEO friendly – it remains that there are still friction-points and gotchas to be conscious of. For example, does shiny framework A require 3 weeks of work to build a non-native Server Side Rendering system which would be not an issue if you went for framework B?
Future proofing quiz
Does your new website need to support other languages or countries? No? What about if all goes well and you hit this years targets? Will different markets be a consideration? If yes, does that mean that whilst platform A has the cool button that makes the site spin and slide in, the better long-term platform is B? This is a great point to discuss future plans and I can help with laying out what needs to be considered and why.
How the Process Works
Step 1
Kick-off orienteering
I start most site planning projects getting up to speed with the intentions behind the project, noting down what’s the current scope and where possible the future subsequent projects which are expected once live.
Step 2
Problem statements, acceptance criteria and toolkits
Once I have a view of what is the scope of work for the project I can begin helping. I then move into being as exhaustive as is possible listing our best practices and SEO considerations as part of all requirements gathering work. Whilst I can make direct suggestions where necessary, my preference is to be clear about the expected inputs and outputs, as this is considerate of the engineers who want to unpick and solve business problems.
Step 3
Feedback and Quality Assurance
Assuming a typical process of content goes to designers, who then pass it to engineering, who then have it reviewed and when bug free sent live – I can help at almost every step. I can help with reviewing suggested features and layouts with the design team, adding requirements to the engineers tickets as they move from design to engineering and lastly quality assure the finished project before it is deemed fit to send live.
FAQ's
Why are you so much cheaper than the bigger tools?
Can I not do this for myself using screaming frog?
My site has to be crawled from a certain market, can you do that?
Why do I need site monitoring?