THE SEO PROJECT

Every SEO project has two parts: the SEO platform and SEO processes. In this chapter, we will cover in detail the SEO project including the platform, the importance of your site speed, URLs, targeting, and targeted pages.
Establishing the SEO platform is mostly, but not entirely, a technical task 안전한 놀이터. It focuses on optimizing the technical infrastructure and application so that it allows for scalable SEO instead of hindering it. Although you can always improve the platform, at some point it will be good enough to enable sustainable traffic growth via search. Before we get into the details, it’s important to remember:

·everything accessible pre-login is within SEO scope
·everything exclusively accessible behind a login is not within SEO scope

And, for a healthy SEO platform you will need:

·targeted pages
·distribution (sitemap.xml)
·a startpage

Everything else is “deadweight” and should either not exist or not be indexed.

User Experience
Remember my favorite rules from chapter three? Always start with the user! If your users come to your site via search but don’t use your site and bounce back immediately, you a) probably did not create much value for your users, b) did not create any value for your business, and c) will not be able to sustain this traffic for very long.
User Experience is not SEO. It’s a massive discipline with lots of different goals and techniques, and it’s still evolving. From a pure SEO perspective, you should always aim that your user experience is better, or at least on par, with that of the competition. As you probably don’t have the usage metrics of their websites, it’s best to look at their site. Ask yourself what they are doing better, assess if it would make sense on your site, then copy and iterate on it. That is the way the internet works.

A Red Line
A site with a bounce rate (where users are coming from search and are only viewing one page in one session) of more than 70% will not survive. That is the red line. If you have a bounce rate of 70% or above, do not waste time on SEO. Focus on fixing your site and your value proposition first.
That is the red line because it means that fewer than 30% of your users view more than one page. It means seven out of every ten visitors do absolutely nothing, leaving immediately and generally go straight back to Google and on to your competitors. But even then people say “What if they bounce forward or do nothing? Aren’t only the bounces back to Google harmful?” My answer is, “Yes, you are right. If the user stays on your site or bounces forward to another site, this is not a negative SEO vote ? but it still means your site sucks!” If you have a bounce rate of more than 70% in any vertical, then it’s not the user, it’s not the vertical, it’s you. If you insist that you only have such a high bounce rate because the “goal of the user was fulfilled,” then I say you must work on your value proposition. Nevertheless, I have never seen a website that couldn’t lower its bounce rate below the red line with some simple user experience improvements.
In general, the UX of your site should get better and not worse. Better means:

·a gradual decrease in bounce rate
·a gradual increase in time on site
·a gradual increase in average pageviews

Note: These are metrics that you can easily measure and act upon. That’s why they are important. These are not the metrics that Google uses. They have their own way of collecting UX data, data that we do not have. Google does not use Google Analytics to measure the UX values on your site. So no, it does not help to “tweak” GA to show better usage values, that is just lying to yourself, and lying to yourself doesn’t work in the long term.
To achieve better UX values over time, you need to deliver direct feedback to the people that work with your site (your marketing, development and content teams). Give those people access to your metrics and make it part of their job description to watch, respond and improve these valuable numbers. Unfortunately, I often see that it’s the other way round. Usage metrics get gradually worse with every release or new feature. You must always strive and fight to get better UX, and the people that work with the site need to know and care about THEIR site’s usage metrics.
So, what the most important aspect of the user experience? Quite often it’s speed.

Speed

Speed is something we must deliver. Speed is part of UX and brand experience and a crucial topic in its own right. Or from a Google point of view: Google does not like to send useres to slow pages, as the users would use Google less. And Google does not like that. Google can measure speed both directly and via the user experience feedback loop. Fast websites perform better in search. They have better UX and deliver a better brand experience. Slow websites are synonymous with having a “clunky, old, outdated” brand and will always underperform. So, what exactly is defined as “fast”? Here is what you should be aiming for on desktop and mobile sites (both HTTP and HTTPS):

·first byte: < 200ms
·start render: < 700ms
·render above the fold: < 1000ms

The first byte is the time it takes for your server to return something to the user’s browser for the first time. The start render is the moment when the browser first starts to render something visible to the user, so they know something is happening. The render above the fold is when the visible content – without scrolling in the browser – has been correctly rendered.
You will have a hard time to get the first byte of < 200ms on mobile, but you should still achieve the one second above the fold as there is much less fold. The most important metrics are the “start render” and “render above the fold” times. However, the start render can be misleading because the first visible content is not necessarily useful to the user (for example, it may just be a background color).
There is an acceptable zone if these web performance values are doubled. It’s not fast, it’s not slow, it’s OK-ish, but you should and could do better.
So, what are “OK-ish” speed metrics?

·first byte: < 400ms
·start render: < 1.4 sec
·render above the fold: < 2000ms

Anything above these values is “kaput” – a great German word meaning completely and utterly broken. Your site will never achieve sustainable, growing traffic.
So, your goal from an SEO perspective and a UX perspective is to have a fast site, not an OK-ish one. If you have a slow website (anything above the acceptable values), then stop everything and fix your site, because your site is broken. In this case there just is no more important business decision you can make right now than to make your site fast.

So how can you test the speed of your site?

www.webpagetest.org is a Google supported project. Just enter your page URLs (obviously not only the startpage but all kinds of pages on your site), choose a location and a browser and start testing. Note that “render above the fold” is basically the same as “Page Speed Index” on webpagetest.org. Other very important webperformance tools are

·Google Page Speed Insights
·Google Lighthouse

as there is not one single tool, not one single metric that can capture the whole role of webperformance for user experience.
Basically Google Page Speed Insights tells you how many webperformance best practices are in place on the webpages you test, and if there is enough data: how fast users experience your webpages. Google Lighthouse – included in the Developer Tools of every Google Chrome browser – calculate metrics how fast mobile users can view and interact with your website.