Why Modern SEO Requires Technical Experience

A CMS may make the tech­ni­cal side of SEO eas­i­er to under­stand, but the notion that if you use a mod­ern CMS your tech­ni­cal SEO is auto­mat­i­cal­ly ticked off and you need not think about it is a dan­ger­ous one, and as a result, lots of busi­ness­es are los­ing lots of...

Kirsty Hulse By Kirsty Hulse from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Ear­li­er this morn­ing, I saw Andrew Isidoro tweet an arti­cle on the Entre­pre­neur called “Why Mod­ern SEO Requires Almost No Tech­ni­cal Exper­tise”. The essence of the arti­cle is that:

The hap­pi­er your users are when they vis­it your site, the high­er you’re going to rank.

Mod­ern SEO real­ly is that sim­ple.

So focus on your users, cre­ate great con­tent, think about UX, get oth­ers to like your site and as a result get links and social engage­ment, and if you’re a local busi­ness, get your list­ings in order, too.

This is not entire­ly unrea­son­able and there is some truth in it. Can you do an aver­age job of your SEO with­out think­ing (or pay­ing some­one to think) about the com­plex tech­ni­cal­i­ties of index­ing? Maybe, yeah.

Will you cap­ture all oppor­tu­ni­ties, glob­al­ly, in the right way, serv­ing the right con­tent with­out it? Absolute­ly not.

IMO the main prob­lem with this arti­cle is that it makes a fun­da­men­tal mis­take in say­ing:

most mod­ern con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems (CMS) have been cre­at­ed or mod­i­fied with the inten­tion to stream­line the SEO process. Most impor­tant back­end con­fig­u­ra­tions are auto­mat­ic, and most oth­er code-spe­cif­ic entries are pre­sent­ed in an inter­face that’s easy to under­stand and even eas­i­er to update. As long as you’re fol­low­ing a mod­ern sys­tem of web devel­op­ment, the tech­ni­cal side of SEO is eas­i­er to under­stand than ever before.

Yes, a CMS may make the tech­ni­cal side of SEO eas­i­er to under­stand, but the notion that if you use a mod­ern CMS your tech­ni­cal SEO is auto­mat­i­cal­ly ticked off and you need not think about it is a dan­ger­ous one, and as a result, lots of busi­ness­es are los­ing lots of mon­ey. I recent­ly worked with a big finance firm where the CMS was auto gen­er­at­ing mul­ti­ple node URLs, so for every instance of a URL there were index­able ver­sions of that page ver­sion with any num­ber of /node.

Let’s put Word­Press aside for a sec­ond and think about Joom­la, which pow­ers mil­lions of web­sites and is real­ly, real­ly good at cre­at­ing dupli­cate URLs (with Joom­la instal­la­tions, there is no auto­mat­ic redi­rect involv­ing www and non-www urls) and most of us will be famil­iar with the /index.php errors that are a com­mon prob­lem with CMS sys­tems. Or Dru­pal, with a tax­on­o­my mod­ule that can cre­ate mul­ti­ple dupli­cate URLs.

These are just the basics.

This is ignor­ing the com­plex­i­ty and impor­tance of site speed (which the author con­cedes is a part where tech­ni­cal exper­tise is required), or how to han­dle inter­na­tion­al sites, sta­tus codes, pag­i­na­tion, parameters…there’s a lot of room for error here.

Also split­ting out tech­ni­cal and con­tent as dif­fer­ent strate­gies is also a mis­take, if you have a con­tent strat­e­gy that results in a blog with mul­ti­ple cat­e­gories, you are as a result cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple tax­onomies, which, in a lot of CMS’ cre­ates tech­ni­cal issues. The two are linked.

In the words of Jono Alder­son:

Tech­ni­cal SEO is more impor­tant than ever. If you’re remote­ly inter­est­ed in your web­site dri­ving valu­able out­comes (vis­its, con­ver­sions, ad clicks, com­ments,  sales), then you need to con­sid­er every aspect of how search engines inter­act with your web­site — how it finds and con­sumes your con­tent, the way it moves between your pages, and how it responds to the sign­posts you pro­vide it with. Hav­ing a decent CMS can’t do this for you — your site, brand, needs and con­tent are unique, and need a ‘made to fit’ opti­mi­sa­tion strat­e­gy.

Most CMS plat­forms do a mediocre job at best — even Word­Press, run­ning pop­u­lar plu­g­ins like Yoast SEO, only get it ‘most­ly right’; and actu­al­ly do an even worse job with more com­plex sce­nar­ios, like han­dling inter­na­tion­al con­tent. There are, uni­ver­sal­ly, huge oppor­tu­ni­ties to increase per­for­mance on the small­est blogs to the biggest ecom­merce sites, which require users and man­agers to under­stand and con­sid­er the tech­ni­cal archi­tec­ture . It’s naïve to ignore or pre­tend that the sys­tems and plat­forms which form the back­bone of your con­tent, brand and user expe­ri­ence will ‘look after them­selves’, and that it’s ok to not think about it.

So whilst CMSare help­ful and con­tent and users are impor­tant, mod­ern SEO requires tech­ni­cal exper­tise more than ever.

Kirsty Hulse

Written by Kirsty Hulse

Head of SEO Best Practice, Linkdex

Kirsty has been working in SEO since 2009, defining search strategies for some of the world's largest brands. She is a regular speaker at industry events and a blogger for industry publications.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

Discover why brands and agencies choose Linkdex

  • Get started fast with easy onboarding & training
  • Import and connect data from other platforms
  • Scale with your business, websites and markets
  • Up-skill teams with training & accreditation
  • Build workflows with tasks, reporting and alerts

Get a free induction and experience of Linkdex.

Just fill out this form, and one of our team members will get in touch to arrange your own, personalised demo.