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 CMS’ are help­ful and con­tent and users are impor­tant, mod­ern SEO requires tech­ni­cal exper­tise more than ever.