The Most Important Elements of Technical SEO For Big Companies

Collaborating with large organizations to enhance their technical search engine optimization (SEO) practices represents an optimal and rewarding opportunity to refine one's technical expertise.

Typically, such endeavors involve navigating complex systems and infrastructures, contending with various legacy challenges, and engaging with multiple teams that oversee distinct components of the website.

This scenario necessitates collaboration across numerous departments and the articulation of compelling business cases, including justifications for changes, to a diverse array of stakeholders.

To effectively manage this process, one must possess a robust understanding of technical SEO while also demonstrating the ability to engage diverse individuals and teams in recognizing the significance of specific issues and fostering their investment in resolving them.

Balancing intricate technical challenges while maintaining effective communication with various stakeholders—ranging from executive leadership to brand, product, and engineering teams—can indeed be a daunting task.

Nevertheless, this experience is invaluable as it cultivates essential technical SEO skills beyond basic checklists and established best practices. Such experiences prove beneficial when applied to standard technical projects.

Communication Problems at Large Scale

Enterprise brands typically employ extensive teams, necessitating coordination and collaboration across various departments to achieve objectives.

Certain organizations function with these teams operating cohesively, characterized by established overlaps and fluid communication channels. In contrast, others may segregate their teams into silos, dividing responsibilities by websites or geographic regions. This structural division can complicate the demonstration of results in conventional terms and hinder the process of garnering support for technical issues affecting the entire website.

Each department within a company tends to prioritize its own objectives and often maintains distinct key performance indicators (KPIs). While marketing teams may be fragmented, engineering resources generally remain centralized within the organization, leading to competition among different marketing teams, brands, and product lines.

Consequently, it is essential not only to ensure that your primary contact recognizes the significance of an issue but also to effectively convey to broader teams how addressing this matter aligns with their interests. Achieving this requires proficient multi-departmental reporting.

This approach does not entail creating a singular comprehensive report for all departments; rather, it involves leveraging available data to generate multiple streamlined reports that are clear and easily understandable. These reports should specifically address the metrics relevant to each stakeholder group, thereby influencing their success. Tools such as Looker Studio or personalized reporting dashboards—if equipped with API capabilities—can facilitate this process.

Standard Operating Procedures

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) establish a structured framework with clients to set benchmarks for consistency and scalability, while also documenting significant changes, decisions, and implementations.

While creating a knowledge repository to track essential modifications is a common practice beyond enterprise contexts, the formulation of SOPs that are subject to regular review and revision represents an advancement in this approach.

This practice not only facilitates the onboarding of new team members by expediting their acclimatization but also offers frameworks for other client teams. Such frameworks minimize the risk of non-compliance with established best practices for the brand or prevent experimentation based on unverified sources, such as random blogs or suggestions from large language models (LLMs).

SOPs can be developed for various scenarios; however, based on practical experience, three fundamental SOPs effectively cover essential aspects and mitigate potential "SEO risks" from a technical SEO standpoint:

1. Internal Linking: Internal links play a vital role in SEO. Every piece of content, apart from landing pages, should incorporate relevant internal links. A straightforward SOP for this might include:

   • Avoiding non-descriptive anchor text like "here" or "this article," instead providing context about the linked page.
   • Refraining from using internal links devoid of context, such as automating the first or second occurrence of a term on each page to link to a singular specific page.

2. Image Optimization: Often neglected, image SEO can significantly enhance page load speeds and potentially improve visibility in image searches. An effective SOP should encompass:

   • Employing descriptive file names while avoiding keyword stuffing.
   • Crafting alt text that accurately describes images for accessibility purposes without including promotional messaging.
   • Selecting appropriate file formats and compressing images to enhance load speed.

3. URL Structures: It is essential to optimize URLs for both search engines and users by ensuring they are clear, concise, and relevant to keywords. The SOP should address:

   • Eliminating unnecessary stop words, punctuation, and white spaces (approximately 20% reduction).
   • Utilizing hyphens in place of underscores.
   • Avoiding keyword stuffing within URLs.
   • Implementing parameters that do not override the source or trigger new sessions within Google Analytics 4.

Technical Auditing Issues

Conducting a technical audit on an enterprise-level website with an extensive number of URLs presents several complexities, particularly in the area of crawling.

There are multiple strategies available for managing the crawling process of such websites; however, two notable nuances frequently encountered include the necessity for routine sample crawls and the challenges presented by crawling a multi-stack domain.

Sample Crawling

Sample crawling serves as an effective approach for identifying large-scale SEO challenges without necessitating a comprehensive crawl of the entire site.

By employing strategic sampling techniques, focusing on critical sections of the website, and utilizing log data, auditors can extract valuable insights while maintaining efficiency in the crawling process.

It is essential that the sample size is sufficiently representative of the site’s overall structure while remaining manageable enough to ensure effectiveness. In practice, you shuld adhere to specific guidelines regarding the appropriate size for samples based on either the overall dimensions of the website or those pertaining to individual subdomains or subfolders.

When conducting a comprehensive analysis, particularly when dealing with extensive datasets that encompass hundreds of thousands or even millions of URLs, it is imperative to adopt a strategic approach to sampling. The following four primary sampling methods are recommended:

1. Random Sampling: This method involves the selection of URLs at random, thereby providing an unbiased representation of the site's overall health.

2. Stratified Sampling: In this approach, the website is segmented into essential categories (such as product pages, blog entries, and category pages), from which samples are drawn to ensure that insights are well-balanced across different sections.

3. Priority Sampling: This strategy emphasizes the examination of high-value pages, including those that yield the highest conversion rates, attract significant traffic, or contain newly published content.

4. Structural Sampling: This technique entails crawling the website in accordance with its internal linking structure, commencing with the homepage and progressing through main category pages.

By employing these sampling methodologies, researchers can derive more accurate and representative findings that contribute to a deeper understanding of site performance.

Crawling Multi-Stack Websites

The process of crawling websites constructed on multiple technology stacks necessitates a strategic approach that considers various rendering techniques, URL configurations, and potential obstacles such as JavaScript execution and authentication requirements.

Consequently, a comprehensive crawl of the entire site followed by generalized recommendations is not feasible.

Below is a high-level checklist that addresses several critical aspects that may arise during the crawling process:

1. Identification and Mapping: Distinguish between server-rendered and client-rendered sections of the site.
2. Authentication Requirements: Ascertain which parts of the site necessitate user authentication, particularly in user-specific areas.
3. Session Management: For sections that require login (e.g., product applications), implement session cookies or token-based authentication using tools.
4. Rate Limiting: Introduce crawl delays if the site employs rate-limiting measures.
5. Content Loading Techniques: Investigate for lazy-loaded content that may require scrolling or clicking to access.
6. API Utilization: Explore whether public API endpoints are available for more efficient data extraction.

The aforementioned strategies represent extreme methodologies for web crawling. If your web crawling tool possesses the capability to render web pages natively, it is advisable to utilize this functionality rather than resorting to external tools such as Puppeteer for content retrieval.

Conclusion

Engaging in technical SEO for large organizations introduces distinct challenges; however, it simultaneously provides some of the most enriching experiences and educational opportunities that may not be accessible in other contexts—an aspect that not all SEO practitioners are privileged to encounter.

Streamlining many of the routine tasks and securing support from a broad spectrum of client stakeholders can enhance the client-agency dynamic and establish a robust foundation for effective SEO initiatives.