In the last two years, there has been a lot of talk about what the technician is and how it can affect web performance. A branch of that discipline that seems to have become fashionable, and which is discussed in one of every three SEO papers.
But the truth is that when you need to go one step further in an optimization project, it’s not just about content and keywords.
In , a computer e-commerce, after a change of website, they decided to take a step forward and advance in technical SEO hand in hand with OnCrawl. A SAAS specialized in technical audits and log visualization, from which they hoped to extract data to further delve into optimizations.
And after about 4 months working with her on a daily basis, the results have been completely satisfactory, as the data will reveal.
Responsive redesign to continue growing
2018 was quite busy within the Opirata company. After the algorithm update in March, they suffered a severe blow that meant a loss of half of organic visibility.
This raised all the alarms and they decided to act accordingly. Make an all or nothing and take by the horns a problem that they had been hiding for too long.
As they explain to us from the company: “Day to day often takes time away from matters that you know are important but are never urgent until it’s too late. Not having a responsive website, a better server or https were details that if not changed sooner rather than later would end up being a problem, and a serious one.”
Determined to change the fate of events, they marked a roadmap and got down to work. The objectives and actions were clear: change of server, change to https and responsive redesign with a change in the type of URLs for more friendly and traceable ones. A triple corkscrew jump that needed to be done.
After the change begins the real technical optimization
All the changes that were marked were carried out successfully according to the calendar, avoiding dates indicated for an eCommerce such as December and January.
How to work a task of that magnitude
The main thing is to always try to minimize the risks to run. For this reason, apart from thinking about the technical part of the web, it is also important to think about the business part.
- In server and https changes, for example, it is always advisable to carry them out at times when the traffic is going to be zero or the impact on the business is minimal.
- On the other hand, in a web change, and even more so if there are going to be thousands of redirections, the important thing is to have a testing place where breaking something is not going to be the end.
In Opirata they had a test website in which all changes, technical optimizations, visual redesigns and to see how they behave were deployed. On the other hand, it is also good to have tools that facilitate the work.
In Opirata they had SearchVIU, a tool specialized in web migrations. This tool, connected to Google Search Console and Google Analytics, basically tells you what you have on your production site compared to your local work site and what you’re leaving behind if you make the switch.
After the switch to responsive
Once all the changes have been made on the website and it works, you can breathe… During that day or night (which is when these changes are usually made), because then there are thousands of things to fix, optimize and, above all, see what is happening in the web. See what users are doing on the one hand in the face of the change and on the other hand how Google sees all those redirections and architecture.
“With a web redesign and a responsive deployment, you always have to be very careful when deploying it, more so if we have redirects. In our case, we went from having a website in three languages, with their corresponding mobile versions, to a single responsive website in Spanish and new URLs. For about three days the redirects were 302 in case ‘it was necessary to go back’. We had everything redirected to the main domain in Spanish and we verified that all the main business URLs redirected to the correct place.”
Technical content improvements: Oncrawl comes into play
is an all-in-one SEO tool for technical and content audits that also offers daily log viewing. At Opirata, they decided to have them over others due to their ease of use and the tailored plan they offered compared to other solutions.
“In the market there are several of these tools in the cloud that offer very powerful solutions such as Botify or FandangoSEO but in our case, and from the beginning, the people at OnCrawl offered us a personalized plan for what we needed and at an excellent price”
One of the first things they did was create the daily export of logs to the platform. This action allowed them to see how the web evolves every day and, above all, how Google behaved.
Then they got down to work to correct 404 errors, redirect chains and blocking what was unnecessary or removing it from the Sitemap. OnCrawl also offers a very powerful content analysis tool that, in connection with Analytics, Search Console and tools like Sistrix, allows you to quickly identify points for improvement.
Viewing the logs: understanding Google
for a couple of months the web was worked on at the on page level, HTML labeling and loading speed. Reworking data markup using JSON-LD, breadcrumbs, and installing Google’s mod_PageSpeed were huge steps in terms of signs of improvement.
Throughout the optimization process and especially with the visualization of the logs, conclusions were drawn.
“The visualization of the logs, beyond offering information on what Google does on the web and the users, gives you the most valuable clues when you have been visualizing the behavior of Googlebot for a month or two. In our case, we identified patterns that, together with the general data from OnCrawl, decided us to make more powerful changes once we saw in the logs that Google was no longer accessing the web through the old URLs.”
On average, from what they have verified in Opirata, Google takes three months to assimilate the new web content and leave aside the one that was previously. Once this happened they made three important changes:
1. Change in the ordering of the products
Thanks to the visualization of logs they were able to verify that the ordering of the products in the categories was not optimal for the business, since the cheapest products were prioritized, which meant that these, located on the first page, received more page rank and hits from Googlebot. A change to an order by popularity and return on business allowed to increase the positioning of this type of pages around 10% with its consequent return in more income.
2. Opening of web page
After the ordering change they decided to change the behavior of the web page. Before, all the pages pointed to the first one as canonical. The change made made it possible for Google to track up to the third without problem and from there to enter a noindex.
3. Link Obfuscation in Footer and Header
With OnCrawl’s Links Flow report and log visualization they decided to obfuscate irrelevant links in Footer and Header. In this way they improved the internal pagerank and eliminated more than 100,000 unnecessary links throughout the web.
https:///agencias-seo-espana-top/
Results
Within the entire optimization process there have been other actions, but these are the ones that in some way from Opirata they had not seen without having a Technical SEO and monitoring tool.
“The data is always there but it is not always easy to draw clear conclusions. The time, the progressive improvements and the evolution of the crawls week by week, are what lead you to draw clearer conclusions. For one part of the actions that are working or which are plausible that they are going to do so”
The results since the change to responsive they are remarkable. On the one hand, income at the mobile level they have shot up over 250% even though there is less traffic.
As for the more technical optimizations they have given the project an impressive boost, making organic revenue 35% better than prior period despite being dates traditionally lower in sales than those of the beginning of the year. In summer it sells less than at Christmas
The keys were better optimization towards the most transactional keywords, prioritization of business areas with better performance and optimization in terms of web architecture and user experience.
Even relying on other external tools such as AccuRanker or Sistrix, the improvement in terms of visibility is evident:
Top business keyword tracking
Sistrix Visibility Index
“The data is not as simple as if it goes up it’s good and if it goes down it’s bad. Having multiple sources aligned with the business is what will give you a global vision of what actions are working and what can be done to continue growing. In our case, Without OnCrawl, we wouldn’t have the data to support decisions made for the most complex technical changes.”
In the end, everything that is said about Technical SEO is more than justified. Actions that can be resolved in a day have more impact than a month of work.
In the they are still working on optimizing, because they know that this SEO thing never ends. The path and final objective is to build a brand above all else, in this way you will be present beyond the SERPs.
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