Are you a digital marketer or business owner looking for advice on how to conduct successful technical SEO testing? If so, look no further than this guide. It will walk you through all the steps needed to set up, implement and verify your SEO tests—bearing in mind very real dangers of hiring an inexperienced developer who may produce poor quality code. We’ll make sure that you understand the importance of codes being valid and tested properly before going live, as well as provide insights into more advanced areas such as page speed optimization and canonical tags setup. By the end of this guide by Minneapolis SEO Agency, you’ll be fully equipped with the knowledge needed to ensure that any technical changes made are both secure and effective!
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Step 1. Research & Plan:
The first step to successful SEO technical testing is research and planning. Doing your due diligence at this stage will ensure that you’re aware of any potential issues that could arise before making any changes. Research everything from the existing website structure, platform, plugins and hosted content down to the individual pages themselves. Identify key areas of improvement such as page speed, redirects, canonical tags etc., as these can all have a direct impact on organic rankings.
At this stage it’s also important to plan out which tests are going to be conducted and how they should be measured. Consider setting up tracking tools like Google Analytics or Moz Analytics so you can measure any improvements in performance after making changes—this way you can make sure that any changes are actually beneficial to SEO.
Step 2. Create & Test:
Once the research and planning is done, it’s time to create and test any code or pages that need updating. During this stage, developers should be extra careful to ensure that all code remains valid—invalid code can cause serious headaches further down the line if not caught early on. It’s also important for both developers and non-developers alike to verify their work by running tests such as link crawling using tools like Screaming Frog or Deep Crawl. SEO Agency Miami shared that this will help identify any issues with internal linking structure or broken links which could have negative impacts on organic performance.
Step 3. Check Compatibility:
After updating or creating code and testing it, you’ll want to check that any changes are compatible with the existing website. This could include checking that robots.txt files haven’t been inadvertently blocked from crawling pages, making sure that any scripts used on the site don’t interfere with search engine spiders, or verifying that all content is visible in text form (as opposed to Flash or images).
Step 4. Monitor & Evaluate Performance:
Once you’ve verified your SEO tests have worked properly and have been implemented correctly, it’s time to monitor and evaluate performance. By this point you should have set up tracking tools such as Google Analytics which can be used to measure organic traffic before and after any changes have been made. If there are significant drops in performance, then you’ll need to go back and review the work that was done in order to identify the source of the problem.
Step 5. Optimize Page Speed:
Page speed is one of the most important factors for SEO success, as it directly affects how quickly search engine spiders can crawl your website—the slower your pages load, the less likely they are to be indexed by Google. To ensure page speed optimization is successful, regularly test loading times using tools like GTmetrix or Webpagetest and make adjustments as necessary.
Step 6. Create & Manage Canonical Tags:
Canonical tags are used to prevent duplicate content issues and inform search engines about the original source of a page’s content. This is especially important when dealing with pages that have multiple URLs, such as mobile versions or http/https variants. Checking canonical tags that are set up correctly should be an essential part of any technical SEO testing process.
Step 7. Test & Verify:
Once you’ve completed all the steps above, it’s time to test everything one last time before going live. It’s important to verify your work by checking for any potential bugs or errors, running performance tests such as page speed optimization and link crawling, as well as conducting QA checks on any new pages or content added to the website. Doing these extra tests at the end will help to ensure any technical SEO changes have been successful and won’t have an adverse effect on organic rankings.
Summing Up
By following these seven steps, developers can make sure that their technical SEO testing process is thorough and comprehensive. After every test cycle, it’s important to go back and review the results in order to identify areas of success or improvement, allowing you to continually optimize your website for improved performance. By taking the time to conduct regular checks and use best practices when making changes, developers should be able to effectively optimize their websites and maximize organic search traffic.