CXL - Technical SEO is oversold

Your host today is Eli Schwartz (< check his book),
Author of Product-Led SEO, Growth Advisor

 

Once done reading, you can ask Eli all your burning product-led SEO questions on this post.

This might come as news to many people, but scoring a perfect score on technical SEO will not drive any additional traffic if there isn’t already a great website that provides value to users.

 

The focus of technical SEO for the most part is optimizing a website to known best practices for search visibility. 

 

There is tremendous value in having a well optimized site from a technical standpoint; however, I think technical SEO can only help a site improve on the visibility it ALREADY should have.

 

The technical SEO enhances and reveals the value that had been blocked by not following SEO best practices.

 

Some people and agencies within the SEO industry have created an expectation that technical SEO fixes will do more for the growth of a site’s traffic than it can actually do.

 

In this paradigm, the company may specifically look to make technical SEO their core effort when they would be better off focusing on great content or even better an SEO product as I go into great detail in my book Product-Led SEO.

 

Technical SEO costs. Will it produce the desired ROI?

 

Organizations spend vast sums to improve technical aspects of a site to bring them up to SEO best practices, but neglect to determine if there will be ROI from these efforts before making an investment.

 

Remapping every redirect, removing error pages and even improving site speed may not actually add enough additional users to justify the effort that might have to be invested to make these changes.

 

Even worse, I have seen companies prepare to spend millions of dollars to enhance their site speed and page load times specifically for SEO because an agency told them this is what they needed to do.

 

In my experience, it is unlikely they would have ever seen any return from this investment in increased search visibility. 

 

The real purpose of technical SEO

 

The purpose of technical SEO is really to unlock opportunity and value that has been hidden away by inefficient technical SEO infrastructure.

 

However, if there is no value to unlock, SEO improvements will not add user acquisition.

 

The best way of explaining this is to think of this in a home purchase analogy. Technical SEO is the structure of the home that lives underneath the sheetrock. When a prospective buyer decides how much they are willing to pay for this home, the technical infrastructure may weigh into their calculation, but it will be a very small amount.

 

Yes, it is nice to know that if an earthquake or fire hits the home it can withstand the onslaught, but what the buyers are really paying for is the location, the design and the square footage.

 

Translating this back into SEO, users of the website only care about satisfying whatever their immediate need might be.

 

It is ideal that when they click on links they don’t get redirected many times, but they will never notice if those redirects are 301 or 302’s. The same goes for internal linking. It’s a nice to have from a user perspective that they can find additional pages/products within the site, but even if they can’t they can always use the search box.

 

Is technical SEO really the best investment for you?

 

Technical SEO will of course add users to a website, but those users should be weighed against other investments that might bring in even more users.

 

The vast sums that might be required to improve a website’s speed might be better used to hire engineers that build additional features that might generate more search or other traffic.

 

As an aside, I believe that site speed does not necessarily improve a website’s visibility in search, rather it is a tool to increase on-page conversions. Therefore, in making an investment case for site speed, I would only use that conversion improvement as a part of the ROI calculation and not make any assumptions on additional traffic.

 

Similarly, there are a number of other areas of technical SEO which might serve a dual purpose of being both technical and content/product improvements.

 

The addition of schema or FAQ’s, while some might consider to be technical, I think those are value adds to a page that are actually content efforts implemented technically. 

 

(Kind of like posting a blog post via a shell command. Yes, you need to be somewhat technical to do that, but the lift comes from the content – not the posting.)

 

I am sure that some of you reading this will disagree with my sentiments around technical SEO, and I would love to hear from you.

What did you think? If you have any questions, suggestions or future Growth Notes requests, let’s chat on this LinkedIn post.

Good luck growing your organic search traffic. Talk soon.

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2. How to define your product life cycle marketing goals

In the early 2000s, DVDs were the primary way to watch videos. Netflix streaming launched in 2007, and the DVD player is now a technological antique.

 

Products, much like humans, live on borrowed time. From the moment they launch, they’re on a journey towards decline. How this journey plays out is what marketers try to predict by using the product lifecycle as a model. 

 

According to the classic sales curve, products go through four stages:

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Ognjen Bošković
Growth Lead at CXL

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