Become more adaptable so that you can take advantage of change

Rebecca says: “We are going to need to be increasingly adaptable. A lot of things, particularly in technical SEO, are still the same. We’re still doing the usual things – crawlability, redirections, JavaScript, internal linking, automation, site speed, etc. – but we have seen so many changes which mean that people in the SEO space need to adapt to a new way of doing those same things.

We’ve seen the appearance of traffic from Discover (which has become highly prevalent for certain sites), the inclusion of ChatGPT and other large language models, and how we use AI in what we do every day. We’ve seen the SGE being promoted by Google, how that changes the SERPs, and what that means for SEO. We’ve seen major core algorithm updates recently, including the second stage of the helpful content update. Earlier this year, Universal Analytics was phased out and replaced by GA4, and so on.

We are still trying to do the same things, with what we hope is the same data, but those have evolved in ways that we couldn’t have predicted a year ago. They’re things that are logical, but we still can’t predict what’s coming next year. You have to be ready for the changes that will impact how we do things”

Does the fact that changes are happening more rapidly as time goes on mean that you need to be more adaptable?

“Some of the things that have really impacted our users at Oncrawl are technologies. We mentioned AI, and both websites and search engines are using different technologies today – including in how they render things. We’ve also seen a lot of headless CMSs and different ways that you have to adapt to that data itself. Search engines are providing different data and we need different data from them.

A lot of our users have access to different data within their companies, so they might have more data from other departments. They could have more data on pricing, general company-wide data, and different supports for big data. None of this is particularly new, but what is new is how broadly it’s impacting SEO.

For example, not every SEO is using BigQuery but, given its implications in Looker Studio and Search Console exports, that is a tool and a type of data organisation that’s much more important today than it was before. Rather than learning new formulas in Excel, maybe you should be looking at SQL.”

How would you summarise Google Discover and what websites and industries can take advantage of it?

“Basically, Discover is a type of result that is fed to certain users. It’s highly customised, and the feed is made up entirely of articles. Only articles are eligible for this, and it’s a sort of news feed for an individual. Media sites that publish news are extremely interested in this because, when an article is featured on Discover, it essentially goes viral. In some cases, you can get much more traffic from that.

At Oncrawl, some of my co-workers have been looking into how you get an article on Discover and how that relates to SEO. In terms of our adaptability, when we started this, we thought it was going to lead to product development at Oncrawl. We assumed the tools that people need to look at Discover and how it relates to SEO would need to be new things that needed to change. In fact, we saw that the platform that we already have allows you to look at that yourself. We can use Discover information in Oncrawl as it is. There are correlations to certain SEO elements, although not always specifically or across the board. What stands out is that, if you rank well, you will do well in Discover. If you don’t rank well, you have no chance. Even for a single website, articles that do well in search results immediately will also do well in Discover and vice versa.”

What has the transition to GA4 meant for SEO?

“GA4 is a complicated thing for SEOs. That is one of the best examples of why adaptability needs to be one of our key focuses in 2024. We have seen so many people (my team included) struggle with how to change their mindset from sessions and users to events. That is one of the main differences between how analytics information was captured and reported in Universal Analytics and how it’s captured and reported in GA4.

Again, this is not different information; it’s still analytics information. It still gives us the same learnings and insights in the end, but we’ve had to figure out how to learn what the best resources are to understand this, and then adapt our processes to that.

We did update our analytics connector for Google to support GA4 information and it brought us new metrics, but we’ve kept all of the old ones. That sort of adaptability allows you to have continuity, but not everyone’s using GA4 – which is something that I actually really like about this change. It forced us all to look at what information we are capturing as analytics, what information is useful, and how you can get that particular part of the information that you need for your SEO.

We’ve seen people move to Matomo and a couple of other analytics platforms, and they are still able to use Oncrawl. Our objective at Oncrawl is to make sure that you can blend analytics data with SEO data to understand which SEO metrics have an impact on the traffic that comes to your site and which optimizations you should be prioritising for that traffic.

That traffic element is something that you can get from analytics. When we look at analytics for technical SEO, that element is what we really want to preserve, and that hasn’t required product development or evolution. That hasn’t required SEOs to abandon the entire idea of analytics. Instead, it has asked us to be adaptable and to look for other ways to collect that particular information.”

How does an SEO adapt and be able to measure the traffic or brand awareness that comes from an AI result in the SERP?

“That’s the key question that is going to come up in the next couple of years. If you step back and look at what have been the key metrics for SEO success, in the first evolution of the internet, the internet was just a bunch of connections between content. Those connections are links, and links were the main money-maker for SEO. You needed links and, without links, you got absolutely nowhere.

However, that was the first iteration. There is a whole debate now over whether links are still a major ranking factor. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but it’s very clear that, even for Google, that’s not the way the world operates anymore.

In the second period, we got to Web 2.0, social elements, and shareability – and content itself became king. The key element was to have shareable content that could be transformed, reused, and shared. That desirability is one of the things that you look for in SEO. You have a lot of clickbait titles, listicles, and blogs supporting that content.

Then, we moved into the hyper-personalisation of search results where you get re-ranking algorithms in Google, the influence of search intent, and a machine understanding of what the content represents. In addition to links and shareability, which are now less important, what is more important is how we communicate the core of the information that is on the page. Why are you talking about this subject and what is your expertise in that?

The elements that facilitate that are already present. We already look at schema; schema has been around for ages. We already look at EEAT; it’s been around for years and it’s even changed from EAT to EEAT.

When we look at SGE and personal adaptation – where you’re searching from, the type of device, the time of year, the time of day, events around you, and all of those elements that inform this personalised search experience – they all require Google to have a very good understanding of what is on your page in order to serve it in the right context.

To me, the technical elements behind how Google is understanding your page are the key to making sure that you place well tomorrow. However, they have restructured the page. A search result isn’t necessarily the 10 blue links anymore. That is going to impact how we need to adapt to the ways that content and content sources are surfaced in organic research.”

What soft skills are required in order to be more adaptable?

“We’ve done a ton of user research this year, and a ton of market research. One of the things that has come up again and again is that the model of the SEO or SEO team that works alone and has to reach out to other teams is much less prevalent.

We’re seeing more and more people who aren’t working alone and are embedded in other, cross-functional teams. Often the marketing budget has been reduced so their dedicated SEO team members have moved to other projects.

As an SEO, the best way to do things is to learn from your co-workers, because your co-workers today won’t necessarily have always done the same things that you have, in the same ways that you have. They are often developers, web designers, or product managers for a web product – and they have a different way of looking at things, different priorities, and different ways of measuring things.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop doing absolutely everything manually. Automate, automate, automate – but automate the right things. In a Google Webmaster hangout recently, somebody’s homepage was blocking Googlebot, so it wasn’t indexed. They would probably have caught this in their next audit, but you shouldn’t be doing manual audits.

You need to be able to free up that time to ideate, to look deeply into certain subjects, and to create new processes by being critical of your own processes. A manual audit of your basic technical elements shouldn’t exist today. You should be scheduling those. You should be setting up notifications that pop up in places where you will see them when things aren’t working as expected – before you get to the massive manual action that would reveal those things.

The more adaptable you are, the more you’ll see other priorities and opportunities that you really want to be spending your time on. To me, that’s the future of technical SEO. Free up your time by automating what you can, so that you can be receptive to areas where you can adapt.”

Rebecca Berbel is Product Marketing Manager at Oncrawl, and you can find her over at Oncrawl.com.