#Realizing there's a three way venn diagram with a lot of overlap between this and collars and wedding rings

[pyrepostings]

I need to look up if this is a thing actually in any slight way, but imagining in a world where vampires are common, a common accessory for their thralls is a sleeve to go over/keep bandages in place.

This sleeve would be form fitting but not tight. Waterproof if the materials are available. Could be unbuttoned, or zipped, or simply slid off depending on the style.

Could be a show of dominance from the vampire. Gifting your thrall a sleeve would be a very easy way to show you intend to keep them. Good way to tag your thrall with your own name, or clan if you have one.

Some thralls might get one of their own accord out of convenience and practicality. Some unenthralled humans might wear one to ward off vampires that wouldn't want to get in a fight with whoever supposedly claimed them.

Sleeves might also be used outside the direct context of vampires, for medical reasons on a temporary basis if they're practical enough for non-vampire related wounds, which might cause a stir or two of gossip.

Thralls that have multiple sleeves to match with outfits. A thrall relieved to be given a sleeve because it means they will be treated like a proper thrall who will be taken care of and be treated like a person, as opposed to a common bloodbag to be turned out at the first sign of infection, or drained at the vampires whim or apathy.

[sepublic]

I think there's a lot of potential for a dynamic between Vee, Hunter, and the Collector; All three are children abused and hidden away from society by Belos, who eventually escaped him, and are among the last of their kind in a sense; There's only a few other Basilisks in Vee's case, and the Archivists are so far apart that for all intents and purposes, the Collector is the only one.

So I'm just imagining an AU where these three somehow meet despite Belos' efforts, and they ultimately band together and maybe even escape! Vee showing Hunter firsthand just how corrupt the Emperor's Coven can truly be, while the Collector reveals the whole cycle of the Grimwalkers; Vee and Hunter explaining to the Collector what death is, with Vee helping her friends understand that what they're going through IS wrong. Plus some added potential dynamics with Vee's siblings, and how this might make the Collector reflect on their relationship with the Archivists. Meanwhile Hunter's family never got the chance to know one another...

The Collector can teach all sorts of interesting magic to Hunter, given his interests, while helping Vee understand why she was cloned and experimented on, though there'd obviously be a lot of dread with that realization. And then we can have Hunter being a protective older brother to Vee, who's genuinely scared in a way the others aren't, and giving her support she might need/miss in the absence of her other basilisk siblings. This could lead to Vee and Hunter developing the courage to take a more direct stand against Belos by using the Collector as a witness to reveal the truth of the coven sigils; Possibly running into Raine and/or Darius' separate rebellions, and finding comfort in adults who DO care.

All three bring different things to the table; What with the Collector knowing the whole story, Hunter having access to the outside world, and Vee fully recognizing how abusive their situation is. They have things in common, sometimes with only one other person to confide in, sometimes with all at once. There's just a lot of interplay one could do with his trio and how the parallels and foils overlap. In essence, one could do a three-way venn diagram with these kids; They’re like Luz, Eda, and King. Or Lilith, Amity, and Hunter. Gus, Willow, and Amity… You get the idea. I love a good trio dynamic.

[b-a-pigeon]

I started writing the first draft of rose garden book almost three years ago(!!) & I totally forgot that I kind of just broke it down for parts and sprinkled bits and pieces over my other projects.

Like, little fragments of the magic system are everywhere; I imported Adarina's original personality directly into Mitzli HotU and gave Nikita Heirloom a lot of her arc and motivations; WFTWR inherited my vaguely-Persian? beautiful gay little prince boy who doesn't want to be king (and is nominally... "anti-imperialist" but in a sort of "well obviously I'm not going to try to stop it but I don't want to be involved!" way); etc.

There's a ton of overlap between my work and characters generally, even if their stories are all quite different in terms of setting/tone/plot/etc. -- the theoretical venn diagram of all the characters referenced above has "deeply flawed gay person, conflicted about their role in the world, with daddy issues" at the center -- but still, I didn't realize until now how much more work I need to do to distinguish this one until I started writing it!!

[authorticity]

Some of My Favorite IMB Character Notes

[REDACTED] is the sort of person who, when rested, is fairly grounded and dependable, and gets progressively more feral the more stress they’re under. If they ever reach the level at which they are a Fairly Competent Action Hero, watch the fuck out. They’ve gone Super Saiyan.

Miko, Jack, and Raf can be combined in different ways for different Vibes:

Miko + Jack: Directed Chaos. Will they accomplish the thing? Yes. will it be in the way they intended to accomplish it? not fucking likely. Miko is a force of nature and Jack is a competency bus. It’s kind of like directing a tiny tornado with a shuffleboard stick.

Miko + Raf: Let’s Hack Santa Claus. Raf is capable of terrifying things. Miko is a purveyor of terrifying ideas. While Raf is difficult to get on board on some of them, he can give Miko access to parts of the Pentagon that she should never be able to access. The only reason they haven’t enacted drastic change on a global level is that Raf does not want to get in trouble and Miko’s saving the REALLY cool stuff until she’s not on a temporary visa.

Raf + Jack: Bravery and Good Sense. Two very good, dependable boys. Let’s derive joy from something mundane and entertaining. Let’s go do a random act of kindness. There’s no reason to seek out danger. (It’ll find them. And when it does? They’ll be ready.)

All of them: a Perfect Storm. Miko is the passion and direction. Raf is the enabler. Jack coordinates for maximum effect and minimal risk. Whenever one of them falters, the other two are there to make sure they’re okay. When one of them slips up or falls into danger, the others are there to call them out or keep them safe. even without the bots, these kids are a force to be reckoned with.

Optimus and Prowl are the sort of friends colleagues that work incredibly well together, but only when both parties make an effort. Optimus relies on Prowl to keep him grounded and realistic, calling him out on the plans that are too optimistic while giving him the catharsis of being able to entertain those ideas. Likewise, Prowl has effectively outsourced a large fraction of his sense of morality to Optimus. However, this system only works if they listen to each other. If Optimus gets too arrogant, or Prowl decides that his realism overrides Optimus’ ethics, it falls apart, and things begin to slide into IDW territory. This is probably a lesson they’ve learned the hard way.

Mr. Wen and Mr. Callighan are Very Gay and Very In Denial and they’ve been caught in a massive slow burn for the last twenty years.

In the Venn Diagram between [REDACTED] and Optimus’ sense of humor, the overlap almond contains the worst of both their senses of humor. A good dad joke? A picture of an angry stick man overlaid with the text from an ancient Roman curse tablet?? The same inside joke, warped and tattered over the years until it’s incomprehensible? both of them regard these things as the Darkest Depths of Humor. Neither one is very good at resisting them.

Optimus’ thought process during snap-decisions looks a whole lot like Phoenix Wright from Ace Attorney

Bee gets chronic migraines due to brain injury. these get especially worse when paired with tension headaches. Like, obviously any additional noggin pain will fuck him up, but after he’s been crying? FUCK that

Raf can understand any language, including sign languages, but not writing. Additionally, anyone who knows a language can understand him.

If [REDACTED] attempts to establish communication with someone, communication will be established. However, they need to make a conscious attempt.

These two things are not the same.

The Primes as modern Cybertronians visualize them were remarkably physically different than how they are depicted, kind of the way that artists present Jesus as the majority ethnicity of their area. The occasionally fucks Optimus up.

He did spend a lot of time when he was younger learning the signs of how to identify the 13 based on appearance alone--Solus with her hammer, Prima with a white crown, Adaptus with the image of his altmode behind him, etc. He was dismayed to learn that what little imagery depicting him consistently presented him with four arms holding writing implements and a set of sharp teeth. Especially because, out of all the depictions of the Primes, his was the most accurate to his original frame

Arcee low-key has a (minor, minor, MINOR) crush on Venus Williams. The only one who knows is Bumblebee, who teased her mercilessly until he actually paid attention and realized that he can Actually Kind of See It, Huh. They currently exist in a Cold War of kink-shaming.

As far as Wheeljack is concerned, Sherlock Holmes stories are the stupidest thing he’s ever read. He adores them.

Pride & Prejudice had been on Optimus’ to-read list since the second week he spent on Earth. He has been too busy to start it for over three years, which is too bad because he would be positively hooked.

[REDACTED] has never gotten diagnosed with anything other than anxiety, but they are Very Definitely Not Neurotypical.

[fenmere]

Our model of plurality

Some things we know, if you listen to everyone who reports being a system and take their word for it:

- Plurality is really way more common than people realize. There's a meme that says upward of 3% of the human population. That's more than there are known trans people.

- People who are autistic seem to have a higher frequency of plurality.

- People who are trans seem to have a higher frequency of plurality.

- People who are autistic and trans seem to have a VERY high rate of plurality.

- The characteristics and experiences of plural systems are really wide and varied. And they all occur on spectrums.

- The way a single given system works may evolve over time.

Speaking generally of the human body, we also know:

- The human body and brain are a complex system of complex systems in the mathematical chaos theory sense of that term.

- Human development is also itself a complex system.

- All sorts of tiny little things can influence it and change it, so humanity tends to show an incredibly wide range of diversity.

Now, current scientific theory of psychology states that the human mind starts out in sort of a plural state as it develops from a fetus. Parts of the brain coalesce and form identities independently of each other before their dendrites make contact with each other, and it typically isn't until three to five years old that a child's brain unifies and develops a single self schema (a psychological map of identity). This is also the time when gender typically emerges and asserts itself.

So, with that in mind, we think there are many different ways that plurality can manifest. But a few different major categories may suffice to describe it.

There could be systems that have completely separate consciousnesses that never share memories and never cofront or coinhabit the conscious mind.

There could be systems that have one single consciousness that merely changes identity to adapt to different situations.

And then there's systems like ours, where each headmate is a separate consciousness, but they can fluidly switch, merge, split, and recombine in a variety of internal configurations.

We know we are this latter type because we can literally feel each other's consciousnesses as we move around each other and touch each other. And when we merge, we can feel ourselves expanding to include the extra awareness and thoughts of our headmates, like overlapping circles growing together in an animated Venn diagram.

We believe that most human minds have an underlying plural structure. This is supported by most psychological theories. Any impairment to unified thought will give a person plural experiences. Meaning it's a smooth spectrum from singlet to multiple, with a lot of variety and texture to the experiences between them.

Diagnoses like DID and OSDD are useful in a clinical setting to obtain insurance and treatment for systems that are in distress. They are diagnoses based on the model of a mental health disorder.

Which means that the key criteria for diagnosis is that the experiences are severe enough that the patient experiences them as an impairment to their life and is distressed about them. Therefore, a system that is happy about their experiences as a system should not receive a diagnosis. And therefore, the diagnoses should not be used to define the neurotype.

We submit that the neurotype should be known as plurality, and that DID and OSDD should be recognized as clinical tools for systems in distress.

Our personal take on this is that DID and OSDD are effectively diagnoses that describe how a system behaves and expresses PTSD.

We have PTSD.

If you take our behavior and experiences from a few years ago, we could and should be diagnosed with DID according to the DSM-5. However, we are not in distress about being plural. Since recognizing our plurality, we've been able to cooperate and function in such a way as to avoid the amnesia and confusion of previous years. And we did this without therapy. But we're still very plural and we still have PTSD. We've just adapted well.

So, for US at least, it makes sense to identify as plural, not get a diagnosis of DID, and instead focus our therapy on treating our PTSD.

For a system that is less cooperative and has more internal conflict, a diagnosis of DID makes a lot of sense.

Finally, some points:

Anyone identifying as plural, no matter what their traits, characteristics, or symptoms are, does NOT reflect on or take away from the identities and needs of other plural people!

The existence of endogenic, non-traumatized systems does not invalidate or even belittle the existence of traumagenic systems that experience a lot of distress.

So there is no need to gatekeep and in turn invalidate people who self report experiences of plurality, EVER.

We have the language to describe impairments, using such words as "amnesia" and "dissociation" as well as many others. Let's use that language.

Take a cue from autistic people. Stop narrowly defining the neurotype by a specific set of pathologized symptoms, and start describing your own specific experiences and needs.

Plurality is a large umbrella, and no two systems are alike.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Duty Now For The Future (part two)

In our previous installment, our erstwhile essayist was about to plunge off the deep end yet again with his ideas of what the post-coronavirus pandemic world will look like.)

Venn Diagram Society

Because digital communications eliminates the need for physical proximity, and because we can find or form “tribes” of like-minded souls linked together by a common interest, we’ve seen traditional neighbor socialization fade.

We’re starting to realize that no one person is all one thing, that you are the biological relative of one group of people, related by marriage to another group (who in turn have other non-biological relations they share, are friends in real life with a variety of other people for a variety of other reasons, and are online friends with even more people whom we’ve never met face to face.

(As David Gerrold observed, sci-fi fans had a leg up on the rest of the world when the Internet age started because we’d been establishing these overlapping Venn diagrams for decades via print and mail communications.  We were primed for this, compadre!)

What we’re in the process of hashing out right now is how these overlapping groups will interact with and among themselves.

There are people we do not wish in our lives, and online that’s easy:  Block ‘em.

But that’s a lot more difficult when it involves biological relatives or people we’re related to by marriage.  New rules and customs are being hashed out (or is that #hashtagged_out?).

If it hasn’t be created already in some part of the world where long distance familial relations are important, we should see apps that let us figure out how we are related to one another.  The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game will provide a template for this.  When we encounter others in real life or online, the internet will find out how we’re linked through family and friends and special interest groups and clue us in.

We will become more interconnected, like it or not.

. . .

Future Culture Is African-American

In 2048 white Americans will only count as 49% of the population.

Years ago I predicted we’d be seeing a lot more white extremist racial violence between now and then and so far, I’ve been proven right.

There will be more incidents in the future, and some of the specific incidents will be very serious.

But eventually biology will hammer it through the thickest skulls of the whitest bigots that they are no longer in the driver’s seat, and if they want anything they better learn to play well with others.

If we were a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation up to this point, what will we be past 2048?

I think African-Americans will finally come into their own.

They have spent half a millennia buttressing their families and their culture against a dominant culture determined to destroy them, if not through outright genocide then by utter subjugation. 

With all those odds thrown against them, with all the handicaps and limitations and exclusions they faced, they nonetheless created a vibrant and thriving social network linking a vast number of sub-cultures and sub-groups within the larger African-American community.

Look at how the Jews, surviving in the face of three millennia of attempts to eradicate them, produced a culture so vibrant and strong that they prospered wherever they went.

Lok how the Irish, the whipping dogs of Great Britain, suffered oppressive bigotry when they emigrated to America, but once the foot came off their neck they dominated politics and culture in cities around the country.

The same will happen to the African-Americans.

They are prepared for this. 

They are going to dominate politics and culture for the rest of the century.

This is not to say that other groups won’t have a voice, quite the contrary.

Their voices will be heard louder than before, because the voices that had shouted them down will no longer be strong enough to do so.

But there’s something unique about the African-Americans position in US history that is going to give them and their culture that little extra boost that will put them at the forefront of the parade.

Good.

I think they will prove to be both stronger than their white predecessors and less callous about the rights of others.

. . .

Less Touch, More Contact

We’d already begun moving in this direction re online dating, with more and more people expressing dissatisfaction at “Tindr nightmares” who can’t grasp the basics of interpersonal relationships.

The coronavirus pandemic is going to produce a “slow down, cowboy” ripple through the dating pool.  There will be a shift away from instant physical gratification (yes, I understand not everybody uses online dating for that, but it is a common thread among those who do use it) and more towards building actual relationships.

We’ll see a gradual turn away from the more obvious forms of using sex to sell products, this in turn will lower the expectation that all close relationships must have a sexual context to them.

Sex ain’t going away, of course, but we may find romance coming back in unexpected ways.

The various…uh…”special interest” communities won’t go away, either, but they will become more insular.  They’ll see discretion as a powerful recruiting incentive, and within those communities there’s likely to be an even great degree of group identification and commitment as anybody who makes it in will need to demonstrate a sincere desire to join, not just casual curiosity.

. . .

Young & Stupid

The age of majority may shift…upward.

The western world may recognize the late teens to mid-twenties not as the start of adulthood but the last hurrah of adolescence.

People -- young ones especially -- do a lot of stupid things (see: “airline toilet, licking” in our first installment).

We tended to shove young children into the labor force as soon as they could pull weeds on the farm or work a shift in the factory.

We saw eighteen as a symbolic adulthood because we needed mass conscription for armies and younger than that the soldiers became too problematic re discipline (not that there’s weren’t very young soldiers in all wars).

We’re not entering an era where we may be able to push that back a bit.

Instead of urging young people to form families, we’ll be giving them time to get things out of their system, make their foolish mistakes, indulge in their embarrassing experiments.

All digitally documented, of course.

I expect we’ll eventually come to some sort of tacit cultural agreement that nude pictures or similar personal scandal that occur before a certain age will be dismissed as “kid stuff” and attempts to hold such shenanigans over the head of an adult (i.e., anyone past that age) will be regarded as pointless and silly and gauche.

This won’t apply to criminal activities, or things that get people hurt, or blatant displays of bigotry that reveal an underlying pathology, but it will give a pass on a lot of other things.

(I’m not predicting this, but the sci-fi writer in me can easily imagine a society codifying certain types of behavior to be done at specific ages under chaperoned behavior.  That’s not a new idea; parents in the late 19th century organized and supervised kissing games like Post Office for their adolescents in order to let them enjoy limited safe experimentation and to introduce them to acceptable adult behavior.)

. . .

Incels In Hell

In the short term, a lot of incels with borderline or not-so-borderline personality disorders are going to lose parents who exercised some degree of control over them.

They are going to be truly alone except for their online buddies, and many of them are going to be dispossessed in the aftermath of their parent/s death.

Since a lot of them have guns and dangerous chemicals, this is going to have some very bad repercussions.

I expect to see a dip in mass shooting rates during the crisis (counterbalanced by a rise in domestic assault and familial murders), then a sharp spike when the all-clear is sounded.

  © Buzz Dixon

[theh0ustonplacestobe]

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We’ve all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we’re not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency’s tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I’m a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I’d like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that’s where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that’s the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let’s start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people’s mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you’re getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, “Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site.”

That’s one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it’s not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There’s a finite number of problems. It’s not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it’s the same chart and the same situation. Here’s the actual traffic that you’re getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what’s happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you’ve framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, “Well, I’ve got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I’m just going to dive in. I’m going to go through page by page, and I’ll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client’s budget. So what if there’s a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it’s been solved?

Well, that’s what this framework that I’m going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I’m going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it’s going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I’d recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That’s dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you’re trying to break down, many people’s first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there’s some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there’s overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I’ve used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That’s a lot of fancy words, so I’ll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There’s just no overlap between them, and that’s what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they’re comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we’re dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn’t being indexed. There’s a technical reason our content isn’t being indexed. 

Our content doesn’t rank as well as it could, and therefore we’re losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn’t being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let’s talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we’re starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn’t being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it’s that our XML sitemaps aren’t uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn’t a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there’s a problem down here, there’s a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we’re really concerned about. The beauty of this isn’t just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. “We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else.” The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren’t uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn’t being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It’s given us a lot more confidence. It’s given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it’s also got us better outcomes particularly because it’s helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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[greenmelonmarketing]

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We've all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we're not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency's tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I'm a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I'd like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that's where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that's the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let's start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people's mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you're getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, "Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site."

That's one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it's not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There's a finite number of problems. It's not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it's the same chart and the same situation. Here's the actual traffic that you're getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what's happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you've framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, "Well, I've got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to go through page by page, and I'll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client's budget. So what if there's a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it's been solved?

Well, that's what this framework that I'm going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I'm going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it's going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I'd recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That's dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you're trying to break down, many people's first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there's some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there's overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I've used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That's a lot of fancy words, so I'll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There's just no overlap between them, and that's what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they're comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we're dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn't being indexed. There's a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. 

Our content doesn't rank as well as it could, and therefore we're losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn't being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let's talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we're starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it's that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn't a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there's a problem down here, there's a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we're really concerned about. The beauty of this isn't just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. "We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else." The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It's given us a lot more confidence. It's given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it's also got us better outcomes particularly because it's helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[deannanaylor]

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We’ve all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we’re not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency’s tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I’m a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I’d like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that’s where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that’s the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let’s start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people’s mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you’re getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, “Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site.”

That’s one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it’s not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There’s a finite number of problems. It’s not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it’s the same chart and the same situation. Here’s the actual traffic that you’re getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what’s happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you’ve framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, “Well, I’ve got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I’m just going to dive in. I’m going to go through page by page, and I’ll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client’s budget. So what if there’s a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it’s been solved?

Well, that’s what this framework that I’m going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I’m going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it’s going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I’d recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That’s dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you’re trying to break down, many people’s first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there’s some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there’s overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I’ve used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That’s a lot of fancy words, so I’ll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There’s just no overlap between them, and that’s what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they’re comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we’re dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn’t being indexed. There’s a technical reason our content isn’t being indexed. 

Our content doesn’t rank as well as it could, and therefore we’re losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn’t being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let’s talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we’re starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn’t being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it’s that our XML sitemaps aren’t uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn’t a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there’s a problem down here, there’s a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we’re really concerned about. The beauty of this isn’t just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. "We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else.” The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren’t uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn’t being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It’s given us a lot more confidence. It’s given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it’s also got us better outcomes particularly because it’s helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO - Whiteboard Friday published first on http://goproski.com/

[goproski]

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We've all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we're not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency's tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I'm a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I'd like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that's where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that's the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let's start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people's mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you're getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, "Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site."

That's one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it's not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There's a finite number of problems. It's not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it's the same chart and the same situation. Here's the actual traffic that you're getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what's happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you've framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, "Well, I've got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to go through page by page, and I'll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client's budget. So what if there's a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it's been solved?

Well, that's what this framework that I'm going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I'm going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it's going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I'd recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That's dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you're trying to break down, many people's first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there's some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there's overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I've used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That's a lot of fancy words, so I'll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There's just no overlap between them, and that's what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they're comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we're dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn't being indexed. There's a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. 

Our content doesn't rank as well as it could, and therefore we're losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn't being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let's talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we're starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it's that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn't a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there's a problem down here, there's a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we're really concerned about. The beauty of this isn't just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. "We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else." The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It's given us a lot more confidence. It's given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it's also got us better outcomes particularly because it's helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[marilynreinhold21]

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We've all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we're not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency's tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I'm a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I'd like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that's where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that's the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let's start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people's mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you're getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, "Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site."

That's one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it's not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There's a finite number of problems. It's not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it's the same chart and the same situation. Here's the actual traffic that you're getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what's happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you've framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, "Well, I've got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to go through page by page, and I'll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client's budget. So what if there's a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it's been solved?

Well, that's what this framework that I'm going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I'm going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it's going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I'd recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That's dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you're trying to break down, many people's first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there's some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there's overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I've used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That's a lot of fancy words, so I'll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There's just no overlap between them, and that's what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they're comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we're dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn't being indexed. There's a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. 

Our content doesn't rank as well as it could, and therefore we're losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn't being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let's talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we're starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it's that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn't a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there's a problem down here, there's a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we're really concerned about. The beauty of this isn't just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. "We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else." The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It's given us a lot more confidence. It's given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it's also got us better outcomes particularly because it's helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[ryangonzales928]

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We've all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we're not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency's tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I'm a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I'd like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that's where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that's the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let's start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people's mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you're getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, "Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site."

That's one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it's not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There's a finite number of problems. It's not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it's the same chart and the same situation. Here's the actual traffic that you're getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what's happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you've framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, "Well, I've got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to go through page by page, and I'll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client's budget. So what if there's a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it's been solved?

Well, that's what this framework that I'm going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I'm going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it's going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I'd recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That's dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you're trying to break down, many people's first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there's some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there's overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I've used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That's a lot of fancy words, so I'll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There's just no overlap between them, and that's what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they're comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we're dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn't being indexed. There's a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. 

Our content doesn't rank as well as it could, and therefore we're losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn't being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let's talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we're starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it's that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn't a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there's a problem down here, there's a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we're really concerned about. The beauty of this isn't just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. "We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else." The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It's given us a lot more confidence. It's given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it's also got us better outcomes particularly because it's helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[patrickrandolph33]

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We've all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we're not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency's tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I'm a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I'd like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that's where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that's the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let's start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people's mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you're getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, "Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site."

That's one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it's not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There's a finite number of problems. It's not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it's the same chart and the same situation. Here's the actual traffic that you're getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what's happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you've framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, "Well, I've got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to go through page by page, and I'll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client's budget. So what if there's a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it's been solved?

Well, that's what this framework that I'm going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I'm going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it's going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I'd recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That's dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you're trying to break down, many people's first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there's some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there's overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I've used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That's a lot of fancy words, so I'll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There's just no overlap between them, and that's what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they're comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we're dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn't being indexed. There's a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. 

Our content doesn't rank as well as it could, and therefore we're losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn't being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let's talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we're starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it's that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn't a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there's a problem down here, there's a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we're really concerned about. The beauty of this isn't just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. "We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else." The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It's given us a lot more confidence. It's given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it's also got us better outcomes particularly because it's helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[michaelowens713]

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We've all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we're not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency's tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I'm a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I'd like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that's where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that's the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let's start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people's mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you're getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, "Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site."

That's one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it's not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There's a finite number of problems. It's not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it's the same chart and the same situation. Here's the actual traffic that you're getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what's happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you've framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, "Well, I've got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to go through page by page, and I'll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client's budget. So what if there's a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it's been solved?

Well, that's what this framework that I'm going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I'm going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it's going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I'd recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That's dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you're trying to break down, many people's first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there's some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there's overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I've used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That's a lot of fancy words, so I'll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There's just no overlap between them, and that's what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they're comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we're dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn't being indexed. There's a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. 

Our content doesn't rank as well as it could, and therefore we're losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn't being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let's talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we're starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it's that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn't a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there's a problem down here, there's a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we're really concerned about. The beauty of this isn't just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. "We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else." The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It's given us a lot more confidence. It's given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it's also got us better outcomes particularly because it's helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[charlenejpatterson]

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We've all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we're not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency's tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I'm a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I'd like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that's where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that's the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let's start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people's mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you're getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, "Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site."

That's one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it's not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There's a finite number of problems. It's not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it's the same chart and the same situation. Here's the actual traffic that you're getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what's happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you've framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, "Well, I've got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to go through page by page, and I'll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client's budget. So what if there's a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it's been solved?

Well, that's what this framework that I'm going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I'm going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it's going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I'd recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That's dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you're trying to break down, many people's first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there's some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there's overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I've used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That's a lot of fancy words, so I'll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There's just no overlap between them, and that's what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they're comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we're dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn't being indexed. There's a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. 

Our content doesn't rank as well as it could, and therefore we're losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn't being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let's talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we're starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it's that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn't a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there's a problem down here, there's a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we're really concerned about. The beauty of this isn't just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. "We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else." The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It's given us a lot more confidence. It's given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it's also got us better outcomes particularly because it's helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[wellnessandrelief18]

How to Strategically Think About Technical SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We've all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we're not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency's tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I'm a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I'd like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that's where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that's the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let's start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people's mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you're getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, "Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site."

That's one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it's not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There's a finite number of problems. It's not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it's the same chart and the same situation. Here's the actual traffic that you're getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what's happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you've framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, "Well, I've got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to go through page by page, and I'll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client's budget. So what if there's a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it's been solved?

Well, that's what this framework that I'm going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I'm going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it's going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I'd recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That's dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you're trying to break down, many people's first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there's some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there's overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I've used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That's a lot of fancy words, so I'll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There's just no overlap between them, and that's what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they're comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we're dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn't being indexed. There's a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. 

Our content doesn't rank as well as it could, and therefore we're losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn't being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let's talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we're starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it's that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn't a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there's a problem down here, there's a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we're really concerned about. The beauty of this isn't just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. "We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else." The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It's given us a lot more confidence. It's given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it's also got us better outcomes particularly because it's helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://bit.ly/2Xb3fKM BenjaminEstes

Posted by BenjaminEstes

We've all agreed that technical SEO is integral, and many of us know at least a little bit about the subject if we're not already practitioners. But have you considered that the way you think about technical SEO could be hindering or helping your success? Today, Ben Estes from Distilled shares the agency's tried-and-true framework for tackling technical SEO quandaries strategically.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ben, and I'm a principal consultant at a company called Distilled. Today I'd like to talk to you about how we think about technical SEO at Distilled. Now, technical SEO is something that a lot of people know a lot of stuff about.

You accumulate knowledge over time from a lot of different sources, and that's where a lot of the value that we deliver comes from. But not everyone can think about technical SEO from a strategic perspective, and that's the skill that I think we should talk more about. 

Framing the problem

Let's start by framing the problem. So look at these charts. Now, I would argue that most people's mental model of technical SEO matches this first chart.

So in this chart, the solid black line is the actual traffic that you're getting, whereas the dotted line is the hypothetical traffic you could be getting if all of the technical problems on your site were resolved. So some people see this and say, "Well, you know, if I can just keep fixing technical things, I can keep getting more traffic to my site."

That's one way of looking at it, but I would argue that it's not the best way of looking at it, because really there are only so many technical things that can go wrong with your site. There's a finite number of problems. It's not an opportunity so much as an issue that needs to be resolved. So what I try and encourage my clients and colleagues to do is think about it in this way.

So it's the same chart and the same situation. Here's the actual traffic that you're getting and the hypothetical traffic you could be getting. But really what's happening is your technical problems are keeping you from realizing the most potential traffic that you could be capturing. In other words, there are technical issues preventing us from capturing all the traffic that we could. Now, once you've framed the problem in this way, how do you solve it?

So some people just say, "Well, I've got this big problem. I need to understand how all the things that could be wrong with this site. I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to go through page by page, and I'll finish when either I run out of pages or more realistically I run out of time or I run out of the client's budget. So what if there's a better way to actually solve that problem and know that it's been solved?

Well, that's what this framework that I'm going to present to you is about. The way that we would recommend doing that is by taking the big problem, the overall problem of technical SEO and breaking it down into subproblems and breaking those down again until you have problems that are so small that they are trivially solvable. Now, I'm going to explain to you exactly how we accomplish that, and it's going to be a little bit abstract.

The approach

So if you want something concrete to follow along with, I'd recommend checking out the blog post at this URL. That's dis.tl/tech-audit. Okay. So when you have a big problem that you're trying to break down, many people's first attempt winds up looking something like this Venn diagram. So we take one problem, break it down into three subproblems, but there's some sort of overlap between those problems.

Once there's overlap, you lose a lot of confidence. There is, are you duplicating effort across these different areas? Or did you miss something because these two things are kind of the same? Everything just gets a little hazy very quickly. So to get past that, what I've used at Distilled is this consulting concept called MECE.

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive

MECE stands for mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. That's a lot of fancy words, so I'll show you pictorially what I mean. So instead of having a Venn diagram like this, what if each of the problems was completely independent? Now they still cover the same area. There's just no overlap between them, and that's what MECE means.

Because there is no overlap between them, they are mutually exclusive. Because they cover all of the original problem, they're comprehensively exhaustive. So what does this mean in technical SEO specifically? Now remember the problem that we're dealing with is that there are technical issues preventing us from capturing traffic that we would otherwise be able to. So what are the three ways that that could happen? 

Maybe our content isn't being indexed. There's a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. 

Our content doesn't rank as well as it could, and therefore we're losing this traffic. 

There is a technical reason our content isn't being presented as well as it could be in the SERPs.

This is things like having rich snippets, stars, things like that that could increase click-through rate. These things seem kind of trivial, but actually all of the technical problems that you can find on your site contribute to one or more of these three categories. So again, that was pretty abstract. So let's talk about an example of how that actually plays out. This is actually the first technical check in this audit at that blog post.

An example

So, for instance, we're starting by considering there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed. Well, what are all the ways that that could happen? One of the ways is that URLs are not discoverable by crawlers, and, again, that is a whole thing in itself that can be broken down further.

So maybe it's that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. Of course, this isn't a guarantee that we have a problem. But if there's a problem down here, there's a pretty good chance that that trickles back up to a problem up here that we're really concerned about. The beauty of this isn't just that it winds up helping us create a checklist so that we know all of the technical issues we ought to be looking at.



But it also helps us convey exactly what the meaning is of our findings and why people should care about them. So this is the template that I encourage my colleagues to use at Distilled. "We are seeing ________. This is a problem because something.You should care about that because something else." The way this works is like Mad Lib style, except we work like inside out.

So we start with this point here. We are seeing that our XML sitemaps aren't uploaded to Google Search Console. This is a problem because maybe URLs are not discoverable by crawlers. We should care about that because there is a technical reason our content isn't being indexed, and that right there is exactly the message that you deliver to your client.

So again, this is exactly the framework that we use for our technical audits at Distilled. It's given us a lot more confidence. It's given us a lot more insight into how long this process should take for our analysts and consultants, and it's also got us better outcomes particularly because it's helped us communicate better about what we found. Thank you very much. I would love if more people use this, and feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or questions.

Thank you.

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http://bit.ly/2wSkh1l June 13, 2019 at 05:04PM Moz Blog https://moz.com/blog