In early 2018 I asked a few old hands in the search engine optimization field how they define “technical SEO”. This is a phrase that has been around since Moses came down from the mountain. I don’t really grok it. To me, all search engine optimization is a bit “technical”, at least in that you’re using techniques of coding, content design and composition, and link design and placement to alter a Website’s relationship with a search engine. After mulling over their replies and reading several uninspiring attempts at explaining “technical SEO” by other bloggers, I started working on this article in November.
“Search engine optimization”, the phrase, occasionally comes under fire from Web marketing pundits who want to replace it with something else. I don’t see the need for that, although I’ve tried out a few forgettable phrases over the years. I define search engine optimization the following way:
1) The practice of analyzing search engine protocols, actions, resources, and guidelines for the purpose of improving Website compliance and performance in search results. 2) The practice of managing the relationship between a business or entity and the search environments to which it is exposed.
The first definition is a sub-topic within the second definition. When I talk about “SEO” or “search engine optimization”, I usually mean the all-inclusive latter. How do you make that more or less technical? Which part of it is not technical?
If people who perform SEO services (either as in-house specialists or consultants) came together to adopt SEO industry standards, there would be far less confusion about what SEO really is (and how “technical SEO” differs from the rest of SEO). I’ve been calling for marketers to develop true SEO industry standards for over a decade. So far, no one is responding. It’s too technical, I guess.
Without proper standards, how do you explain search engine optimization to someone who asks what you do? The general business public (the part who deal with the Web) have been talking about SEO for over 20 years. To this day you’ll find that people offer up a thousand explanations for what SEO is and does. THAT is why we need industry standards. Any blogger can publish an SEO glossary like the one on SEO Theory. You can make up your own definitions for everything. Many bloggers HAVE done that through the years, and other bloggers have copied their favorite bloggers’ definitions.
*=> Without a proper definition for “search engine optimization”, how can you explain what “Technical SEO” is supposed to be? Isn’t all SEO technical because it’s all a matter of technique?
So what did my online friends have to say about technical SEO? It’s funny that I received only a handful of responses. The group where I posed the question is named “Tech SEO”. I have interacted with nearly every member at one time or another. I’ve known some of these folks for over a decade, at least in an online sense. We’ve had our differences in the past, but I wasn’t looking for an argument about the meaning of “technical SEO”. To me it’s a nonsensical phrase because I cannot confidently distinguish between the “technical” and “non-technical” aspects of search engine optimization.
But a couple of responses helped me put a context around what other people think. They feel that technical SEO includes any of the following:
- How a Website is coded
- How a Web server is configured
- How a Website is structured
- Data analysis
The list seems short but these are broad topics. For example, everything to do with HREFLANG, “robots” meta directives, LINK relationships, link attributes, and image embedding (such as whether to use ALT= text) falls into the coding topic.
If you write, review, or modify “.htaccess” or “config” files for Web hosting, that falls under server configuration. I would guess installing the CMS, managing the SQL (or alternative) database, and any other software used to provide content or functionality on the site also falls under “server configuration”.
And the structure of the Website is important. This goes well beyond the navigation you include on every page. It includes the rules or criteria you follow (if any) for writing TITLEs, placing widgets on pages, how pages are laid out, how links are included (do they keyword-rich anchor text?), etc.
The “data analysis” may only be limited to analyzing data about Website performance (error conditions, redirects, etc.). But could it not also include analyzing referral data? What about using Bing Toolbox and Google Search Console to fetch and render pages?
And where should you include XML sitemap management? Is that part of the coding, configuration, structure, or analysis? Maybe it falls into all four major topics.
Can Technical SEO Be Classified Any Better Than This?
When you write an SEO plan, or lay out a specific strategy, that’s a task that falls outside the above categories. And yet I’ve seen people include these functions in their “technical SEO expertise”. Again, the lack of standards makes everything confusing.
In order to rationally accept that technical SEO is a real thing, I need to arbitrarily distinguish between the PLANNING and the IMPLEMENTATION. I can almost live with that distinction. The non-technical SEO specialist may recognize there is a problem, may suggest a solution for the problem, but doesn’t get down into the details of applying the solution.
The non-technical SEO specialist may read the reports, interpret the data, and write some detailed analysis about how the site’s traffic is moving up, down, or nowhere. But is it the technical specialist’s job to do the keyword research, plan the editorial calendar, set up the content rules, or figure out where to get the links?
While link placement and design clearly are technical tasks, does strategizing for links fall into that technical category or not?
If what you do isn’t “Technical SEO”, then what is it (other than NON-Technical SEO)? In the past I’ve used the phrase’ “strategic SEO” but only as a catchall for my personal cleverness at devising and implementing strategies. Sometimes I had help implementing the strategies. Sometimes I used someone else’s strategies. The implementations were themselves strategic, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to divide search engine optimization into Technical and Strategic.
We could experiment with a phrase like Conceptual SEO but I don’t like the sound of that. It’s a little too theoretical even for me. Would you really feel confident going into a sales call by saying, “Hi, I’m Michael Martinez, and I’m the Conceptual SEO specialist here at Reflective Dynamics”? It hardly rolls off the tongue. Worse, it sounds rather wimpy and artificial.
When you tell people “I do technical SEO” they set an expectation that, perhaps, you’ll fix their problem. If you tell people “I’m not the technical SEO guy” you usually have a different label for yourself, but in my experience it doesn’t include “SEO”. My partner Randy Ray is perfectly good at all this technical stuff but he hates doing it; he loves to write and manages our content team. You can ask him a technical question and like any good specialist he’ll either give you an answer or say, “I don’t know; let me find out for you.”
There is a customer service role in search engine optimization. When you have enough clients and employees interacting with each other, you need a designated CS rep to ensure everyone agrees on what needs to be done and to nag the team into meeting their deadlines. If you’re the lone consultant handling the whole business for yourself, you have to be your own CS rep. But while that’s not Technical Search Engine Optimization, I don’t really see it as an SEO function at all. It’s a business role (and a very important role).
If we can’t identify non-Technical SEO functions, then how can we be sure that we really know what Technical SEO is? The distinctions should be as clear as night and day, at least in most cases.
Other Things An SEO Specialist Must Know And Do
Over the past few years I’ve noticed we SEO professionals have to fill out an increasing number of forms and things. I always seem to be typing meta information into something. Maybe it’s a local business account, or a Webmaster dashboard account. I have to set up analytics accounts, advertising accounts, and other accounts before I can start reading reports.
Just to run some tests you have to fill out forms. Is all this information sharing really “technical” work? Or is it just administrative work? Administrative SEO doesn’t sound very cool, either. It’s more like Concierge SEO. That phrase could almost work for me. A good Concierge is a very helpful person, even important. The Concierge knows where to get the things you need, or how to get things done. But the Concierge doesn’t implement the solutions.
However, no matter how successful I become, I’m not going to hire someone to fill out forms for me. I don’t need a Concierge to assist me. I provide the Concierge service myself when I fill out the forms for the client (or myself).
Analysis is a big part of the job. Whether you dig into code or not, whether you know how to parse a Netstat report or code a rewrite rule, if you’re doing any kind of search engine optimization you’re analyzing something. When I managed a weekly training session for my SEO team, I started every new group off with a review of the search results. We looked at sample queries on a projector and talked about how the search results pages were laid out, and how they were filled out. This gave everyone a common frame of reference.
Even my Copy Specialists needed to understand what the end result of their work should look like. I expected them to know how the search results were assembled, and to visualize the results we were trying to achieve.
I could live with a division of duties between Analytical SEO and Technical SEO, allowing for some overlap between the two roles. But even so I don’t think you’ve quite covered everything. The Analyst may indeed suggest the strategies while the Technician implements them, but who does the research to find the resources, competitive sites, and most important keywords? When you only wear one hat on the team, in my experience, there is usually someone else who does a lot of this prep work (typically a CS rep).
Backlink analysis is a huge part of search engine optimization. It’s not really necessary for SEO, in the sense that no search engine requires anyone to go out and grab all the links they can. Today’s version of “technical SEO” specialist is more likely to be asked to clean up a spammy backlink profile than to obtain as many links as possible.
Someone once falsely said “Michael Martinez doesn’t like links”. That’s never been true. I was grabbing and exchanging links in the 1990s before most of you even thought about doing SEO. What I don’t like are the cheap, spammy, short-sighted link building methods that 95% of Web marketers invest in. Despite making impressive strides in deflating the value of self-placed links, Google continues to rely on the power of link anchor text in its search results. Hence, there is still a market for link building services. Whether link building is all you do, if you’re an SEO service provider you need to at least know how to get some links.
It’s better to earn links than to buy them, but if you’re going to build links for the sake of manipulating search results then you don’t want anyone else to know how you do it. And you don’t want to do it the way everyone else is.
Does Technical SEO Include Running Tools?
One boon of waiting so long to publish this article is that I saw an interesting thread on Twitter in February. SEMRush asked “if someone has only 30 minutes to perform a technical SEO audit, what should they focus on? Why?” 26 people replied to the question. Until I became respondent #27, no one even suggested looking at the source code of the Website.
A lot of the replies consisted of running some SEO tool. You people and your tools. As if technical anything could be run by software. Imagine Captain Kirk calling down to Engineering in an emergency: “Scotty! We need warp drive in 5 minutes or we’re all dead!” And then Commander Montgomery Scott, pride of the Federation Engineering Corps, replies: “Nae canna do it, Captain! Our cloud account has expired and all the data has been deleted! I’ll have to recrawl the engine cores again and build a new index. That’ll take at least 30 minutes assuming our Wi-Fi doesn’t go all buggy again!”
Scotty just wouldn’t use software to do a man’s job.
The common fascination with SEO crawlers and tools perplexes me to this day. If you monitor any kind of Web forum where people ask for help with their SEO, someone always mentions crawling a site. And after the crawling gurus are done the SEO plugin afficionados move in with their suggestions. No one actually asks for a description of the problem they’re trying to help with. I see this time and time again. Someone vaguely describes an issue – and I have no idea of what their problem is – and people immediately start telling them to crawl the site, install SEO plugins, and use canonicals and redirects to get rid of all the duplicate content.
I’m sorry, Mr. Scott, but that just doesn’t cut it in this Technical SEO fleet.
If you need to know whether a site can be crawled from top to bottom, bow to stern, etc., then you should run a crawler on it. If you’re doing an audit and you want to know how much duplicate content the site has (or other voluminous things such a crawl-audit would discover), then the crawl makes sense. I’ve run many an SEO crawl myself. But there is no reason to suggest out of the blind that people should crawl their sites because they’re not happy with the search results.
If you’re publishing in WordPress, chances are pretty good you’ll want to do some SEO thing on every page. There are a lot of SEO plugins that help you do that. We use several SEO plugins, many even. And we don’t allow the plugins to choose which of their features will be active. Some of the things SEO plugins do by default are just plain stupid. The developers have to choose some sort of default setting, so I cut them some slack. But anyone who just installs a plugin and lets it do its thing is asking for trouble. And they usually get what they are asking for.
Scotty runs diagnostics on the Enterprise all the time. He uses software to do at least part of that. He also visually inspects the system. Commander Geordi LaForge asks the computer specific questions. If there’s one thing the Star Trek writers do correctly, it’s condense what should be time-consuming detailed work down to a fine art of bullshit. If there is a real technical side to search engine optimization, I firmly believe it does not consist of doing bullshit moves with software.
As Scotty says, “Use the right tool for the right job!” (or something like that).
Technical SEO is Here to Stay: We Just Don’t Know What It Is
Even after thinking about technical SEO for a year, and reading what other people have to say on the subject, I don’t believe we have any idea of what the phrase is supposed to mean. You may have an idea, and I’d love to see you articulate it clearly, succinctly, and convincingly. But after several years of “I do technical SEO” from thousands of people, the industry seems no closer to explaining what it is.
It doesn’t even fall into a “you know it when you see it” category. After all, if it’s technical SEO then non-technical people shouldn’t really understand it.
I think some day, especially if we developed a real standards group, the industry will be able to concentrate all its definition power on the Technical SEO Super Star Destroyer. We should be able to pin this thing down. We need to do that so everyone is talking about the same thing. That’s what standards are all about: keeping things clear and well-defined.
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When I recognize there is a problem on a customer’s website, I suggest a solution for the problem, and get down into the details of applying the solution if required.
May I now call myself technical SEO too? Just kidding! LOL
I do not call myself SEO since years already, because SEO is known as… you know what… and which has nothing to do with ethical professional Search Engine Optimization.
Excellent read Michael! Thanks for sharing!