Sometimes the Technology (really) Matters

Conrad Saam Conrad Saam | October 3, 2013

Want an immediate 56% increase in your natural search traffic?

In most of my SEO 101 talks I invariably gloss over the technology aspect of SEO on the grounds that the platforms have evolved to  adhere to technical best practices for search.   However, identifying and fixing major technical issues is the one search tactic (outside of enormous Adwords budgets) that delivers massive and immediate performance improvements.  As an agency, this has the added benefit of delighting clients by associating confusing technical lexicon with increased phone calls from prospective clients.  SEO Agency Nirvana.  That’s what happened two months ago; and while I won’t share the client or the problem or the solution – I’m happy to share the end result:

Technical Fixes

That’s an immediate and persistent 56% increase in traffic – and if I squint really hard, it looks to me like a trend line that is continuing to grow.  Note also that we implemented the fixes at 2 am on a Saturday morning – futzing around with major technical changes is fraught with peril and best done well outside of regular traffic hours.

Was this cheap and easy?  No.  A full audit to weed out technical issues is time consuming, technical and requires access and working knowledge of advanced tools.

How to Tell if you Might Have a Major Technical Problems

This is by no means an exhaustive list . . .

  • Search engines can’t find most of your pages.  (When you do a google search for site:mywebsite.com, more than a third of the pages on are not included.)
  • Search engines find more than all of your pages.  What?  (When you do a google search for site:mywebsite.com, the number of pages returned are 2-10 times as many pages as you think you actually have – make sure you include “supplemental results” found by clicking the “see omitted results” link after the last result in your site: search.)
  • You change something and your site traffic plummets.
  • Your site isn’t built on WordPress
  • Your site was built more than 4 years ago and hasn’t been updated.
  • Your Google Webmaster Tools interface has anything under “Site Messages”.  (You do have GWT access don’t you?)

Lots of lawyers are looking for the easy SEO solution.  This may be it.