“More than ever, Hour after hour, Our work is, Never over.”

As the founder of Blind Five Year Old, AJ Kohn combines a deep knowledge of search with a passionate interest in product strategy.  Kohn broke his Engage PDX presentation into three key areas that will help manage and scale SEO. To be successful focus on the following: Crawl, Index, and Rank. Then apply a framework.

Crawl

When it comes to crawl, the Google Crawl team can be stingy. They have limited resources so ensure they can crawl your site efficiently and as completely as possible.

Tips for improving crawl:

• Google has zero tolerance for 500s. Clear them up to improve the crawl process.
• 404s are junk food. Have too many internal 404s? Google will be done with you. Clear them up. Fix 404s and traffic goes up.
• Kohn notes “you are what GoogleBot eats.” His advice is to nourish it well and feed it healthy “everyday food”, not junk-laden “sometimes food”. Track the crawling by page type. Not all pages are the same.
• Sometimes Google crawls the wrong way, so he suggested to the audience we use a robots.txt tool to help direct Google Crawl to the pages we want to make sure are included in the crawl. This will help spend your crawl karma points with Google.

Optimize

Index optimization – Optimize and organize site maps using an XML map. Take time to ensure the site’s crawl organization mirrors the sitemap organization. Rank Rank is not about any one particular term (although it can be hard to convince some clients of this!). It’s best to think of rank in terms of It’s about indices.” Use stock indices as an example. Understand the user and how they search. It’s imperative to get the syntax right and create an index that will materially impact the business. But how do we impact rank? Simple one word answer– Titles. While you can’t hand-optimize millions of pages, we can use smart templates to create a logic tree for creating titles. Using logic and variables will create a strong path to success.

To close his presentation, Kohn provided this final note for all of us whose attention span is short:

TL;DR – Kohn left the audience with a succinct summary of his presentation – Measure, crawl, index, and rank by query class!

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“Google’s ability to index and rank content generally lags behind the changing needs of modern technology.” – Cindy Krum

As she introduced the audience to the concept of Mobile First Indexing, Krum pointed out that we have to consider multiple platforms, devices and modalities when it comes to emerging technology. “Replacement technology is always about to be the new norm.” she pointed out.

Mobile is changing and the category currently includes everything that’s neither laptop nor desktop is being considered mobile. This means search is changing too. Take Google Home, it’s part of Google and as such Google wants it to search so they can monitise it. Unlike ever other type of search, Google Home returns justONE canonical result for per query. Part of the reason search is changing is driven by voice search. 41.6% have done a voice search in past 3 months? Why? All these new technologies that don’t have browsers or keyboards but they can search. All they have is voice.

So, what is mobile first indexing? It’s a process in which search engines create a list of results to answer specific questions. Indexes have an organizing principle. Urls are the unique identifier for SEO. That’s how the index has worked previously but Mobile First Indexing is going to be different. Mobile First Indexing will include:

• Apps – Cloud info & feeds – Google actions – web
• Web – websites – pwa – amp – pwamp – instant apps.

Krum shared her big hunch as we move towards Mobile First Indexing (she emphasized this is purely her speculation), SPECULATION: Mobile-First Indexing ± URL.  And she sees this as a good thing. We’ve been conditioned to make sure web content fits tightest mobile requirements. That will no longer be important. It will be more encompassing and more content will be able to rank.

For many marketers and brands this may not seem mission-critical but Krum challenged that notion and provided some sound advice.

Some action items and cautions for those who might not care:

• Minimally make sure all your pages pass the Mobile Friendly Test.
• Schema – helps Google understand what the data is. Google can’t crawl everything (and won’t).
• Google-Hosted content – If Google hosts it, it’s easier and less expensive than crawling.
• APIs – Google is getting data through APIs. Again, it’s easier and they don’t have to spend money and resources to crawl.
• Security is a big concern – Google is going to push hard on https, so if you haven’t made the switch now would be a good time.

And lastly, if something weird is happening, take time to test, test, test using tools like those found on Mobile Moxie.

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