How to Scale and Grow your Enterprise Technical SEO Strategy

How to Scale and Grow your
Enterprise Technical SEO
Strategy
Dan Taylor, SALT.agency

Today...
01
eCom Holiday Readiness
Utilizing Edge SEO
How to use Edge SEO to automate and improve processes in product
management (from an SEO perspective).
How to deal with out-of-stock products to maintain brand visibility and avoid
negatively impacting the user experience.
02
03
Leveraging Entities
The best way to use entities scalably for better support of content creation.

Dan Taylor
Head of Research & Development at SALT.agency
2018 TechSEO Boost Research Prize Winner
SEJ VIP Contributor
Previously spoken at:
BrightonSEO 2019, 2021x2
TechSEO Boost, 2018
Optimization Moscow 2020, 2021
WeLoveSEO, 2020
SEO Camp’us Paris, 2020
New York SEO Meetup, 2019

Poll Question
When creating lead generation content; how frequently do you get feedback
from your SDRs & what makes a good MQL convert to SQL?
A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Never
D. What is MQL & SQL?

What is Edge SEO?
Edge SEO is a practice within the wider spectrum of technical SEO that relies
on serverless technologies to execute code as it passes through a CDN and
create a “middle ground” of SEO implementation processes – all without
impacting website infrastructure.
These solutions provide website owners, marketing teams, and non-
developers the ability to modify content and implement vital technical SEO
components with almost one click code deployment and minimal associated
DevOps involvement, and costs.

What is Edge SEO?
It’s important to keep the website development team involved in all
conversations and planned deployments through workers to ensure these
deployments remain complementary to the existing, and planned, code
base, and don’t cause conflicts and other bugs.

Origin
Server
Final
Response
Request
Filter
Chain
Response
Filter
Chain
Body
Filter
Chain
Edge
Redirects
Content &
Meta Injection
Log Data
Collection

Potential Applications & Automations
These applications are designed for when there is no other suitable
alternative for implementation.
Suitability can be defined in a number of ways, ranging from lead time v
opportunity cost, platform capabilities, or support from other third-parties.
A number of applications can simply be implemented as a band aid, whilst
the “hard code” implementation is progressing through the JIRA board to
realization.

Potential Applications & Automations
● 301/302 Redirects
● Prerender/Dynamic Render JS
● Collect Log (Request) Files
● Implement Hreflang
● Implement Security Headers
● AB Testing
● Overwriting Robots.txt
● Implementing JSON Schema
● Overwrite or Inject Metadata
● Overwrite or Inject Body Copy
● Age Verification Barriers
● Waiting Room Tokens

Dynamic Title Tags
Even with Google now choosing to
rewrite title tags, we could/should
still be working to make them as
good as possible.
You can use your CDN to
dynamically rewrite them on the fly
when they are requested by a UA.
This way you’re automating a
potential competitive advantage in
the SERPs.
<script>
$(window).on(“load”, function (){
document.title=”Best Price X “ +
document.getElementByClassName
(“price”)[0].innerText +”
| Brand Name”
});
</script>

JavaScript
Rendering
Dynamic rendering is a solution
supported by Google, and can be
implemented through the Edge.
This also allows you to control
which pages are being pre-
rendered, and also means you’re
not pre-rendering or dynamic-
rendering individual pages on the
fly.
Google Cloud
Scheduler
GSC: Sitemap Bucket
Google Cloud
Pub/Sub: Prerender
Topic
GSC Bucket
Google
Cloud
Function:
Pull
Sitemaps
& Publish
URLs
Edge
Worker.
E.g.
Cloudflare
Worker
GCF:
Prerender
Webpage

This is what you’ve learned in this section...
Edge SEO can be worth exploring in helping…
● Improve technical performance
● Bandaid technical issues whilst the actual fix is in the dev queue
● Improve user experience
● Improve data collection and site use/crawlability visibility
And importantly, the flowchart to determine if you should include
developers and other stakeholders in your edge SEO efforts...

Am I
planning
Edge SEO
stuff?
TELL THE DEVS &
FOLLOW THEIR
DEPLOY PROCESS

Why Are We Talking About Entities Again?
We’ve known for a long time now that Google has advanced (and continues)
to advance it’s understanding of topics and entities, and the relationship
(and strength) of relationship between them.
In more (very) recent times, this is also important in how Google is now
changing title tags using elements from the URL, HTML, Image ALT text,
headers…

Quality Pages = Better Pages Indexed

A Short History Of How This Happened
With Hummingbird 2013, Google took search phrases, such as [whitby town]
and advanced it from being 2 words, 10 characters, to meaning an entity:
m/09t9_k.
This then allowed RankBrain 2015 to go from seeing [whitby town play
football] to [m/09t9_k play m/02vx4].

A Short History Of How This Happened
Understanding this, and then the related topics and entities around specific
topics/entities allows us create better user experiences and map more points
within Google’s own perception of the world.
Google has been learning about the world through the internet for years,
through various classification systems.

Entity Metrics
Relatedness - Relatedness is determined based on the co-occurrence
entities. Basically, if two entities are referenced frequently on the web.
Notability - Google uses a formula to determine how notable an entity is. It
basically breaks down that the more valuable an entity is (determined by
things including links, reviews, mentions, and relevance), the lower the value
of the category or topic it’s competing in, the higher its notability.

Entity Metrics
Contribution - Contribution is determined by external signals (e.g., links,
reviews) and is basically a measure of an entity’s contribution to a topic. A
review from a well-established and respected food critic would add to this
metric than my opinions on how well the restaurant cooked their steak.
Prize - The prize metric. A measure of the various relevant prizes an entity
has received. These could be a industry awards, peer awards, or
commendations in specific fields. It helps if the prize itself is an entity.

Images
In 2012 Google released a post talking about
how it was using image classifications to get
better at identifying contents, to improve image
search.
Illustration from the patent 10,534,810

Nodes can
also reflect
association
scores.

Illustration from the patent 9785696

How Impactful Can Incorporating Relatedness Be?
For a large CDN we mapped out learning centers based on a combination of
keyword research, PAA, and mapping entities into a structure - which
resulted in 18 unique URLs, and this has grown steadily over time to provide
a big (relevant) traffic source.

Getting This Data @
Scale
Google Image Search: Image Category Tags
Knowledge Graph API
Carl Hendy’s Entity Search Engine
EntityExplorer.com
EntityExplorer.com

Images could provide a great insight into what other topics and “aspects”
Google is associating with your original topic.
There are great tools built by some greater people to leverage knowledge
graph API data on scale.
You are now armed with the metrics and explanations of why and how
entities matter, and why they should be adopted as part of the “keyword
research” process.

Poll Question
When do you start planning your content strategy around Black Friday and
Cyber Week?
A. August
B. September
C. October
D. November

Enterprise Level Holiday Readiness
We know in eCom that all industries have seasonality, but for the majority of
B2C ecom sites the final quarter of the year can be huge in terms of revenue,
and introducing new customers to the brand.

Enterprise Level Holiday Readiness
This goes beyond user acquisition, but also needs to incorporating retention
of existing users - and laying the positive user experience foundations to
make the new users want to come back.
This means creating clear messaging, and creating a realistic (and positive)
user experience forecast of what they can expect from your website, and
product fulfilment.

Managing Peak Traffic & Customer Experience
During major sales events or known high traffic periods such as Black Friday
and the Cyber days, balancing traffic load and user experience can be
difficult for some websites (depending on the stack). The last thing you want
to do is provide a negative experience.
While waiting room tokens may not necessarily improve your rankings, you
can bring this to the table as an option to help improve conversion and
experience around these times.

Modifying Content Based On Stock & Time
Performing a search and navigating to a product page takes user effort. If
they navigate to a page that is out of stock, it’s a negative user experience
that can not only damage this specific user session, but also any future
interaction the user may have with the brand.

Dynamic Content: Interstitials
Using workers, implementing a rule
for product pages (and category
pages if applicable) were you can
present an interstitial/non-intrusive
pop-up based on stock availability,
and time of the day (next day
delivery cut off times) can really help
you with conversion and improving
user experience.

Dynamic Content: Out Of Stock
Out of stock messaging can
oftentimes trigger Google to treat
the PLP as a soft 404 - but you still
want it to rank.
Using Edge, and based on page
criteria, page copy and elements can
be amended to maintain a customer
value proposition, positive user
experience, without the page soft
404-ing.

Waiting Room
Tokens
This can be built out with Fastly’s
Compute@Edge, which a number
of companies have done, and can
also be built out using the Amazon
API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB,
and a token service.
A large number of users all request
the same URL(s), the sales URLs,
and landing pages, in a short time
period to take advantage of the low
prices, and stock availability.
Users are given a waiting room
token and held on the edge. This
auto-refreshes and if the user
continues to refresh the device and
browser, they will retain the same
token and not make multiple
requests to the origin.
Once allowed, the user can navigate
through to the website and
subsequent requests go to the
origin.

Edge SEO techniques can be great short-term methods to improve your goal
hitting and maximising revenue generation from peak holiday traffic.
With overlays and agility in changing content, you can implement cross-sell
and up-sell tactics.

Thank you!
@taylordanrw // dantaylor.online/slides //
salt.agency

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