SEO On- Air: A Deep Dive Into Nitty-Gritties of Technical SEO

In this episode, we cover:

Today, we speak to John Morabito, the Director of SEO at Stella Rising. John is a marketer, speaker, and blogger with over eight years of experience in SEO, PPC, and other digital marketing channels. He helps businesses reach their potential through search engines.

In this episode, he will discuss the nitty-gritty of technical SEO.

Stay tuned for the next podcast episode, where our guest, Alex Melen, discusses SEO goals agencies must try to achieve.

Show notes

• [01:37-04:41] What is a branded search?
• [05:20-09:04] How important is website crawlability and indexability for webmasters?
• [09:20-15:30] How can low-quality websites cause Google deindexing pages from search?
• [21:13-27:05] What is the best pagination practice that you suggest to the audience? 
• [20:40-37:05] Can you tell us about redirect chains and their impact on the crawl budget?

Show Notes Explanation

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of SEO On-Air. The moment you find that you’re not ranking for a keyword, what would you usually do? Most of us would change the content, build more links, or do a lot of other things to improve rankings. 

However, the most basic issue of a site’s crawlability and indexability is left unattended. To speak more about this, we have Mr. John Morabito, the Director of SEO at Stellarising. 

John is a marketer, speaker, and blogger with over eight years of experience in SEO, PPC, and other digital marketing channels. He helps businesses reach their potential through search engines. Welcome to our show, John.

Time Stamp: 01:37-04:41

Q. What is a branded search?

• We have clients who receive a very big monthly search volume for branded keywords than eclipses the non-branded clicks on a website.
• I started creating an audit process since the branded search was not the focus before.
• As an SEO, we should look at branded keywords and think of using it to serve our customers better.

Time Stamp: 05:20-09:04

Q. How important is website crawlability and indexability for webmasters?

• This is something that totally vital. If Google can’t crawl and index your pages, there’s no chance of ranking.
• Crawlability and indexability are even important for small websites too. Some people would say if you have 500 pages, crawl budget is not an issue, but I’d recommend thinking about it otherwise. 

Time Stamp: 09:20-15:30

Q. How can low-quality websites cause Google deindexing pages from search?

• I’ve seen this happen for real estate websites.
• We have a very big site with user profiles but don’t do much with it, so these pages were not indexed.
• So, Google is kind of telling them, your pages have signals to index, but they don’t have the value that we would like to index.
• So, in this case, we recommended setting up a profile completeness algorithm that would deindex pages that were not complete enough.
• Another way in SEO is implicit and explicit. It is a way to tell search engines that the meaningful pages on this site have unique meta titles and descriptions. Those pages are to consider implicit
• The explicit content can be marked with non-index tags or parameters settings in the Search Console. 

Time Stamp: 21:13-27:05

Q. What is the best pagination practice that you suggest to the audience? 

• Most search engines still use pagination. Although Google doesn’t use them for ranking signals, however, they use pagination for crawlability.
• The most common type of screw up these days is an infinite scroll. 
• My approach to pagination is to show the number of pages at the bottom. You should check out Portant Pagination Tunnel to understand the topic better.
• When I look at pagination, I consider how many clicks it takes to reach a particular page.
• Another question to ask about pagination is, can I better categorize my stuff. So, another thing to look at is the taxonomy of products.

Time Stamp:  20:40-37:05

Q. Can you tell us about redirect chains and their impact on the crawl budget?

• Each of your redirects counts. Anytime you have internal links to redirect, you are essentially using one of your crawl chips for the day.
• We see a correlation between pages that are crawled frequently and pages that tend to do well
• We have a Redirect Chain Fixer tool, and it was built a couple of years ago to solve client needs. It’s a free tool.
• After migration, a site may face a drop in ranking, but this tool mentioned above might be really helpful in such situations.
• There’s another tool called SEO Intern. It takes a spreadsheet and helps you create a JSON file that you can upload in GTM to implement title tags and meta descriptions.
• You can also check our complete website migration checklist.