The combination of designers, engineers, marketing managers, product managers and CEO’s can make SEO volatile. Canonicals are removed, pages are not optimized, navigation links are removed and redirects broken. Sometimes these factors unknown until keywords disappear and traffic drops. There is a lot that cannot be controlled such as Googles algorithm and the competitors.
When safe SEO is practiced the system will tell the business if there is a problem. The business will be aware before anything actually goes wrong. Critical issues can impact traffic and must not be missed. Effective SEO tools will alert a business when an issue needs attention. This means critical issues will not be missed. The business is not required to log into the system because the details are sent by email. Some sites have more issues than other but they must be handled as they appear.
Monitoring is critical so any issues can be caught in the staging phase. Once they reach production they are harder to handle. The Google indexes and crawls are so quick issues must be found prior to going live. This can be accomplished with a staging audit to remove the stress from major migrations, releases and production audits. Key changes can be displayed on a report before the production is updated. Behaviors and priorities can be configured so alerts are received and logged.
There are a lot of changes occurring on a site that do not always impact SEO. This can be an added H2 or re-optimizing a title. Sometimes an H2 is removed when the design is changed. There are changes made for the purpose of improving SEO such as optimizing an H1 or a title. With the right tools pages can be tagged for the analysts with the results emailed once sufficient data has been collected. The need to check the impact weeks later is eliminated because an analysis can be established from the alert details window. The email additionally compares the post and pre changes as soon as the information is available. This will contain details such as high volume keywords and a decrease in clicks.
Controlled SEO tests can be created and run on numerous pages with current tools. Comparisons can be established between the changes made on the pages. Businesses often attempt to go back in time to see when and why the traffic to the site decreased. Screenshot and HTML snapshots can be saved to make it easier to see the changes that have occured. Different archive versions can be compared to determine exactly what has changed. It is possible to view a full HTML diff, a structured SEO diff or a content diff. If the issue was caused by a change made on page it becomes easy to diagnose.
A business can make preparations for a mobile index by comparing the mobile pages to the desktop pages. There are many tools providing a nice variety of diffs. There is even a special diff available for comparing the internet archive to the live pages.
There is no doubt SEO is difficult, stressful and frustrating work. There are numerous analytics and tools available to make the process easier. When a business is informed of any pending issue by email alerts the situation can be handled quickly before the issue deteriorates. The right tools eliminate any changes that were not planned as well as SEO emergencies.
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