🔎 Focus: Technical SEO
🔴 Impact: High
🟢 Difficulty: Low
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Dear Tech SEO 👋
Let’s review the fundamental of Technical SEO. In simple terms I categorize Tech SEO in 4 layers. Let me explain each of them and their impact 🙂
My 4 Tech SEO Pillars
Tech SEO can get quite complex and here is my effort of making it simpler (and more fun):
If you are not a developer you do not have to fear Tech SEO (we try hard to not being too technical in our content).
One thing is true tho, you need to understand the principles of programming to easily understand the business impact of SEO. But with AI, learning the basics of programming and its logic is easier than ever. Example:
You have a crawling issues from which 1M pages if your website are not being indexed. The business impact of fixing that crawling issue can boost revenue significantly.
Ready? Let’s goooooooo
Layer 1: The Structural Foundation
The layer 1 is not necessarily the simplest. Of course there are basics like meta data (title and description) but things like Structured Data can get quite challenging to implement properly.
Check our experiment with Structured Data (to get ready for Agentic eCommerce):
The Layer 1 is the one you cannot miss. The core pillar. If you don't have these basics right, you aren't even in the game for the long term.
How I approach this layer:
HTML, CSS: for optimal site
performancespeed 😅 and optimal rendering and crawlability.Href Lang, URL structure & Structured Data: site hierarchy and multi-region visibility.
Navigation & UI: enhanced user experience and conversions.
Layer 2: Performance & Experience
Once the structure is set, we look at how the site "behaves." This layer focuses on the bridge between your server and the user’s browser, specifically regarding JavaScript and Speed. We consider conversion rates a fundamental part a fundamental part of SEO.
My key focus of this layer:
JavaScript: Loading and rendering issues (blockers). Core Web Vitals upgrades. A faster website impacts directly dwell time, which we had confirmation to be a ranking factor.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization): SEO does not exists without a business case behind it. Many are happy with top rankings, I am not happy until conversion rate grows from SEO.
Advanced Schema: Click-through rate is my top-level “conversion“ rate. The first win is from the top ranking down to the page view. I focus on getting more page views with a proper visualization of product data on search results. Something like this:
Clean Index: basically remove any errors or “bad pages for whatever reason“. Something like this:
Layer 3: Backend & Scalability
This is where I get most of my “programmatic SEO“ cases built. Many think programmatic SEO is creating content and publishing in bulk (without any added value). That’s spam.
The way I see, programmatic SEO builds value that captures demand in bulk. It could be a simple tool like a “logo maker“:
Programmatic SEO is capturing demand in bulk.
What do you need to win “logo maker“: a software solution (programmatic).
Good Programmatic SEO for eCommerce
Within the framework “capture demand in bulk with a software solution“ there could be indeed cases to capture demand with content.
💁♂ Let’s start with the fact that eCommerce is “programmatic SEO“ by default: one website and thousands or millions of pages, all of them relevant to the user (product pages).
One case we often implement is on eCommerce websites that helps users, covers intent and has low risk of becoming a spam update drop:
Optimizing product descriptions with AI-Generated product summaries:
Unique data (manufacturer specs + user reviews)
Helpful for the user
Low error prone
We implement it often on Shopify stores and they are both fast ranked and long-term proof:
Programmatic SEO work often on eCommerce if done well.
How we build eCommerce content bulk project:
Programatic data collection
Multi-prompt AI layer
Editorial page
Manual upgrades
Our main intention with any programmatic SEO project is to help users. As long as you have that motto in mind you are quite safe from spam updates.
My approach for this layer of Tech SEO:
Key focus: Programmatic SEO (pSEO), API access, database optimizations, and server-side response.
Server Response Optimization: I usually work with hundreds of thousands if not millions of pages here. Server log analysis tells me which issues are having the crawlers. Optimization of server response goes down to keep users happy.
API Access & DB Optimization: a fundamental part of large scale SEO is proper access to data, for example via headless solutions where the storefront lives separately from the website data (product data) and it relies on a connection to an optimized database. Backend programming comes to play.
Layer 4: Data Processing & AI
This is the "Advanced Tier" where SEO meets Data Science. At this level, you’re not just reacting to search engines, you’re predicting them (you got me, this sentence was full AI written 😅).
Key focus: Predictive analysis, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and advanced automation.
Why it matters: Using NLP processing helps you understand exactly how LLMs (like ChatGPT) perceive your brand’s authority. This layer uses web scraping and in-depth data analysis to spot market trends before your competitors even see the data.
For this layer I will refer to the figures I follow and respect the most in the AI SEO space. They can tell way better than me how to execute AI to the benefit of SEO:
That’s it for today.
Oh here tech SEO session with me (covering layers 1 and 2):
Full 30-min over-the-shoulder video
Reply with your domain name, if you want me to help you with your Technical SEO, whatever layer might be.
Until next time 👋
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