The State of Technical SEO in Australia

Technical SEO is the foundation of SEO. There is no escaping the fact that to have your website perform well in search engines you have to get the base technical configuration and architecture right. Yet in Australia the standard agencies and consultants set in getting the technical elements of a site correct is low. Project after project, agency after agency the same scenario unfolds. You get behind the dash of a corporate site and look under the bonnet to discover a litany of errors, configuration problems and development issues all which effect a sites performance in search.

The most extreme case was a recent project where the agency had a significant retainer for link building and promotion. Month after month the agency was focused on off site promotion ensuring every last dollar of the retainer was spent. The first day of reviewing the websites configuration showed that it was not even being crawled by Google. Anyone in the industry will know that, investing in links and promotion when your website is not even being crawled is lunacy. [quote_right]”investing in links and promotion when your website is not even being crawled is lunacy.”[/quote_right]

Getting websites into a reasonable technical state can be as easy as

  • Fixing all of the errors reported in Webmaster tools
  • Using a simple error detection tools like Moz
  • Ensuring there are no glaring user experience errors as you browse the site

Yet in the Australian market it is not uncommon to find that marketing managers nor IT teams are observing let alone addressing errors being reported by Google Webmaster Tools.

And even though the above precautions are a good way to start the technical SEO process, they are only the starting point to ensure your site is technically optimised.

Even though there are elements of SEO that are far more focused on creativity, the reality is that execution of creative initiatives are far more effective when done with a deep technical understanding of media from the bottom of the stack to the tip of the camera lens.

Everyone responsible for SEO outcomes be they CMOs, agencies or marketing managers need to come to terms with the fact that driving SEO outcomes involves technicalities. Even going past the point of technical configurations and structure, the analysis required to drive performance in competitive space is once again a technical endeavour. CMOs and marketing managers that try to duck and dodge the technical realities of SEO and convince themselves it is all about content marketing are not going to be the ones driving results. Agencies and consultants that don’t do thorough and accurate technical auditing and implementation will be doing their clients a great disservice sitemap.

Stuart Andrew
Focused on Clicks and the People Behind Them