"Move fast and break things" does, in fact, mean broken software. (All web software changes run this risk, even if your organization doesn't practice agile software development.)
Sometimes that means impacting critical search engine optimization elements of your website. When it goes wrong (and it inevitably will,) if you don't catch it fast enough you will see your SEO traffic drop, and possibly need an SEO investigation to find/resolve the issue.
Companies love to focus on growing SEO traffic, but invest too little resources in maintaining the organic traffic they already have.
To avoid this issue it's critical to have a good SEO quality assurance (QA) process. That entails:
These are the things everyone (with web software updates) should consider:
With that in mind, let's start to talk about what's important to watch out for in terms of SEO. Keep in mind that these checks aren't about improving your SEO - they're about not the losing ground you’ve already earned. (It’s hard to grow when you are fighting to maintain the status quo!)
To state the obvious, don't block your website (or any critical pages/sections of the site) from search engines on accident.
Despite how easy it is to check, many sites will accidentally push a stage (blocking) robots.txt file into production and not catch the issue until organic traffic drops dramatically. Here, the healthy structure of all things accessibility is provided.
Specific items to check:
Weird examples of things to watch for:
GSC notified us that Googlebot was blocked via robots.txt, but the file we could see looked normal / did not match the blocking file we saw in GSC. As it turned out, 3 of the 8 load balancing servers were using the stage robots file on accident, and we only checked one that looked okay. Googlebot, unfortunately, checked them all.
Despite Google's insistence that they are totally, completely fine with JS and SPAs, issues can and do arise with accessibility to content, links, and core functionality.
Classic examples of JS issues include the following:
In general, when possible, build in non-JS (and CSS, and cookie) dependent functionality, or build workarounds for when it's turned off. These workarounds do not need to be "pretty," but they should be functional.
Turn off these features and browse your site and see how well it works. Unfortunately, this is not a perfect test plan, but it can be a helpful/visual overview.
If/when something isn't accessible in this initial test, run the page in question through the Google Mobile Friendliness Test. Export the Googlebot-rendered code, and control+find for key content/links. If you can't find them, you have an issue.
Inspect Element and View Rendered Source can be useful tools here as well.
Ensure that all existing (SEO) content, as well as any new content a) still exist, and b) are what you expected to see (same or better than previously)!
Specific items to check:
Weird examples of things to watch for:
A plugin updated their JS code for a related products widget, rendering once-crawlable links into something search engines couldn't see. This, in turn, impacted the link equity flowing to these critical products.
Even in a mobile-first world, so many of us keep forgetting to check non-desktop devices for issues! Crawl the site as mobile Googlebot using Screaming Frog or your crawler of choice:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z‡ Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
For SEO QA on mobile, you are checking for all of the above sections, but specifically with a mobile-template viewpoint.
Pay particular attention to:
Weird examples of things to watch for:
As you start to create your checklist, consider:
Again: check these in stage, before the changes are released. Then check them again immediately upon go-live. Unexpected things can change between the 2 environments, and this is the easiest way to avoid these issues.
Even with a great SEO QA Checklist, things will inevitably fall through the cracks. As I mentioned earlier, your SEO testing list should evolve over time as you learn the ins-and-outs of your particular site and the things that commonly go wrong.
After that, it's a good idea to set up monitoring tools to catch these issues as quickly as possible. Why? A faster fix means less work to recover from the issues the problem caused in the first place.
It's incredibly common for websites undergoing migrations - or even normal, ongoing updates - to simply "forget" to get tracking set up. Either they neglect to implement a Google Analytics UA code altogether, neglect to add it to some specific pages or templates, or they forget to set up event tracking, eCommerce tracking, or Goal tracking.
This can lead to a freak out when GA organic traffic drops overnight. If/when you see this happen, check Google Search Console first. If you don't see a corresponding drop there, chances are, you have a tracking issue. If you support figuring out or resolving this issue, help is available!
SEO QA Testing isn’t rock science, but it is important to maintain and grow your organic traffic when your website changes over time. Equip your QA team with the right insights and tools to ensure success!
If you need help defining your SEO QA checklist to amplify your digital marketing efforts, The Gray Dot Company can help. Reach out!