I have a gift: an innate ability to find weird things in SEO.
As an SEO professional, this skill can be both a blessing and a curse.
A blessing, because I can usually figure out what makes one website stand out over another. A curse, because I would spend many hours, including many nights, studying search results and looking at things for so long that it gave me what I called “brainaches.”
Never heard of FWS? That’s because it’s a new acronym, of my own creation. Yes, you are witnessing SEO history right now.
Ready for FWS? Here are some things you can do when approaching a new prospect or project.
FWS
In all the years of running SEO initiatives and using SEO, I have found that there are many who are talented in content strategy, information architecture/taxonomy or maybe even deep technical analysis.
As much as we try to create the perfect process documentation for SEO efforts, there will always be occasional issues. Challenges you won’t find on checklists.
Sometimes finding the odd stuff can be the key that unlocks SEO success.
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Therefore, we account for time for FWS in our SEO scopes. We need a certain amount of time for research and discovery, even a few hours each month, for a project.
Convincing a client to agree to “investigation” (pulling strings and following the trail) can be difficult.
So, assuming you can convince the powers that be that FWS is necessary, in what ways might we learn to think differently and find those pieces that can lead to SEO success?
The place: ask
You can learn a lot about a website by doing this simple task. Type site: in Google, followed by the domain you want to review.
Then repeat this exercise with the www version:
Now, in this case, Searchengineland.com resides in that, without the www. So expect the query “www” to return zero results if everything is as it should be. And that’s right: zero results for www.
But I can’t count the number of times I’ve discovered unknown subdomains for businesses. Sometimes even great/old content was heavily linked and was about to be removed in the next redesign.
Now we needed to think about how we could incorporate an updated version of that content and redirect those URLs to maintain link value and maybe even regain some of the search traffic (rankings) that existed years ago.
Another common occurrence is finding .pdf content that nobody cared about.
When you review your analytics to determine the performance of your SEO efforts, you may not be aware of how much traffic is coming to .pdf pages hosted on your website because they are not tracked by analytics.
However, if you were to run a Semrush report and filter those results by .pdf, you might find yourself ranking for some pretty big keywords and not getting traffic visibility.
In many cases, you may find that by converting these .pdfs into HTML pages, you can achieve a few things:
Analytics tracking for these classified pages. A more consistent user experience, with a fully built page, complete with site navigation, etc. Ability to update these pages and optimize them; it may also link from these pages to other relevant pages.
Review a website’s history
All too often, I’ve seen people jump into an SEO initiative and “optimize what’s there” instead of digging through a website’s history to see what was there before.
Case in point (real world example): I was recently approached by a potential client who had lost a significant amount of their organic search traffic over the past year. A routine I’ve always followed is to generate an organic search report through Semrush, filter to remove brand keywords, and look at all-time trends.
You can quite easily see the significant drop.
The next step is to copy this report, paste it into a separate tab and start comparing URLs.
In this case, the perspective had gone through a redesign. Instead of recreating the successful pages, they (under the guidance of an “SEO consultant”) decided to turn those pages into a section of a page (ie: category#page-name.html).
By using the Wayback Machine (archive.org), I was able to see exactly what these pages looked like previously and put into perspective, in very simple terms, why things fell off a cliff.
Google the brand
Another tactic I use for FWS is to search for a company name and click through some of the results.
Several times, in doing this, I’ve found official company domains that I didn’t recognize. In other words, the company had changed the domain for their company and just parked the old domain.
For those interested in link building, this could be a quick fix. That’s why my agency has a standard domain portfolio analysis procedure. We want to know all the domains our client owns so we can understand how (or if) those domains are being used.
With this domain search, you can also learn about their affiliations with other companies.
Did a company buy them in the past? Did they buy companies in the past?
Dig deeper into this and you may find opportunities beyond the specific project you’re working on.
Maybe other companies in your “network” also need SEO assistance? Maybe they should consolidate domains/websites to form a powerhouse of one website instead of two (or more) weaker websites?
Other sites in FWS
Check robots.txt and XML sitemaps. You’ll often find pages that shouldn’t be on the site or publicly available. Track the site and compare it to the sitemaps. You’ll often find orphan pages or important pages that have fewer internal links than Google Search Console deserves: signs of unknown content appearing on the site under Coverage > Indexed, not submitted to the sitemap report. Google Search Console > Settings > Crawl Statistics – Indications of previous hacks and unknown content. By reading your page speed data and looking at the source code, you’ll sometimes find things like JS, CSS or images that are served multiple times or tracking pixels that are no longer used. Link Profiling – Can uncover bad link networks or linking strategies, such as random blog comments or previous agency efforts, where they may have exploited WordPress vulnerabilities to build links. DNS: If you can get a list of the files in your DNS zone, you often will. Find references to sub-brands, previous acquisitions, micro-sites or other product and marketing initiatives.
Set aside a scheduled time to find strange things
I believe that good SEO goes beyond knowing how to use the tools of the trade well, doing keyword research, competitive analysis and the like.
Being curious is an important aspect of SEO.
We need time to think, consider and find strange “things”.
Valuable discoveries can often be made if we take the time to think creatively.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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About the author
Mark Jackson is the president and CEO of Vision Interactive, an agency founded in Dallas, Texas in 2005 specializing in SEO services, paid media services (search/display/social/video/Amazon), local listing management and conversion rate optimization. Mark co-founded the Search Engine Marketing Association of Dallas-Fort Worth and the Search Engine Marketing Association of Kansas City and has contributed to Search Engine Watch, ClickZ, Pubcon and Search conferences Engine Strategies.
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