Technical SEO in 2023: key takeaways from the Knowledge Panel Show

We would like to share with you the key takeaways from a panel discussion on the prospects, challenges, and needs of a technical SEO in 2023, as shared by Serge Bezborodov, CTO JetOctopus. The discussion was highly informative and we encourage you to watch the full video, which is available below. In this article, we have compiled the main ideas shared by Serge Bezborodov so that we may share these valuable insights with you.

What will technical SEO look like in 2023?

Technical SEO is not just about ensuring bots can crawl pages, but also ensuring users can navigate your website freely and easily find the information they need. In fact, user experience and technical SEO are closely related. If bots can navigate your site without issues, it’s likely that users can too.

It’s important to remember that users don’t always arrive at your site through search engine results pages (SERPs). They may also use navigation on your website to find what they need. This means that optimizing user experience and technical SEO is essential to creating a successful website in 2023.

What are the biggest problems that your websites and your clients’ websites face?

Many websites nowadays use JavaScript. A few years ago, we were just starting to talk about technical SEO for JavaScript, but now most of the big e-commerce websites are simply migrating to JavaScript. However, during this migration process, technical problems can arise that can negatively impact the results of a JavaScript site. For example, SSR (server side rendering) is unfortunately not popular. This leads to indexability problems and causes traffic drops. 

Despite these challenges, we have some good examples of successful migrations. For instance, one site was able to increase its traffic by 20% after undergoing a lot of hard work during its migration to JavaScript. The website was designed with users in mind, and it is now more pleasant to visit. However, it’s important to note that a lot of time and effort was spent on this migration.

Misconceptions of SEO

One common misconception is that once you’ve fixed all your 404s, redirect chains, and slow pages, you’ve completed all your technical SEO tasks. However, these are only the first steps – like the basic elementary step. After that, you need to clean up junk pages and deal with thin content. It’s also important to understand that quality pages with quality content will bring in more traffic than hundreds of low-quality pages, so you should focus on optimizing the pages that receive the most traffic. 

Only after completing these tasks can you begin to work on internal linking. At first glance, this may seem simple, because there is a lot of information, a lot of diagrams, videos on the Internet and on specialized resources. But in reality, implementing internal linking is very difficult, especially on large e-commerce websites. It takes a lot of effort to explain and justify why you need to invest money and resources in improving internal linking. Moreover, if you made mistakes in the earlier steps, efforts to improve internal linking may be in vain. Not many SEOs really understand how to work with internal linking, as it requires taking into account its impact on impressions and clicks and much more data. 

In fact, high quality internal linking is the top level of SEO. 

So, one of the biggest problems with SEO is a superficial understanding of technical SEO. In reality, it takes a lot of effort and time to implement high-quality technical SEO, but the results are definitely worth it.

About communication with developers

Communication between SEOs and developers is super important. I mean, you can receive approval from the product owner regarding the implementation of SEO tasks, but you can’t get your dev team to actually implement it properly? It is a very common case when SEO tasks are not implemented correctly. 

The thing is, SEOs and developers often speak different languages. SEOs think in terms of pages and links, whereas developers think in terms of products and categories.

So what do we do? We can be more specific about the algorithms and technical details behind our SEO strategy. Sure, some developers might not care too much about this stuff, but others will be fascinated by it and will appreciate the chance to learn more about the technical side of things. Tell them about algorithms, they’ll love it.

A few key thoughts for people who are new to tech SEO and don’t know where to start

For those who are new to technical SEO and not sure where to start, the best advice is to begin by reading the Google guidelines. They are easy to understand and provide a solid foundation of knowledge. So, this is the first step. Segre said that here you can draw analogies with learning a new language and studying tech SEO. When you want to learn a new language, you go to YouTube, look for different articles, look for an interesting book. Do the same with technical SEO. 

You can also find a mentor, join an SEO agency as a trainee or junior. You can learn a lot on your own, but in a team experience and learning will happen much, much faster.

AI for SEO

There are many specific tasks when the AI works very well. But AI is not some magic button that you press and everything will be ok.

Many teams use AI, for instance, to analyze texts. JetOtcopus, for example, uses the Random Forest algorithm to analyze the influence of factors on each URL. But you can’t tell AI to make you a great SEO and make your site the first in Google – it doesn’t work like that.

You may be interested in our other publications:

Take Control on Googlebot: the best takeaways from Serge Bezborodov’s talk at BrightonSEO

Insights from GSC: how to use this dashboard to create an SEO strategy

Top Insights from JetOctopus Big Data Research

Case Study: How DOM.RIA Doubled Their Googlebot Visits Using JetOctopus

TOP SEO influencer wrote about JetOctopus