Born and bred in Italy, Marco Bonomo is a former figure skater. Now working as a Senior SEO Planner at MediaCom, he used this talk to highlight five automatic SEO alerts that will help you be the first to know when something with your website goes wrong.
Overview
- Speaker: Marco Bonomo
- Company: MediaCom
- Website: https://www.mediacom.com/
- Twitter profile: @MarcoBonomoSEO
- LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-bonomo-48b68ba0
- Link to the slides:
What was the talk about?
The five alerts he mentioned were in relation to five key areas:
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to tell search engine robots how to crawl and index pages on their website. Critical mistakes with robot.txt mean your content won’t be indexed and your traffic will plummet.
Visualping is a tool that will notify you of any changes to a website. This means you will receive an email when new pages are indexed and you won’t be caught unawares by any nasty surprises.
Traffic and rankings
Monthly reporting is a task that causes many SEOs a lot of stress. To help with this, Marco recommends customisable alerts by Google Analytics. You can set these up to track pages with no traffic, specific drops in traffic, drops in goals, drops in revenues, and much more.
Performance
If you run a page load speed once and it looks good, it doesn’t mean it will last forever. An uptime monitor like RapidSpike monitors performance continuously and sends notifications when something like page speed drops dramatically.
Rankings
Rankings are the yardstick by which all SEO efforts are measured. Marco recommends BrightEdge and SEMrush to help you detect both ranking gains (yay) and drops (boo).
IFTTT
IFTTT stands for If This Then That. It’s a free web-based service that allows you to create conditional alerts called applets. These can be triggered when changes occur within a wide range of web services, including Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, Google Sheets, and Slack.
Fave quote
On why you need to track your website more actively:
“Let’s say that, for example, you’re tracking your reporting once per month. The first of the month is the day when you deliver your report. Then, let’s say something really bad happens on the 7th — basically, you’re going to lose like an entire month of optimisation.”
Awesome presentation and talk from @MarcoBonomoSEO https://t.co/EbFhkjvYEF
— Rebekah Dunne (@RebekahDunne) April 13, 2019
Potential impact on the industry
Manually tracking performance through digging into analytics takes time and effort that SEOs need to spend on other tasks. The more the industry can become comfortable with taking advantage of automation resources, the more promptly we’ll all be able to handle any issues that arise, and the more easily we can keep our websites in great condition.
Key takeaways
- Simple issues can cause major problems if left unaddressed.
- Standard reporting is too infrequent to avoid disaster.
- Readily-available technology allows us to automate so many things: we need only embrace it.
