This post was sponsored by JetOctopus. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
When you’re taking on large-scale projects or working with extensive websites with hundreds to thousands of pages, you must leverage advanced technical SEO techniques.
Large websites come with challenges such as vast site architectures, dynamic content, and the higher-stakes competition in maintaining rankings.F
Leveling up your team’s technical SEO chops can help you establish a stronger value proposition, ensuring your clients gain that extra initial edge and choose to continue growing with your agency.
With this in mind, here’s a concise checklist covering the most important nuances of advanced technical SEO that can lead your clients to breakthrough performance in the SERPs.
1. Advanced Indexing And Crawl Control
Optimizing search engine crawl and indexation is foundational for effective technical SEO. Managing your crawl budget effectively begins with log file analysis—a technique that offers direct insights into how search engines interact with your clients’ websites.
A log file analysis helps:
Crawl Budget Management: Essential for ensuring Googlebot crawls and indexes your most valuable pages. Log file analysis indicates how many pages are crawled daily and whether important sections are missed.
Identifying Non-Crawled Pages: Identifies pages Googlebot misses due to issues like slow loading times, poor internal linking, or unappealing content, giving you clear insights into necessary improvements.
Understand Googlebot Behavior: Know what Googlebot actually crawls on a daily basis. Spikes in the crawl budget may signal technical issues on your website, like auto-generated thin, trashy pages, etc.
For this, integrating your SEO log analyzer data with GSC crawl data provides a complete view of site functionality and search engine interactions, enhancing your ability to guide crawler behavior.
Next, structure robots.txt to exclude search engines from admin areas or low-value add-ons while ensuring they can access and index primary content. Or, use the x-robots-tag—an HTTP header—to control indexing at a more granular level than robots.txt. It is particularly useful for non-HTML files like images or PDFs, where robot meta tags can’t be used.
For large websites, the approach with sitemaps is different from what you may have experienced. It almost doesn’t make sense to put millions of URLs in the sitemaps and want Googlebot to crawl them. Instead, do this: generate sitemaps with new products, categories, and pages on a daily basis. It will help Googlebot to find new content and make your sitemaps more efficient. For instance, DOM.RIA, a Ukrainian real estate marketplace, implemented a strategy that included creating mini-sitemaps for each city directory to improve indexing. This approach significantly increased Googlebot visits (by over 200% for key pages), leading to enhanced content visibility and click-through rates from the SERPs.
2. Site Architecture And Navigation
An intuitive site structure aids both users and search engine crawlers in navigating the site efficiently, enhancing overall SEO performance.
Specifically, a flat site architecture minimizes the number of clicks required to reach any page on your site, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content. It enhances site crawling efficiency by reducing the depth of important content. This improves the visibility of more pages in search engine indexes.
So, organize (or restructure) content with a shallow hierarchy, as this facilitates quicker access and better link equity distribution across your site.
For enterprise eCommerce clients, in particular, ensure proper handling of dynamic parameters in URLs. Use the rel=”canonical” link element to direct search engines to the original page, avoiding parameters that can result in duplicates.
Similarly, product variations (such as color and size) can create multiple URLs with similar content. It depends on the particular case, but the general rule is to apply the canonical tag to the preferred URL version of a product page to ensure all variations point back to the primary URL for indexing. If there is a significant number of such pages where Google ignores non-canonical content and puts them in the index, consider reviewing the canonicalization approach on the website.
3. JavaScript SEO
As you know, JavaScript (JS) is crucial in modern web development, enhancing site interactivity and functionality but introducing unique SEO challenges. Even if you’re not directly involved in development, ensuring effective JavaScript SEO is important.
The foremost consideration in this regard is critical rendering path optimization — wait, what’s that?
The critical rendering path refers to the sequence of steps the browser must take to convert HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a rendered web page. Optimizing this path is crucial for improving the speed at which a page becomes visible to users.
Here’s how to do it: