SEO is fragile.

With engineers, designers, product managers, marketing managers, and sometimes even CEOs dipping their hands into the complex SEO mix, things can inevitably go awry.

On July 29, I moderated a sponsored Search Engine Journal webinar presented by Mark Munroe, CEO, SEORadar.

Munroe discussed how to easily integrate SEO testing into the QA process to prevent SEO problems from ever going live.

Here’s a recap of the webinar presentation.

Why a Focused QA Process for SEO?

No website is safe from SEO issues.

Even the biggest websites can get deindexed from Google and encounter other problems that impact organic traffic and rankings.

These issues happen because SEO is vulnerable and testing is difficult.

Additionally, Google is fast when it comes to crawling and indexing content.

So right from the start, we want to avoid any SEO issue from ever going live and wreaking havoc on traffic and revenue.

Being an SEO professional is a really tough job.

You’re responsible for things you can’t control – Google algorithm updates, what competitors are doing, and a lot more.

Still, there are things you can control – and that includes the website that gets deployed into production.

Let’s focus on controlling the controllable.

Ideally, SEO testing and monitoring should be done at all stages of development.

QA Testing for SEO: How to Get There

A good QA testing process for SEO involves:

• **Comparison Testing: **Being able to compare two versions of your source code, for instance: staging vs. production (or once you’re in production: production vs. previous version).
• **Comprehensive Test Set: **Testing elements that are important to you.
• **Automation: **You already know what you want to test and you want to make it better and more efficient.
• **Change Monitoring: **Make sure things are safe once they get into production. Even if you test thoroughly on your staging site, things will still happen in production that doesn’t happen in any other environment so you need to keep an eye on this.
• Webpage Archive: A history of changes and your source code for you to go back and look at when there are traffic drops and other sudden changes.

Some Changes Are Sudden & Catastrophic

When iFly.com accidentally placed a noindex on all their interior pages, they lost half their traffic and significant revenue.

One way to catch this is by browsing through the source code – which can still be a pain to do.

Change detection is a better option since you’re not just browsing through code, but you can see what’s changed and whether it’s something that you anticipated.

#seo #webinar #coding #testing