Compete on technical quality, and stop re-building things

Jono says: "Stop looking at technical debt as something that we have to fix, and technical SEO as a way to prevent errors, and start looking at it as something we can compete on. If we make our technical infrastructure, and our platform, twice as good as our competitors we get paid dividends in rankings, performance, conversions, and much more. We need to look at technical SEO as a positive thing, not a negative thing."

What does competing on technical quality mean, in practice?

"Instead of saying, 'How do we take our inaccessible website from a 4 out of 10, to a 6 out of 10?', you say 'What would perfect look like?'. You can't just tick some boxes and get by, slightly ahead of the competition. You need to consider how much money you could make if you were twice as fast as the next fastest player in the market.

Don't just fix the basics; achieve excellence and embrace the new standards. You want to get to a position where you never have to worry about 404s, or 301s, and wasting time fixing things that break all the time. When you get to that place then you've got more budget, time, and resources to be doing the things that matter - like brand building and content strategy - rather than fighting fires."

Why do you want to be twice as good as your competitor, instead of just number one in the search results?

"With speed and quality, there are many benefits, other than just SEO ranking boosts. A few milliseconds can be the difference between somebody spending or looking away. The perception that users have of brands as they browse influences how likely they are to return, or to recommend. If you are looking at how little you can get away with, you're never going to start surprising and delighting customers.

Simply ranking first puts you at risk of one of your competitors going above and beyond. Then you lose customers, you lose hearts and minds, and your addressable market size diminishes. You need to win the consumer, not do as little as you can get away with. SEO is becoming even more of a 'winner takes all' game. The old joke was that the best place to hide a body was on page two of Google. But the world has changed - now it's on the second result. You need to be the best result. If you're getting away with being okay, it only takes a tiny shift in the marketplace for you to be gone."

Is it an SEO's job to stay on top of the changes in things like CSS and JavaScript?

"Yes, and no. Core Web Vitals has given us a watershed moment. The entire technology stack has become something SEOs need to have an opinion on. However, even as a technical SEO nerd, I find myself struggling to keep up with some of it. It moves so fast. In conversations about things like Chrome experimental features, I can get lost in the level of technical jargon and terminology. There is no way that, as an industry, SEO can be expected to know it all.

I started working on a conference presentation recently, where I decided to describe all the moving parts for building a perfect website. I thought that it was just a case of knowing the ingredients and standards. I started a slideshow on How to Build an Image Tag: 'img src=picture.jpg' is fine, but it needs an alt attribute, and you need a source attribute for different screen sizes, and it changes if the image is landscape, or a document.

I got to 70 slides on how to put an image on a web page and I was still learning things. If putting a cat on an HTML web page takes an hour to teach at a basic level, with the modern standards, then there's no way we can do it all. We need to be involved, but this is not something that SEO can own completely."

Where are some educational resources online, that you would recommend?

"There are two places and they're both from Google. One is web.dev, which is Google's general web dev portal. It's a little sprawling and busy, but it's worth digging through. There are a lot of blog posts and articles - some are truly phenomenal, but others are incomprehensibly technical. It's really good for 'ad hoc' learning.

For something more structured, I would recommend Google's PageSpeed Insights documentation - not the PageSpeed Insights tool, but the web fundamentals documentation around it. It covers everything from what a server is, to how to minify your CSS. The problem is that it's still far too much to consume. At some point, you have to rely on frameworks, platforms and CMSs. You can't do all of this manually and keep on top of it. My 70 slides on images has turned into 75, because five new things have happened since I wrote it last month."

Should every site be using AMP to make their site fast?

"I'm a huge proponent of AMP. I should disclose that I'm on the AMP Advisory Committee, which means I have opinions on what it is and where it goes. I'm involved because I think that it is a good solution to this kind of challenge. It's not enough to chase perfection and build a perfect site. You also need to maintain it as standards, policies, personnel, and expectations change. AMP is a very good framework for solving that kind of thing.

With it, you offload all maintenance and knowledge requirements to the developers who work on it, which tends to involve a large amount of Google developers. I run my website on the 'AMP for WordPress' plugin, the main developers of which work for Google. I can wake up in the morning and see that my site scores 98 on Core Web Vitals, and in the source code there's a bit that I don't recognise. That's because a Google employee has spent the evening working on my website, or rather all the websites running the software, so that I rank better in Google. They're operating at a technical level which far exceeds my ability as a developer - they are right on the cutting edge of what's possible. Every day my site gets better, not worse. I'm not fighting technical debt, I'm ahead of the curve.

Imagine the impact of not using this resource. A brand will start to build a gap against their competitors who are working from scratch, reinventing the wheel, and not competing on technical perfection. AMP is not perfect for all sites; it has its limitations. It is a platform and an approach. For many sites, however, it can be a catalyst for not only fixing but transforming how you approach tech."

Are there benefits for using AMP on different content on your site, like product pages?

"Initially, it wasn't great for that, but a lot of the constraints have changed. There's been a lot of changes to how AMP is governed and operated, and how it functions technically. It is still not trivial to build a product page in AMP, but there's no reason it can't be done. It covers all elements, like checkout, interstitials, modals, and payments like Stripe and PayPal. It's not the easiest thing in the world to build complex pages at the moment, but it's definitely achievable.

People tend to struggle with AMP when they're still building in 'paired mode'. They have both the AMP version and the original version of the page they're maintaining. The right way to do it is to build just the one.

The next evolution is Bento AMP, which is AMP as standalone components. If you want a carousel, a product image, or a pricing unit, then you just load in the bits you need. That will be transformative, and that'll be when it really starts to shape the web."

What's a quick summary of Progressive Web Apps and how can SEOs use it?

"A lot of people have only just started to encounter it, because they've seen bad scores for it in a Lighthouse test and Core Web Vitals. We have a paradigm at the moment, which doesn't help Google, in that we have web pages and websites, and we have apps. They are two entirely separate ecosystems that work in two different ways. That makes things like crawling, indexing, and monetization quite difficult for Google.

The dream is that you could have a website that behaves like an app - it could live on your phone, have an icon, and could access APIs on a phone, like making a phone call. PWAs are that bridge, and they can be surprisingly easy to set up. If you're on WordPress there's a plugin, again maintained by the same team of Google employees who continually update it. You can practically plug-and-play, whack an icon in, and suddenly your website can behave as if it's an app. You have the best of both worlds.

It also acts as a framework to allow a website to act as an API. If I want to be able to integrate into or out of any other system, say Salesforce or Zapier, it's easy for all of my bits of content to be pushed and pulled in different directions. I see the combination of AMP and PWAs as a pairing, and it's a smart move for any content sites wanting to take advantage of that."

Will PWAs work alongside apps on an Android or iOS device, or are they in competition?

"I think they will work together, though this is a contentious issue. A few years ago, Cindy Krum first mentioned PWAs at a conference and she said it would kill the app ecosystem. She was laughed out of the room because Apple had firmly stated that they would not support PWAs, but then they changed tack. Now, Google openly crawls and indexes the content of apps and PWAs in much the same way. Cindy has a lot of insight into how the back end of Google Play is changing to disambiguate those things.

In the longer term, those distinctions will go away. We will see PWAs in the app store, and apps in search results, and the difference will be academic."

What's one thing that SEOs should stop doing to focus more time on the technical success of their website?

"The simple answer is link building. I know that links still 'work' for some purposes, however, as an industry we spend far too much time building, buying, or otherwise acquiring links. It's easy to commoditise and it's a convenient deliverable. If you're an agency, judged on what you've achieved this month, it's easy to do externally. That doesn't mean it's the right way to be spending our time, or the best way to be spending our time.

Some of that time, budget, and resource should be spent having challenging conversations. Are we on the right platform? Is it beneficial to spend 10 hours a month fixing 404s? Is it sensible to adopt the new JavaScript framework, when our current website is experiencing errors? In the industry, there's a huge amount of focus in the wrong places. We need to ensure our websites are healthy before we worry about getting some promotion and some PR coverage. It's not 'shiny' but it's a good investment."

You can find Jono Alderson over at Yoast.com.