Technical SEO FAQs

Technical SEO refers to the optimization of a website’s technical elements to improve its visibility and rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). Unlike on-page or off-page SEO, which focuses on content and external factors like backlinks, technical SEO deals with the backend aspects of a website that affect its performance in search engines. This includes factors such as website speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, site architecture, URL structure, indexing, and security protocols like HTTPS.

Technical SEO ensures that search engine crawlers can efficiently crawl and index website content, making it easier for search engines to understand and rank the site’s pages. By addressing technical issues and optimizing these elements, websites can enhance their overall search engine visibility, user experience, and ultimately drive more organic traffic to their site.

At Nexus Marketing, we help clients develop a strong technical SEO foundation to support the success of our on-page and off-site SEO strategies.

General Questions

What does the “site health” score mean?

Site health is a metric calculated by Semrush on a scale of 0-100% that provides a single number to understand the technical SEO Health of the site. 

The fewer errors and warnings found during a crawl (in comparison with the size of your site), the higher and healthier your Site Health score.


For more information about site health, check out this explainer from Semrush.

What parts of the website are you crawling?

For websites that have multiple subdomains, we’ll limit the scope of the crawl to your marketing site where our SEO work is focused.

If you have a resource/blog subdomain, we’ll include that in the crawl, but we’ll exclude parts of your site that are customer-generated or intended for existing customers, like help/support subdomains.

Ongoing Technical SEO As Part of Your Engagement

What technical SEO activities are included as part of my standard Nexus engagement?

On a quarterly basis, part of the account strategy time in your engagement goes towards technical SEO audits and improvements.

Think of this as a routine checkup at a doctor’s office. 

In a standard Nexus client engagement, 20-25% of monthly engagement hours are typically dedicated to account strategy, project management, reporting, and technical SEO. 

The subset of technical SEO hours is usually ample time for the routine maintenance needed to keep the technical foundation of the site healthy if we’re working from a strong foundation. 

Your CMS can also impact how easy it is to maintain the technical SEO of the website. Solving issues is more efficient in standard CMS tools like WordPress and Hubspot, but it may be more time-consuming or complex if your site operates on a custom or less-common CMS. Your account manager will let you know if your CMS requires more time.

In some cases, we’ll elevate the need to spend additional dedicated time to improve the technical SEO health of the site. This may occur when:

  • Unexpected new issues have arisen
  • and/or there are more critical issues than we’re able to solve for in this time frame, we’ll elevate the need to spend additional dedicated time to improve the technical SEO health of the site.


When will you resolve technical SEO issues as part of my standard Nexus engagement?

On a rolling cadence of every 3 months, your account manager will provide an update on our latest round of technical SEO fixes either via email or in your monthly check-in. In most cases, no action will be required on your end, and this update is just for reference.

If you have questions about when to expect your next scheduled maintenance, please reach out to your account manager.

Additional Technical SEO Projects

When would Nexus propose an additional SEO project beyond a standard engagement?

In keeping with the analogy that our standard technical SEO maintenance is a routine doctor’s checkup, sometimes we may uncover an issue that requires more significant follow-up treatment.

This could be flagged in two main ways:

  1. Site health. A failing grade of 70% or below on the site health score indicates significant opportunities for technical SEO optimization to improve the performance of your site.
  2. Number of high-priority errors. If there are more high-priority errors (like broken links or redirect chains, than we’re able to solve for within our standard engagement, we’ll propose spending more time to solve these issues.

If your website has a low site health score or a significant number of errors, we’ll prescribe a treatment plan to get your website back into peak condition.

How do you create an estimated scope for technical SEO issues?

Websites and technical SEO issues are unique so calculating the time needed is an estimation rather than an exact science.

We use a multiplier of 4 minutes per issue under the assumption that the majority of fixes will take around 3-5 minutes to find in the CMS and resolve. 

In some cases, some issues may be able to be solved in bulk with a change in setting or a single fix, but others will take longer than the scoped time. 

We’ll focus our attention on the highest-priority issues that should be most straightforward to fix with the biggest possible positive impact on your overall SEO performance.

What types of technical SEO issues is the Nexus team able to solve?

  • Link issues: Including 4xx errors, broken external links, and HTTP links
  • Redirect issues: Including redirect chains, redirect loops, redirect to 4xx
  • Sitemap issues: Fixing issues with incorrect pages being included in sitemap
  • Site speed / core web vitals issues: Depending on your content management system we have experience troubleshooting and testing page speed improvements using built-in settings or plugins. We often use the
    caching plugin WP Rocket to improve performance for clients on WordPress sites.
  • Metadata and content issues: Including duplicate content, meta description issues, meta title issues, H1 issues, and more.

What happens if the issues are highly complex and need a web developer?

While we have the internal expertise to resolve most standard issues, in some cases we may need to elevate issues to your web developer or site admin. 

This may happen in the following scenarios:

  • Non-standard content management system causing unexpected issues
  • Problems caused by theme settings or plugin settings
  • Any other issues that can’t be solved on a page level and could risk breaking the site without knowledge of your site’s theme and structure

What does the process look like for Nexus to deliver on a technical SEO project?

  • Kickoff: Once our project agreement is signed, we’ll immediately jump in to start resolving
  • Ongoing Project Updates: Depending on the timeline of the project, you can expect weekly updates from your account manager with details about progress towards resolving different types of issues.
  • Project Completion: Once the project is completed, we’ll provide a summary of the issues resolved and an update on your site health score.
  • Go-Forward Performance Monitoring. While technical SEO improvements don’t always have a sudden and dramatic impact, over the coming months we’ll continue to monitor the performance of the website to track the success of the project.

How long will it take to complete a one-time technical SEO project?

When we share our proposal for a technical SEO project, we’ll also share an estimated timeline for when you can expect the project to be completed. 

This is typically 30 days or less, but may vary based on factors including:

  • The complexity of your content management system
  • The estimated time needed to resolve issues – As you may expect, 10 hour projects can be turned around more quickly than 50 hour projects
  • Team capacity depending on other ongoing projects

In any of these cases, we’d still give you a timeline of when you can expect the project to be completed, as well as provide updates along the way.

Impact of stopping SEO investment

What happens when a business stops investing in its SEO?

As with any B2B vendor-client relationship, there are times when the fit between our strategies and a client’s evolving needs might not be perfect. When this happens, the Nexus team’s top priority is to ensure your business remains positioned for continued growth and SEO success.

However, sometimes we encounter a different scenario:

Sometimes, clients with whom we’ve had productive working relationships need to consider pausing their SEO engagements due to financial constraints.

How do we navigate these situations? What are our recommendations to clients facing these decisions?

Finding alternative solutions and taking steps to preserve SEO gains are critically important. We want to share our thoughts on the potential risks of pausing SEO efforts and share the alternative approaches we often recommend that will help safeguard your business’s online visibility and growth:

 


Understanding SEO Results & Growth

One common reason clients consider pausing their SEO campaign is the perception that results are happening fast enough.

It’s essential to understand that SEO, by its nature, is a marathon, not a sprint.

Most businesses do not see immediate results because their websites have yet to achieve peak ranking for their target keywords. This is normal, and it’s why encourage our clients to consider longer-term engagements when we begin working together.

Here’s our take: Being on the second page of search results, or even the lower end of the first, means you are on the cusp of breakthrough success.

Click-through rates (and therefore conversions) increase dramatically between the second page of results and the top organic spots on Page One.

But moving upwards requires consistent effort, not just in the initial content creation, but also in ongoing link-building and optimization of the domain’s content as a whole.

The risk of pausing your SEO efforts at this point is that you’ll stall out the valuable momentum that’s gotten you to Page Two. By stopping prematurely, you’ll risk undoing your progress and could see a gradual erosion of your website’s organic visibility.

The “Cruise Ship Effect”

Time for an analogy (bear with us): SEO is a bit like operating a cruise ship.

Cruise ships and SEO engagements are slow to start and even slower to come to a complete stop.

When you initiate SEO strategies, the results do not manifest overnight. Similarly, if you pause these efforts, the impact isn’t immediate, but the long-term consequences can be significant.

Consider an experiment we conducted on one of our own websites:

After consistently applying SEO strategies until December 2022, we decided to pause due to full utilization on client hours.

Initially, the effects were not evident. In fact, performance metrics like website clicks even hit record highs in January 2023!

However, as time progressed, the lack of ongoing SEO efforts led to a slow but very steady decline in performance. Twelve months later, the website had experienced a significant drop, going from an average of over 250 clicks per day to just 90.

The Challenges of Restarting SEO

Let’s say the cruise ship grinds to a halt—it takes a lot of time and power to get it back up to full speed.

Deciding to resume SEO after a pause brings its own set of challenges, too, and requires careful expectation setting.

The foundational SEO work done previously (like creating optimized content and starting to build a backlink profile) remains valuable, but regaining forward momentum becomes significantly harder. This is for three key reasons:

  1. During the pause, your competitors will almost certainly have strengthened their online presence.
  2. Google continuously evaluates websites based on numerous ranking signals. A prolonged absence of fresh content, new backlinks, and technical optimizations sends negative signals to Google, reinforcing a cycle of diminished visibility.
  3. Content previously created for your website may now be outdated to the point of appearing irrelevant to Google, requiring an additional investment of time to catch up.

Simply put, it’s an uphill battle. Restarting your SEO efforts means not only fighting to regain lost ground from competitors but also re-establishing your website’s authority, trustworthiness, and freshness in the eyes of Google.

The Financial Implications

On the surface, pausing SEO initiatives might seem like a prudent decision, even a necessity, during times of budgetary constraints. But as with any major business decision, it’s critically important to consider the long-term effects.

Organic search is a cornerstone of lead generation for many businesses today, driving traffic and conversions at a cost significantly lower than paid advertising channels.

By cutting organic SEO efforts, businesses risk becoming overly reliant on paid advertising. Over time, paid channels often prove to be far more expensive and less effective at generating sustainable growth.

SEO vs PPC: Is Organic Or Paid Search Better? A 2024 Guide

Think of it like this:

  • Paid advertising requires constant per-ad investment and is heavily siloed, meaning success in one campaign won’t have much direct impact on the next aside from any lessons you learned. Growth through paid channels requires increasing amounts of investment.
  • Organic SEO also requires ongoing investment but is a holistic and somewhat self-perpetuating process when done well. Achieving top ranks through high-quality content, link-building, and other best practices will improve your entire website’s standing with Google. This leads over time to higher ranks and more engagement across the board. It’s a consistent investment that doesn’t require major spending increases to sustain its performance. (Not to mention, top organic search results tend to have much higher click-through rates than expensive paid ads!)

So, if you’re faced with budgetary decisions and need to weigh your SEO options, what are the different routes you can take?

Alternatives to an SEO Pause or Wind-Down

There are always options for businesses that understand the risks of pausing SEO but are dealing with budgetary constraints.

We recommend two strategic alternatives that allow for the continuation of SEO activities at a reduced scale. These will help safeguard your online presence and ensure that the engine of growth doesn’t shut down completely.

1. Scale Down, Don’t Shut Down

Reducing the scope of SEO efforts to essential activities can maintain your site’s visibility and ranking without the full cost of an aggressive SEO campaign. Remember, it’s always easier—and more cost-effective—to maintain a stable ranking than to recover from a decline.

This scaled-down approach focuses on maintaining the core elements of your SEO strategy, such as quick content updates, basic on-page optimizations, and maintaining the technical health of your website. At Nexus Marketing, we call these bundles of activities “maintenance packages.”

2. Collaborative Adjustment of Spend

We’ve been through all kinds of journeys with our long-term clients and know that ups and downs happen. We can be flexible.

If needed, we’re open to adjusting our engagement terms to accommodate a client’s current financial situation while still maintaining the momentum of its SEO campaign.

This approach has helped numerous clients navigate lean periods, only to emerge stronger and ready to ramp up their SEO efforts when conditions improve. If this approach sounds like the correct fit for your business while it works through constraints, ask your Account Manager to present some options.

Success Stories of SEO Scale-Downs

We’ve seen time and again that scaling down rather than pausing leads to more successful SEO outcomes.

We’ve supported nearly a dozen clients through periods of financial constraint by adjusting their SEO strategy to a maintenance mode. These clients were able to keep their rankings stable and, once their business situation improved, quickly scale their SEO efforts back up.

This approach not only preserved their online presence but also positioned them for rapid growth and resurgence as soon as they were ready to invest more aggressively in SEO again.

 


TL;DR: The decision to pause SEO investments can have far-reaching implications for your business and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

While the immediate effects might not be visible, the long-term negative impact on your website’s traffic, visibility, and overall online presence can be significant. Immediate financial savings could also quickly become overshadowed by the increased costs and decreased effectiveness of heavy reliance on paid channels.

At Nexus, we advocate for a balanced approach. Scaling down to a maintenance level of SEO activity is a viable alternative that allows your business to continue leveraging the benefits of organic search without the full investment.

This strategy ensures that your business remains competitive and ready to capitalize on opportunities as soon as they arise.

In these challenging times, it’s more important than ever to make informed decisions about your SEO strategy. By understanding the potential risks and exploring viable alternatives, you can navigate financial constraints without sacrificing your long-term online success.

If you have any questions about our advice in this guide or how to navigate your business’s marketing challenges, please don’t hesitate to contact your Account Manager. We’ll be happy to chat through our philosophy and what your best options will be.

PPC and SEO Best Practices

4 Best Practices for Integrating Pay Per Click (PPC) & SEO Campaigns

The synergy between Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is invaluable, especially for demand generation. The right combination of outbound and inbound strategies can help your business build a robust online marketing journey that reaches and converts more visitors.

However, many businesses tend to treat these channels as silos. While the goals of your PPC and SEO efforts differ in many ways, it’s important to remember that they can and should support one another.

Here are the top four practices we recommend for integrating your PPC and SEO strategies:

1. Quarterly Insights Sharing

To maximize the value that each channel can bring to the other, you need data and visibility.

The best way to start doing this is to share and analyze your PPC data on a quarterly basis. Review your PPC campaigns to identify your most impactful keywords, measured by:

  • Return on ad spend (ROAS)
  • Total expenditure

For example, a nonprofit tech provider might discover that “nonprofit CRM software” is driving considerable PPC conversions and generating strong returns, and “best fundraising software” is driving a moderate number of conversions at a high cost.

By identifying your highest-return and most costly keywords, you can shape your SEO strategy for the coming quarters. Review your SEO efforts—have you actively targeted either of these keywords with blog content and link-building? If not, you’re missing opportunities to maximize ownership over these terms.

Appearing in PPC and top organic positions for your high-return keywords will put your brand front and center for a proven valuable audience.

2. Targeting & Budgeting for High-Value Keywords

When you know your highest-value PPC keywords, you can build a strategy to organically rank for them. This approach brings a few valuable benefits:

  • Maximized visibility for high-value keywords and to audiences proven to convert
  • Reduced drawbacks of reallocating ad spend away from your highest-cost keywords
  • Overall enhanced SEO performance for your website

Let’s look specifically at the idea of using these cross-channel insights to help you spend your ad budget more effectively.

For example, if “online donation tools for nonprofits” is a top PPC keyword for your business, developing SEO-rich content to target this term will capture organic traffic, potentially decreasing the need for paid ads. Consider these statistics:

  • Click-through rates (CTR) on paid search ads average around 2%.
  • The first organic result on a search results page has an average CTR of 31.7%.
  • However, paid search visitors are 35% more likely to convert than organic visitors on average.

It’s a careful trade-off to make, but in many cases and for many keywords, ranking highly on organic results can save you a lot of money while growing your website’s traffic.

However, you can only benefit from this approach if you actively track and compare performance between channels. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy—a basic spreadsheet will do—but it does need to be an intentional, repeated process. Here’s an example:

This table rounds up the most relevant information about keyword volume, CPC, and organic ranking movements. Analyze this information against your PPC conversion data, and you can lay out a savvy SEO roadmap for your business.

Want some inspiration? Check out how we report organic SEO and conversion data at Nexus Marketing.

3. Landing Page Strategy Segmentation

Creating separate landing pages for PPC and SEO efforts is critical for accurate measurement and optimization.

For PPC, landing pages should be highly tailored to the ad copy, offering a direct and conversion-optimized path for paid traffic. Get your pages in front of the right visitors with Google’s audience targeting features, then convert them with your excellent landing page strategies—this is what explains the high average PPC conversion rate cited above.

For SEO, content-rich pages that provide in-depth information about the target keyword can attract organic visitors, improving the site’s authority and relevance for these key terms. Then, careful consideration of the keyword’s user intent and other contextual elements can help you develop an effective organic conversion strategy for the page.

At Nexus Marketing, we keep conversion strategies front of mind when creating content for clients. We think through:

  • Ideal “next step” asks based on the keyword’s context and sales funnel position
  • Ideal call to action (CTA) placement and language
  • Effective introduction strategies to ensure visitors don’t bounce away before being asked to convert
  • Other UX and design elements that will contribute to conversions by increasing time on page
  • Technical SEO elements that contribute to page load speed

What other elements go into high-performing SEO content? We’ve rounded them up here.

4. Testing & Experimentation

Cross-channel analysis helps with more than just broadly guiding your organic keyword strategy. PPC insights can help you test, experiment, and improve your digital marketing efforts at a more granular level, too.

Review your PPC data to quickly identify:

  • Your highest-performing ad copy
  • Your most effective calls to action
  • Your highest-converting landing pages

Dig into these ads, CTAs, pages, and the strategies they use to connect with their audiences. Learn from them.

For example, you could echo the language from your top PPC ad in the calls to action on your organic pages that target similar keywords and audiences to improve their conversion rates.

Plus, this approach works both ways. Learn from your top-converting SEO pages to fine-tune your PPC ads targeting similar keywords. PPC offers immediate data, allowing for rapid experimentation and optimization.

 


For businesses, the strategic integration of PPC and SEO is not just about improving search rankings; it’s about creating a more cohesive and cost-effective online marketing strategy.

Remember, these channels can and should support one another. Start implementing these best practices in your campaigns and data review processes, keep learning more, and let us know how it goes!

Have any questions or want to learn more about Nexus Marketing’s SEO services and other digital marketing opportunities? Please get in touch—we’d love to hear from you.

Organic SEO and Conversion Reporting Dashboard for Clients

Organic SEO and Conversion Reporting Dashboard for Clients

 

When working with Nexus Marketing, one of the most crucial aspects clients are curious about is our reporting process.

How do we track and communicate progress in traffic, keyword rankings, and lead generation? Let’s delve into this.

Live Google Data Studio Dashboard

Shortly after you kick off your engagement with Nexus, you’ll gain access to a live, interactive dashboard on Google Data Studio.

This tool is your window into real-time inbound marketing performance, keyword, and conversion insights, which we’ll review together during our monthly check-ins.

This dashboard, while standardized, is tailored for each client to cater to their unique needs.

Executive Summary: A Clear Snapshot

The dashboard’s homepage features your brand’s logo and an executive summary.

This summary is crafted to be concise yet comprehensive, highlighting key takeaways, current objectives, and notable data points.

It’s designed for easy sharing with your executive team or investors, simplifying the task of communicating high-level insights.

Year-Over-Year Organic Traffic Analysis

Understanding the ebb and flow of your organic traffic is vital.

Our dashboard presents this in various formats – a succinct summary, monthly breakdowns, and detailed analysis by landing page.

This section reveals opportunities and challenges, guiding our strategy for future growth.

Organic Conversions: The Heart of ROI

Arguably the most critical part of our dashboard is the organic conversions analysis.

We look at conversions by type, over time, and by landing page.

This multifaceted view is crucial for identifying which strategies are driving real business results and where to focus our efforts.

Keyword Position Tracking: Staying on Top

Our dashboard integrates with SEMrush campaigns to provide a detailed view of your keyword campaign’s performance.

You’ll see how keywords fluctuate over time, their current positions, and their potential cost impact.

This continuous monitoring is key to adapting and refining our SEO strategies.

Channel Comparison: Understanding the Bigger Picture

Digital marketing is not just about SEO. We compare SEO performance with other channels driving traffic and conversions to your site.

This holistic view helps contextualize SEO within your broader digital marketing ecosystem.

Organic Traffic and Conversion Performance Over Time

Finally, we map out organic traffic against conversions over time.

This longitudinal view helps us gauge the effectiveness of our strategies in not just attracting visitors but also converting them into leads or customers.

Concluding Thoughts

At Nexus Marketing, our reporting isn’t just about numbers; it’s about insights, strategy, and continuous improvement. Our comprehensive reporting structure is designed to keep you informed, engaged, and ahead in your digital marketing journey.