Search Experience Framework: From SEO Strategy to Meaningful Tasks

by | Mar 21, 2019 | General, SEO

For years, I’ve talked about the importance of looking at your search engine optimization efforts through the lens of a framework. Having a framework makes it easier to prioritize problems and solutions, to understand their impact, and to begin to estimate their financial impact. But knowing how to bridge your infinite list of to-do items with a framework might seem a bit daunting, so I wanted to take a few moments to talk about how you can do that.

The Search Experience Framework

If you’ve seen me present at a conference or in a class setting, you’ve seen this pyramid framework before. I’m nothing if not consistent about this.

The Search Experience Framework, which we called URA SEO back at seoClarity, rests on a foundation of Usability. This is the technical foundation that insures that your site is accessible and crawlable, responsive for the latest and greatest technologies, fast loading, and nimble in the face of emerging user technologies.

Relevance, the middle tier, represents the content on your site and how relevant it is to the searches being performed by the people in your Buyer’s Journey. While text has been the primary format for content related to SEO, this also includes effectively marked-up video, audio, interactive graphics, etc.. The point of this tier is that you should be creating superior content that meets your user’s needs better than your competitors. However, the efficacy of your content is dependent on that Usability foundation. Great content on a bad technical foundation will fail just as badly as bad content on a good foundation.

The top tier of the URA SEO framework (we call it The Three C’s of SEO at IBM) is Authority. From a purely algorithmic standpoint, this accounts for the number of backlinks coming into your site. In a broader sense, however, this can be affected by brand sentiment, product sentiment, social sharing, mentions and co-citations, the user community built around your product or service, your outreach efforts, and so much more. It is going beyond just the messaging on your site and pages and getting into the areas of ecosystems in which your potential buyers dwell.
As I mentioned in my quote to Search Engine Journal last year, “The entire search experience is our domain of expertise and control….” We shouldn’t just be concerned with inbound linking, getting our on-page messaging right, or fixing technical issues. Our concern should extend to those other channels that drive awareness to our products, services and brand, including social media (both paid and organic), paid listings (PPC, paid organic, display, etc.), industry and global news, and other social forums (Q&A sites, forums, Glassdoor, etc.). Although not directly a part of the ranking algorithm, as part of the overall digital experience for users, they have an additive effect.
Having a solid framework like the URA SEO/Three C’s of SEO pyramid helps proportionally understand what you can and should control, while recognizing that the most impactful area (from an algorithmic standpoint), Authority, rests atop and is dependent upon all of those efforts.

How then can you translate this massive framework into actionable items that you can insert into a strategy or into an Agile sprint?

Breaking Down the Framework into Actionable Items

Far too often, by the time an SEO is contacted to help with a site’s ranking and traffic issues, the damage is done. An audit will reveal a multitude of problems, from broken pages to irrelevant content, from incorrect canonical tags to pages with missing titles. But also too often, we SEOs will deliver the audit results as a list of problems, and it will all blur into a jumbled mess for the product manager or the site owner.

Without context, all problems look the same. If every problem discovered during an audit is presented the same way, it would look a bit like this image, where every problem is the same size and same color.

How would you prioritize this? Which items would you work on first? Would you just go one-by-one? Which items have a dependency on other items? How would you predict and then measure the impact of fixing any of these issues?

It is incumbent upon SEOs to present audit discovery items either as a prioritized list or within a framework. Otherwise, as is in our nature, people will gravitate to the easiest to fix items and delay the most difficult items until later. Within the URA SEO framework, you can also begin to see which teams within the organization will be needed in order to fix the problems. Designers, developers, sys admins, etc. will need to deal with Usability issues; content strategists, writers, producers, subject matter experts (SMEs), etc. on the Relevance items; and PR, social media, and Brand focus on the Authority items.
Once you’ve determined which team best fits each of the items on the list (in practice a very simple task), it’s time to start establishing blocks of related and interconnected issues. In Sprint Sizing in Agile Methodology, these larger groups of issues (or User Stories) would be called Epics. Once these Epics are organized, you can begin determining the size of each of the User Stories within.
In the example above, we can break down the Usability items into specific blocks, and perhaps the two highest priority blocks are Page Load Time and Crawl Errors. Fixing these within a Scrum effort might be part of an overarching Epic. So the epic for Crawl Errors might state, “As a site owner, I want to have all of the crawl errors on my site fixed or mitigated.”

But because of the size of this undertaking, the block will need to be broken down into individual Releases, which are when the team produces a minimally marketable product/result. Perhaps the Epic can be broken down into individual User Stories, which state something along the lines of, “As a site owner, I want to repair all broken internal links on my site.” And this Story can be further broken down into sprint-sized pieces, which are tasks that individual team members work on for a two-week period.

Sizing each of these stories and determining which of the Sprint tasks need to either be broken down or assigned to more than one team member is a process that’s as unique as your team and its members. As I mentioned in my previous post, what one person might accomplish in a single sprint might take another team member two sprints. It’s all about where they are in their own career and how much bandwidth they have.

The entire point of sizing is to be able to get a line-of-sight on a solution and to accomplish your goals without burning out your team members. The additional benefit to implementing using the Agile Methodology is that you can develop the habit of iteration toward perfection, rather than demanding perfect results every time.

Summary

In business, what’s better than success? Replicable and Repeatable Success. And you get that kind of success by establishing a framework and a system by which to execute within that framework.

Hopefully, I’ve helped you to see how to view your site’s issues through the lens of a framework and then to understand how to break everything down into manageable pieces.

I’d like to chat with you and see how you manage your digital marketing efforts. Catch up with me at one of my upcoming conferences and say “Hi!”

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