Do you know what is the meaning of the acronym QA tester applied to the marketing and how to use it in SEO-how would You like to know how to carry out a good plan of QA (Quality Assurance) to have quality results. Read on and discover all the secrets that you have not been told about the process of QA, and how to apply it in your website.
When we talk about optimizing the SEO of a website, come to us a lot of things on the head: we need to find the best keywords, to improve the website structure, optimize the crawl, make sure that the load times are poor, that our content plan it is unique and interesting, etc In contrast, there is a key point to improve the growth of the organic traffic of a website that few times it comes out in a conversation: the process of QA.
Imagine: you get to work in an optimal structure in your web, you are looking for the best keywords, but once you apply the changes to your website traffic, your positions will begin to drop. What has happened? If you have not checked out the improvements applied in a test environment, possibly the implementations uploaded to the web contain errors that end up hurting your traffic.
What is the QA in SEO?
Just like in any other sector, the QA (Quality Assurance) or test plan in Spanish, this is the process that ensures the quality of a product. In the same way that when a mobile application to check that it works properly before launching it to the market, when it comes to SEO we must also verify that all changes are correct before uploading to production, and Google and the other search engines to see.
What happens if we don't do QA?
When we do not do the QA properly or when it doesn't directly do the QA of our site, what is more common is that problems arise. These problems can be of different nature and severity, but in all cases will end up negatively affecting our positioning in Google.
I give you an example, if you upload your website to production with duplicate content and any URL leads canonical or noindex, your traffic will be affected and will go down gradually, so that in the long run it will be a fall of visits considerable for something that could have been solved with a proper review of the site.
Another more serious example is that you put a noindex to a category or to a relevant page of the web: the fall of traffic will be noticeable almost immediately and even desindexarán the urls that the more traffic you provided. In this case, something that is detected very easily in a review in QA will be led to a significant decline in traffic.
In both cases, though a more serious one than the other, the result is a significant loss of visibility and traffic, and, therefore, income.
In the chart that I show below; the traffic dropped by nearly 60% in a few days for a mistake that could easily have been avoided with a fix in a test environment.
How do you do QA on your website?
It is necessary to create a replica of the web, better if it is in a subdomain that you can validate that everything is correct, and that, in addition, it is not accessible to the search engines.
I tell you several ways to do this:
– Blocking through the file robots.txt: If we include the line Disavow: / in the file robots.txt our version of QA, we make sure that the search engines can't access it. Do not do this, any user could browse our website and test, it is easy, by an oversight, disappear, this line and the page is discovered to Googlebot.
– Blocking of indexing by X-Robots: Another option very similar to the previous one, is to lock through the header X-Robots, a directive that indicates that a page should not be indexed, or track the links. Google will be able to access the web page, but can't do anything with it.
– Use of password: Create an environment in which only you may enter via password is another possible solution. In this way, would only be visible for those who know the password.
– Access to specific IPs: Is the safest in which only you can access the trial version from one or more IPs concrete. For example, since the IP of your office or from a VPN.
Between all of these options, the most appropriate is to use a double method: we can use a password and at the same time to block the site from the archive robots.txt. We may also block indexing through the X-Robots and only allow access to specified URLs. The goal is to prevent by all means that Google or other search engine from indexing the version of QA.
Check list SEO for QA
The process of QA does not only consist in verifying the change but also to check that the rest of the elements of the page continue like that in production.
It is important to review both the desktop version as in the mobile the following list:
● Meta robots: what Are well-placed labels index and noindex?
● Canonical: is Signed with canonical to the correct URL? What is indexing?
● Robots.txt: What have we blocked? What is it that you want to block?
● Internal links: do We have linked all of our sites? What we have included links nofollow where it belongs?
● Error 404: How there are pages that do not exist are linked internally?
● Redirections 301: what Are no links to URLS with redirection?
● Hreflang: do you Need your page hreflang? What are you using it correctly?
● URLs: what Are the unique urls? How redirect correctly to www or vice versa? What do http to https?
● Title and H1: All of the pages have a unique title and h1? What are duplicated with other pages? Do you have the keywords in top?
● Description: have You included a unique description on each page? What is attractive and descriptive to encourage the click?
● Quality of the content: Is the content relevant? Are there pages of low quality, duplicate or thin content?
● Javascript: what Are the relevant elements in JS? What is server side rendering?
● Richsnippet: is There richsnippet relevant? What are successfully implemented?
● Sitemap: The sitemap is correct and their urls are indexable
That said, if you do not want to take the scare preventable with the organic traffic, preparing a test environment as close as possible to your website in production and test your improvements before you show them to Google.
If you want to know more about the QA Test or we can help with the development of this type of test, contact us or write to us at : barcelona@elabsconsulting.com
