Martina says: “My tip is from back in 2011, when the Panda update hit, and it basically did not change from back then.

SEO is continually evolving, yet one thing remains the same: prioritising a solid SEO foundation, a clear structure, and excellent content. Many tend to overlook these essentials whenever there's a new hype, a new trend, or a new strategy that approaches.”

Okay, so 2011 is essentially 15 years ago now. That's a long time ago, but you're saying that there are many key elements that SEOs overlook and don't pay close enough attention to.

What are the key SEO essentials that many SEOs tend to overlook?

“Basically, the foundation, as I mentioned, is everything.

Back in 2011, it started with keyword strategy, finding out who your competitors are, and having a proper structure based on all that data that you've got. Tools changed, the environment changed, but the process itself did not change. It still starts with having a proper overview of your page.

Chances are, you already have a content audit, a keyword mapping, or something similar, and you can proceed from there. It's a good start to build up from. It also includes (which is often forgotten) finding old, not performing content – especially PDFs, for example, that just get forgotten on your server.”

Okay, PDFs. That's something that I haven't really heard of for a while. It certainly used to be a thing that you could optimize for PDFs to appear in the SERP. Is that what you're advocating?

“Oh, no. It's more about finding those old PDFs. Often, they are not even accessible to people and devices anymore, so you can get rid of them – at least in most cases.”

Got you. So, find PDFs that are indexed and get rid of them.

When you say get rid of them, do you mean take the content from there and perhaps actually publish it on web pages?

“From my experience, it's already content that exists somewhere in the HTML, and people just forgot about the existence of that PDF.

I mean, most web pages nowadays are not young web pages. They already existed for years, and things just get forgotten and get done twice, three times, four times, etc. We are talking about duplicate content issues, at some point.”

How do you go about finding this content that you've overlooked?

“I am personally a fan of crawler tools such as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and Lumar as well. They all do really well at finding outdated content.

You can even sort it by file type or just search for ‘.pdf’ documents. Many approaches work here.”

How do you know if a piece of content is out of date/irrelevant? Is it simply starting with PDFs, and saying that all PDFs that are indexed are likely to be irrelevant?

“That's a really good question. There are always PDFs that need to exist. For example, we, as a hardware store chain, do sell a lot of products that need some technical documentation. Of course, you need to keep that available somewhere. You have to keep that kind of content somewhere.

At some point (at least nowadays), you still have to manually check such files in combination with tools that allow you to check keyword cannibalisation in SERPs.”

It's an interesting point. I think many industries don't consider things like PDFs and ranking PDFs, and what might have been published historically on their server.

However, for certain industries (like hardware stores or stores that sell items which perhaps come with product manuals), it may be helpful to have those product manuals as a PDF available on your server, and perhaps available to be discovered organically on Google.

Is there a solid SEO strategy around that?

“It's interesting to think about. The thing is, we're not usually producing the content; we're only selling what was manufactured by someone else.

The PDFs we're talking about are not even ours. Often, you cannot really make massive changes to such documents, as you're not really the one who has the liability, for example, if you change something that has some effect.

It's a very interesting topic, and I think it really depends on the kind of PDF content.”

Does it have a detrimental impact on your likelihood to be able to rank other pages, if you've got lots of old content ranking that you don't find to be valuable anymore?

“You mean in general or with PDFs?”

I mean, in general. If you've got lots of old content ranking, perhaps for less relevant keyword phrases than what your business is about nowadays, does it mean that it's going to be harder to rank new web pages?

“Actually, our domain isn't too old. The current one we're using has been in use since 2018. Our competitors have much older domains, which also means that we don't have that 10-year-old or older content that some other competitors have.

What we can say, or what's also known based on studies that others have done, is that the new search approaches (such as GEO, AI search, or whatever it will be called next week), seem to prefer newer content, and that, in itself, might be a motivator to find the old content, update it, and clean up a bit.”

Now, part of what you recommend in terms of providing a solid SEO foundation is to provide a clear structure. What do you mean by that?

“With us, our store contains 100,000 articles. So, just based on products and categories, we have over 100,000 URLs. Add our normal content, our magazine, and some other file types such as PDFs, and we're talking about quite a huge page.

There are several reasons why you should have a good structure here. One of them, of course, is to make it possible for Google to really understand your whole page, but also make it as accessible as possible for visitors.

Imagine going to a shop that has that many articles in a poor category hierarchy. You will not find anything.”

What does a good category hierarchy actually look like?

How do you prioritise what needs to be included, how many items do you include in a list, and how do you structure it to make it more likely that crawlers can discover everything that you want them to discover?

“I have to say we're not perfect in that area yet, because it's a lot of work. It really depends on how big each category is.

Sometimes you do not need to do much refinement, as there's just a handful of articles. In other areas (such as colours for the walls), we have quite a large quantity, and you need to put a lot more thought into how your structure is.

Are you going by brands? Are you going by colours? Are you going by certain types of walls that you can colour? It's very different, and you need to have a proper plan for that. Also, things such as faceted navigation or some workarounds to that help a lot here, to allow for very good indexing.”

Do you have a maximum number of links that you'd like to feature within a menu on an individual URL?

“Not yet, actually. So far, I don't have the feeling that we need to put maximum on it, as everyone here has a very good feeling about not overdoing it.”

Are you saying that 200-plus links could be included on a page?

“Well, on a page, it always depends, right?

Some pages tend to have the mega menus on the top, which are easily 200 links just by themselves. But usually, you program them in a way where not all of these links are visible to the crawler and customers at the same time.”

I'm just wondering because you've got 100,000 URLs that you talked about in your web pages, 100,000 distinct content pages, and obviously, you don't want to go too deep either.

I'm just wondering what the optimum structure is, in order to actually get crawlers to be aware of every single page that you have.

“We are currently on a very, very good indexation ratio. I think it's over 95%, which is really amazing for e-commerce stores. I cannot say, off the top of my head, how many links we have on a site-wide area, but I assume there should be around 100, which are mostly category links.

Then there are additional links, for example, from content to category pages, category pages to individual products, and detail pages on top of that, but it heavily depends on which kind of template you're currently on. For example, a product page will link very differently to a content page.”

How do you measure the SEO success of improved indexation?

“We are going very basic with this one. We are basically just checking, with the tools (as I already mentioned) plus Search Console, whether there are any massive issues with pages not being indexed.”

You mentioned briefly that there are new search optimization opportunities, such as AI, GEO, etc.

When a trend emerges, how do you know if it's worthwhile spending time on that particular trend?

“I think common sense and a tiny bit of gut feeling are sometimes not too bad, even if it's not scientific.

For example, if it's something that, even after using it yourself and trying it out yourself, you feel like, ‘Hey, this is less practical than what I used to do.’

Think about voice search. That’s something that was very hyped around six years ago, and no one is using it nowadays (at least not at the moment), because it's just not practical. On the other hand, we have AI search, and I'm using it, and everyone I know is using it. That's the indicator that this is not a quick trend, but something that we have to adapt to.”

OK, so a bit of gut instinct to begin with, whether or not you're using it, whether other colleagues and other people who are perhaps customers are likely to be using it as well.

Is the next step after that to identify a testing opportunity within your site and perhaps take a category of content and attempt to optimize that category of content for an LLM, for example, and then measure the potential ROI from doing that optimization work?

“Yeah, that would be something I can imagine doing on our page, but I have to be honest, we are not yet at that stage where we do massive testing.

Our team is rather small, and it's just four people and a large page. We are still doing the fundamentals, basically.”

Doing the fundamentals is obviously still impactful for you as well, and it's important not to get caught up by bright shiny things that are perhaps more exciting than doing the fundamentals.

Do you tend to focus on what you're doing from a financial ROI impact?

“Yes. Of course, we measure everything. It's a basic setup for most of us. We are looking at many tools, and also looking into web analytics, to check how we are doing.

The area we work in is very seasonal. In spring, we usually do the most sales, and we always need to do a year-over-year comparison, which is a challenge with this changing environment at Google.

However, there are still options, and of course, you can still count or check the rankings that are not as heavily impacted by seasonal changes. From there, you can see whether your target ROI is fully met.”

Martina, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Basically, start with the very obvious and very basic things that you need to do.

Do not focus on too small or too trendy things if you already have a huge workload, and prioritise. Make sure that you stick to the most important things first.”

Martina Kölsch is Senior SEO Manager at toom Baumarkt Hardware Store. Find over at toom.de.