Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial element for any company seeking to increase its online visibility and attract qualified traffic to its website.
However, with so many technical elements taken into account by search engines, it can be difficult to ensure optimal SEO at all times.
In this article, we'll explore how automated testing, still relatively unknown in SEO, can be used to improve your SEO.
What is SEO?
It's thanks to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that search engines like Google can understand our web pages and enable end-users to discover them.
Essentially, it's a structured way of communicating information about a site to search engines and websites.
Search engines use robots to crawl web pages, automatically finding sites, collecting information about these web pages and putting it into a database.
This database is indexed in such a way that information on these pages can be easily found.
When you search for information on a search engine, it extracts information from this index to provide the most relevant web pages that match what you're looking for.
By optimizing sites with SEO data, your site is more likely to be found by relevant Internet users!
That said, the foundation of any SEO strategy is based on the quality of the content found on your site. There's no technical optimization that can compensate for duplicate content (content reproduced identically or nearly identically on the Web) or content that doesn't fully answer your target market's questions.
The aim of optimizing the technical aspects of SEO through automated testing is to make your quality content more easily accessible to your target market.
Factors contributing to SEO that can be monitored by automated tests
Some of the elements that can be verified by an automated test tool :
The presence of Title Tags
Google conseille explicitement d’assurer que chaque page de votre site comporte un titre dans l'élément <title>.
Cela se trouve à l'intérieur de la balise <head> du document HTML et il est affiché dans la barre de titre du navigateur.
This is the title that is displayed in search results. It's also worth noting that you can't have more than one title tag on your web page.
The presence of meta-description tags
La balise <meta> est utilisée pour décrire les métadonnées d'une page web où la description de la page, les mots-clés, etc. sont spécifiés.
Cette balise doit se trouver à l'intérieur de la balise <head> du document HTML. Les métadonnées telles que la description sont utilisées par le navigateur et d'autres applications pour afficher des informations sur la page web.
You'll find tools that help validate the structure of certain metadata, such as Google's structured data testing tool, but when it comes to regression testing of actual metadata, an automated testing tool shows its worth.
Site loading speed
User experience is a key factor in SEO, and site speed is one of them.
Of course, a site that doesn't load quickly on all browsers and devices tends to drive users away, creates a higher bounce rate, and consequently does considerable damage to a site's SEO.
Automated testing can identify performance errors that could be slowing down your site, so you can correct them quickly.
Discuss how automated testing can help ensure compliance with ever-evolving search engine guidelines, with an emphasis on Google's Web Core Vitals.
URL structure
A clear, consistent URL structure is essential for good SEO.
Automated tests can help you validate the structure of your URLs and detect errors such as broken links, incorrect redirects and missing canonical URLs.
Optimizing content for keywords
Keywords play a crucial role in your website's SEO, and automated SEO testing can help you identify the most relevant keywords for your content, and integrate them strategically into your pages.
Web accessibility
Search engines attach great importance to the user experience, and accessibility is one of them. It ensures that content is accessible to all users, whatever their physical or sensory abilities.
As a result, an accessible website generally translates into a better bounce rate, as well as a better understanding of the content by users and search engines.
Why and when should you automate SEO tests?
Companies are launching software much faster today, and a way to easily test and validate SEO data for web pages can be a real confidence booster!
SEO is an excellent candidate for automated testing, because consulting page sources can be a chore, and you may miss details.
To maintain your ranking on Google or any other search engine, you need to make sure that your SEO data is always present on your web page, because if it isn't, your site won't be indexed properly, if at all, depending on what's missing.
Especially if you're migrating your site using a different technology stack, for example, it's essential to ensure that all your HTML metadata is migrated correctly to the new platform.
What's more, if a company is constantly updating the frontend of its website, it would be wise to set up tests to ensure that the metadata is still present on the page before it is published.
The scenarios mentioned highlight that with launches or migrations, there's a good chance that your SEO data will be deleted or modified, and you need to make sure that this remains constant, whatever the context.
By collecting the data in a reference table, we can then automatically examine the information on each individual page and guarantee a successful migration.
Manual SEO testing vs. automated SEO testing
There are many companies and individuals capable of carrying out SEO audits on websites.
However, the results of such audits reflect the state of the site at a given moment in a constantly evolving process, and are subject to human error as well as omissions of detail.
What's more, these manual SEO tests take up a significant amount of time!
Automated SEO tests provide you with continuous, comprehensive monitoring that alerts you to problems with all aspects of your website's technical SEO in an efficient way.
A development cycle that prioritizes SEO at every stage
Automated tests are frequently used in development cycles to detect bugs related to logic, syntax and integration errors.
However, adding automated SEO testing to the continuous development workflow and continuous integration processes provides clear SEO guidelines for technical teams, optimizing website development for SEO from the outset, at every level.
Mr Suricate - French leader in no-code automated testing
Automated testing can be a powerful tool for optimizing your SEO and improving the visibility of your website.
With the automated testing tool Mr Suricateyou can implement continuous SEO monitoring to maintain your competitive edge in a constantly changing environment.
