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Edge SEO and the (possible) future of democratised SEO (Part 1)
68 Plays1 year ago
We have known Chris Green for many years, and we are always interested to hear what he has to say. Chris has a track record of seeing the bigger picture with regards to long-term SEO trends.
In this episode of the Yeseo podcast, Chris explains 'Edge SEO' and how it is already impacting the world of SEO. We also discuss falling out of love with Wordpress and the democratisation of SEO knowledge.
We had a few Internet issues at the end of this episode, so we will continue the discussion in Part 2.
Visit Chris's website - https://www.chris-green.net/
Find Chris on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisgreenseo/
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello. Welcome back to the Untitled SEO Podcast by Yesseo. I'm your host, Andrew Laws. I am the chief human at Yesseo. And we have an honoured guest today. So honoured guest, would you like to introduce yourself?
Chris Green's SEO Journey
00:00:16
Speaker
Hi, I'm Chris Green. I'm a senior SEO consultant and I guess long time messer about on the Internet. I kind of made a career doing SEO, tinkering and playing with stuff and
00:00:28
Speaker
feel lucky and bemused that I get to do this as my job. A long-term muck about her. For the listeners, Chris and I have known each other. We've known each other for some time. And I've always been really interested in the angle at which Chris approaches SEO. There's a lot of assumed approaches to SEO in our world, in the world of SEO.
00:00:54
Speaker
And each time I've seen, Chris, for example, a write-up that you've given, where you've given a talk somewhere, or just the titles of some of the things you've written and other things you've been involved in, there's always something there which I think is quite interesting.
Innovative SEO Concepts
00:01:08
Speaker
You were one of the first people I remember really talking openly about keyword cannibalization. I mean, this is a long time ago. It's a few years.
00:01:20
Speaker
It was a while, I think, yeah, it was always a thing and I think, yeah, we know now. But when I spoke to you recently just over the LinkedIn chat, you mentioned a phrase I've not heard before. And much like you, I've been an SEO a long time and part of the joy of the whole thing for me is every day is a school day. So you mentioned the phrase Edge SEO. So can you unravel that a little bit for me, please?
00:01:46
Speaker
Yes, well one part of that's easy to unravel and the other part's less easy to unravel. So I'll start with the easy part first. It is SEO as we know it in most recognisable senses, but the edge part is the
00:02:02
Speaker
the bit that can lead you astray a little bit. It's effectively a new place for us to do SEO. So if you recommend changes to developer or you're in the position where you can implement changes yourself, you would do that
00:02:18
Speaker
on your website, most likely on the server that it's based on in the code base that the site's written in or within the CMS that you edit. So that's kind of conventional. That takes place on what we'd call the origin server so that the main point where your website lives.
00:02:35
Speaker
The edge is at a different level, kind of sits above the origin. If you're familiar with CDNs, sort of content delivery networks, a little bit like say CloudFlare or CloudFront or the various other providers, the edge is kind of facilitated at that level.
00:02:55
Speaker
So Edge SEO, put simply, is SEO that takes place there. It's making SEO changes or fixes above the server. Now, the term Edge is a little bit odd in that you can ask any of the different CDN providers what they would consider Edge to be. They all have slightly different takes on it. And many companies now that are CDNs conventionally now don't consider themselves just as a CDN.
00:03:20
Speaker
call themselves other things like cloud network solutions or other convoluted stuff. But the fundaments of it are all the same. Rather than using the computing power of your server, you're using their computing power that's based somewhere else. And for SEO, the reason why that's kind of super exciting is for a number of reasons, really.
Understanding Edge SEO
00:03:40
Speaker
You get to circumvent blockers or technical restraints that may stop you implementing changes.
00:03:46
Speaker
Or better, yeah, it enables you to do things that you couldn't do just on the origin server. In terms of optimizing for delivery, in terms of cleaning up redirects, or generating sitemaps potentially, or various other, some SEO functions I would argue are better on the edge than they are on the origin. So it's kind of a wild new world of opportunity whilst at the same time
00:04:15
Speaker
almost being painfully similar to conventional SEO as I just said it just kind of just take it to a different battlefield basically I think that's the hopefully that's helpful it absolutely is so to kind of clarify it further is this a technology that you can use with you know CMSs that are very ubiquitous at the moment like WordPress or
00:04:39
Speaker
well it's wordpress really yeah yeah so wordpress so um if your cms sort of acts independent of any of the cdns then then yes in short so wordpress uh drupal things like that can can interface well with it so the most common or the easiest barrier to entry would be wordpress install um with cloudflare
00:05:04
Speaker
So Cloudflare, their free tier, will let you sort of help protect your website against malicious attacks. Also has lots of lovely one-click like optimization options that can help sort of speedy delivery of your website to the users. But more recently Cloudflare have been adding things like redirect management for example. So
00:05:25
Speaker
You could have your WordPress blog, but say you wanted to add some redirects in. Well, you don't have to add that at the WordPress level. You could add that at Cloudflare's level, for example. Or you can even deploy files or other changes straight to Cloudflare, circumvent WordPress altogether.
00:05:46
Speaker
I think some reasons you might do that is if you're doing any SEO AB testing, for example. So WordPress doesn't do that kind of thing very well out of the box, whereas something like Cloudflare or another Edge provider could let you do that. So they work really well in tandem, depending on what you want to use it for.
00:06:05
Speaker
So we're talking more about the more tech side of SEO. So it's not so much the words and the pictures. It's the delivery of those things. So I can see, with my limited technical understanding, that if you are managing a redirect in Cloudflare, then it's going to be done by DNS, I'm guessing, or something that's a level above the actual files on a server being served.
00:06:32
Speaker
Yes, yeah, the real optimization for, say, redirects on the edge is you never request that from the origin server. So user connects to, in this instance, CloudFlare. It sees the destination and it serves you the redirect right at that point on the edge. So to most users, that will almost be an imperceivable difference. But say you've got a 10-year-old installation of WordPress that's really unoptimized. Say you've got
00:06:59
Speaker
far too many redirects in there already. And just your application, WordPress just takes long to load. Depending on how it's built, you may have to wait for that to load to then process the redirect to then send it back. So for example, you could cut two-thirds off the time it takes just to serve a redirect. Or if you've got a chain of them, so again, say the site's existed for 10 years, you've redirected a page from A to B to C to D to E.
00:07:27
Speaker
You hit A in the sequence and you've got to wait for WordPress to redirect you between all of these different destinations before you finally get your working page.
00:07:36
Speaker
On the edge, one of the things we've done is flattening redirects so you don't have this chaining or this hopping between pages. You just hit the edge of the network. It goes, ah, you want this page. We're going to serve you it or serve you the redirected version. So it's on that side. It's that's a, as you said, like an entirely technical kind of reason for doing
SEO for Large and Small Businesses
00:07:57
Speaker
so. And
00:07:58
Speaker
The people that benefit from that are larger, older sites. So, you know, if you're saving 900 milliseconds on a redirect and you have a 20 page WordPress website and you sell local services to people within a 50 mile radius, it's probably not something you'd get too excited about. If you're serving those redirects millions of times a day,
00:08:20
Speaker
that has a real kind of tangible impact on how Google bot sees your website, but also on costs of just hosting and various other things. So that's one that I'd say is like an entirely technical kind of very hardcore technical implementation.
00:08:35
Speaker
But it can sometimes be content as well. So you can use workers on edge or you can essentially code workers in JavaScript to do things like run a find and replace on the page. So whenever you see this link,
00:08:52
Speaker
change the anchor text to be something more optimal, for example. It would run it automatically, you'd already have built or written the codes that would do that and what it's doing for the users and for Google they're seeing a different more optimized link but without you having to have made that change on the origin. So that could be dynamic for example, that could change in various contexts or
00:09:17
Speaker
it could just be possible where it might not have been. So still quite a technical thing, but it can impact your on-page elements, depending how you want to do it. I can see that this is a technical thing. And in ye olden days of SEO, having a website that worked was sometimes enough to rank. I mean, I'm going back to the last century. So I see this very much as a natural progression.
00:09:42
Speaker
It's it's kind of an obvious Not really a destination because we're never going to reach like SEO Nirvana but it seems like quite an obvious step along the way because we've been we've seen so many times over the last 20 odd years that any optimizations that improve user experience and Ultimately reduce tech debt, you know reduce the amount of oomph you have to put in how your website runs generally
00:10:10
Speaker
are well aligned with with what Google likes to rank, essentially. So it makes a lot of sense. I mean, in a way, it worries me for the smaller, the smaller companies who may not have the budget to invest in something like this. Because you know, one of one of my things has always been democratization of SEO knowledge and
00:10:32
Speaker
I don't think I've heard you use that phrase, but just the way you share. I'm not putting words in your mouth here, Chris, but the way you share information, I think you're kind of along a similar lines. But then as you started to explain more of it, I thought, well, I'm not promoting them, but just moving your website somewhere like WP Engine or any of the, I think it was very good WordPress hosts.
00:10:56
Speaker
is going to get you a large way towards this anyway. And the other reason I changed my mind about it worrying me for small businesses.
00:11:05
Speaker
is that we also see quite regularly an SEO that if you make more of an effort than your competitors, you'll outrank them. That's a massive simplification oversimplification. But, but generally, I think I'm just celebrating awareness. I don't really, I haven't really got a point of where I'm going here. I've just sort of used it for counseling now, Chris, and just sort of getting it all out.
00:11:28
Speaker
No, I know what you mean. I think there's a truism there for sure in regards to putting more effort in making your website better, more optimal, your experience better is definitely worth doing.
Future of Serverless Websites
00:11:42
Speaker
I think with regards to the Edge or Edge Compute or this kind of distributed method of putting content online, I mean, it's entirely possible you could go to Cloudflare today
00:11:55
Speaker
and build your website entirely on the edge. So you actually are a serverless website. Now, if you're a small business, a serverless website might be all you need. So it's just hosted or lives on the back of Cloudflare's distributed network.
00:12:13
Speaker
which is relatively inexpensive relatively easy to use relatively i think of this stuff i'm not an engineer but i can make it work but the stuff that so of the different edge provided so you you've got this kind of spectrum so on the one and i'd say cloud player position themselves very intentionally at this accessible and so.
00:12:34
Speaker
just moving your DNS to Cloudflare protects you from stuff, can optimize delivery. And for some businesses, that's all you'll ever need to do, but you will get some of that sort of overall benefit of doing it. Now, you can then go into the more complex end of things. You can start writing your own workers, doing some more complex stuff if you so wish. And again, it's reasonably accessible from like a budgetary point of view.
00:13:01
Speaker
whenever you're using workers or any of this computed edge stuff, it tends to then cost. So, you know, if you are a small business that gets a large amount of traffic, for example, you may find some sort of cost prohibitive factors there. But if we kind of then take a step away from Cloudflare to like the extreme end of the spectrum and we look at Akamai or Fastly, who kind of much more the enterprise end,
00:13:27
Speaker
The problems that they're solving, the network infrastructure that they're putting in place, they're slowly transforming the tech stacks of major companies, major e-commerce platforms. And the way that people are thinking slowly is, actually, this doesn't need to sit on our servers anymore. This could go and live somewhere else. And it would be cheaper and quicker. And if we need to upgrade it, we don't need to upgrade our setup. We're upgrading someone else's.
00:13:54
Speaker
I think the opportunities and what people have to gain from it is very, very different depending on where you sit in the overall kind of scale of things. I'd say the most likely implementation of age on smaller businesses, or if you're thinking you're an SME or small businesses, where I need to make some changes and I just cannot do it on my platform. I have to do it somewhere else.
00:14:20
Speaker
the edge is another option. Now, I'm not saying that's the best option. That sounds like a hack or a hotfix, but that is a solution. So I think, you know, think back to my days, primarily an agency, I'd make recommendations to small businesses. Their developers could never, couldn't or wouldn't make the required changes. So for me, something like an edge platform where I could come in and just, you know, just change some title tags or some links in some menus or something like that.
00:14:49
Speaker
is a very attractive prospect. So I would say there's definitely a lot of health warnings around that. And I'd say in an enterprise situation, hot fixing stuff on the edge to circumvent the devs or engineers that are running the main code base is actually quite an unpopular and probably not great thing to do. Yeah, it alienates people slightly. So how you utilize it and how you get the best benefit out of it does
00:15:18
Speaker
it does depend. I would say for me, if I could characterise a lot of my career, it's kind of like, well, identifying the problem is actually pretty simple. I'd say 95% of cases, it's clear what the problem is. It's that path to implementation is often really difficult. And whenever I'm teaching or workshopping of anyone, the key thing I drum into people is
00:15:42
Speaker
this stuff doesn't do anything until it's live, like the content that we've written, the keyword research, the technical audits, until this stuff is reflected in the code that Google is crawling, it means very little. And whether the blocker is my fault or somebody else's, if I'm the one giving the recommendations, I can't get the result I want until I can get over this implementation gap. So
00:16:07
Speaker
The initial excitement around Edge is this implementation gap gets smaller, or I have a new weapon in the arsenal. And sometimes, actually, if you just go to a team and say, well, look, we can do this using your Akamai service, and we can write a worker.
00:16:20
Speaker
They usually don't want to do that but very often just being told there's another workaround or it is possible Can sometimes spare people on to making the change the right way? So it's another tool. I don't think it will it's not mainstream at the moment and I think it will take years to become so I think until websites become serverless as a more common occurrence
00:16:47
Speaker
This is more fringe cases, web optimization, other sort of elements. It won't be, I don't think it'll ever be the dominant method, but I don't see that as being a problem either, because as you sort of said, it is quite a niche application in so many ways.
00:17:02
Speaker
It
Tech Accessibility and Platform Growth
00:17:03
Speaker
is at the moment, but a lot of technology like this trickles down. Sometimes it takes a very long time, but I can remember seeing the first Drupal website and just thinking, well, this is it. We're here now. And then worked on one and turned grey and lost some years of my life.
00:17:23
Speaker
And then that trick, there's probably people screaming if they listen to this, but more complex CMSs like Drupal then trickled down to being WordPress, which is very easy to use. And that then trickled down to being, I don't know, Squarespace or something. And these things become more accessible and more kind of attainable without having to have that great tech understanding. I mean, I've been experimenting over the last couple of years with
00:17:50
Speaker
headless CMS is like, I can't say it, systemic. And some of the other ones that can just live in an Amazon S3 bucket, or they don't need any sort of guts, as it were. Is that sort of thing you would think of as serverless? Because it's sitting in an S3, it's static files sat in an S3 bucket being served by CloudFront on AWS. Am I sort of thinking the right way?
00:18:22
Speaker
You can say, no, you're an idiot. I wouldn't be offended. Okay. I've got a text message here from Chris saying his connection is a, he's struggling a bit. It's conversations. Oh, that's all right. Are you back? Yeah, I got bits of that.
00:18:47
Speaker
I was just sort of trying to think it through into sort of perhaps brands or names that people have heard of. So I was thinking, I was mucking around with Jekyll and Stastamic, which are headless CMSs, where you bung the files in Amazon S3 bucket on AWS and then serve it using CloudFront and Route 53. I'm not sure that's quite what you're talking about, but I'm sort of trying to bring it into a way that I understand.
00:19:15
Speaker
Yeah, it is broadly. I think the ethos is there. I think it's the networks that everything's distributed on that's the key. And it's that difference of your origin, whether it's a dusty server cabinet in one place, or whether you've got it from a data center, or it's that difference of piggybacking on someone else's architecture, I guess, to help benefit from that.
00:19:43
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think just coming back to what you're saying around Drupal trickle down into WordPress, that trickle down into other things. So one of the things that I'm hugely excited about in general, and the link to Edge is there, I'll come back to it in the second bit, is things like Wix or other services actually becoming better. And you said right at the start, like the democratization of this kind of knowledge, democratization of the web.
00:20:07
Speaker
As much as I love WordPress, I've fallen out of love with it over the last couple of years because for the vast majority of people that I worked with, it's still too complicated. It's still too easy to make a bad website. Don't get me wrong, WordPress has done a huge amount and plugins like Yoast and others that are shaping the web, but it's still a little too exclusive or the barrier to entry is still too high for it to impact the majority of people in my experience.
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's sort of pulling both ends of the spectrum because it's too complex and has too much for a lot of people, but it's also suffering from trying to be all things to all people. I sometimes explain it to people that, you know, a Windows computer might get slow because it's trying to be everything to everyone. It's trying to be everyone's best mate. A Mac might not be quite so much because it just does a core set of things very well. I think WordPress is interesting because it's a victim of its own success and its own simplicity in a really confusing way.
00:21:08
Speaker
Oh, see, at this point, I can't tell if Chris is deep in thought or whether his internet has crapped out. Unfortunately, his internet has crapped out. So hopefully he's going to come back. But we are recording this in the Easter holiday here in the UK.
Podcast Conclusion
00:21:23
Speaker
And what happens with UK broadband is as soon as the kids leave school and fire up Minecraft or anything else they're playing, all the bandwidth disappears. I think I'm going to give Chris a few minutes to come back.
00:21:38
Speaker
and if he doesn't come back I think sadly we might have to wrap this one up I think it's been a really interesting episode and what I'll do is I will get Chris actually in the room with me here at the ESEO headquarters and we'll kind of carry on from there because I think there's a lot more to this discussion to be had it's really interesting as somebody in the ESEO industry to talk to people like Chris who
00:22:06
Speaker
really looking at the bleeding edge and you know so beyond the cutting edge and I genuinely thought that's where the the name edge might come from from the bleeding edge right unfortunately I think I'm gonna call that and I'm gonna wrap up this episode so thanks for listening this this is a really interesting discussion that will continue and I might call this one part one
00:22:30
Speaker
Okay, brilliant. Thanks for listening. Please subscribe, like it, add stars to it, tell your friends, ring your mum about it, all the good stuff. You've been listening to the Untitled SEO Podcast by Yesseo, and I'm your host, Andrew Lawes, and I will smell you later. Bye.