Site Crawl
OVERVIEW
PROCESS
For all you non-SEOs out there – if the search engines can’t crawl your website efficiently, you can do a lot of harm to your rank on a SERP(Search Engine Results Page). If there are technical issues or content is out of order the SEO needs to know as soon as possible or they can be completely ineffective with other site tasks they are juggling.
Site Crawl! What a massive set of information. The problem to solve here was how does Moz give all of this data to somebody in an organized manner and make it digestible and most of all actionable.
To get started we conducted SME interviews and card sorts. After the Moz team determined the milestones for beta we were able to formulate what would be our beta set of data.
This is the Beta navigation structure. Highlighted items are navigational clusters. Plans to segment the data here as Beta moved forward into more defined task areas.
The flow that I proposed was very much like a funnel. As you go deeper into the crawl the data gets tighter and more specific. Another important piece of Site Crawl was also making the huge amount of data feel very actionable. Quite often customers are overwhelmed by the data we surface so a big objective of mine was whether you were an expert or a novice you could take the information and make sense of it and when the customer moved away from our app they knew exactly what their next steps were.
This is a deeper look at post-beta proposed navigational buckets. Site Inventory is exactly what it sounds like, a line by line table view of what the customer has on their website. This is not where you see alerts prominently. It is a place where you can say "I want information on a specific image" there you can drill down and see information about that component of your site. Technical and On Page were split based on customer feedback. Within these two buckets tasks very quite a bit. Some things all though of equal importance take a different skill set. This can be generally summed up as a Content SEO and Technical SEO.
The Solution
As a user the Overview page is a snapshot of my whole site's SEO ecosystem. Few main things we are showing:
View progress of dealing with the site's issues
View any new issues that may have happened since the last weekly crawl.
View a complete list of issues including change and total issues stack ranked.
The issue checklist was designed to feel actionable. As the user if I have no issues of a specific type we will tell you "no issues" and roll up that issue until something comes a long. When you do have issues we surface the five newest issues(with an option to dig in deeper and see all). We also surface "what it is" and "how to fix" really pushing the action.
We are now at the Issue level. This is a deep dive of the issue. As a customer I can see ALL of my issues for this issue type. As you may have noticed there is a "New" label, this label denotes newness from last crawl which is a weekly event. This is important because if Google for instance has an algorithm update it can sufficiently derail your site's indexing.
We are now far down the rabbit hole. This is page detail. As a customer, if I were to click into the table items "page detail" icon within the issue level I would end up here! I am now looking at a solitary page and all of its contributing information to this hectic site ecosystem.
This is page detail from the other entry point from the nav. As a customer, if I wanted to know information on a very specific page from my website I could come here to paste in the URL of the page in question. From here I could get to issue types climbing to broader set of data.