ANDY DUNN

The SSR vs SSG vs ISR is a common question with respect to pre-rendering Next.js and everyone wants to know what SEO experts think of these options. For clarification (and those who don't know), these pre-rendering options are defined as the following:

• SSR = Server Side Rendering
• SSG = Static Site Generation
• ISR = Incremental Site Rendering

Which is best? Well, that depends on the use case, resources, server setup, and other factors. Personally, I prefer static site generation (SSG) since static is fast and fast wins SEO rank. A SSG site, once built, can simply be served from a CDN to many users very quickly. However, SSG isn't always the best option for websites featuring always updating news content or sites with giant eComm product databases. These types of content flowing and large sites benefit from server side rendering (SSR) since loading from the server for each user is faster and better managed than rebuilding the SSG's static pages.

The right answer is almost all the time! Schema gives you more website visibility and can get your content into a quick answers slot on Google. There are 15 basic schema types you can apply including FAQs (like these ones here), recipes, how-to steps, and many others. You can also generate custom schema as well.

No, SEO is never dead. The targets and factors which determine SEO rank do shift over time with Google algorithm updates and realigned best practices. SEO experts must constantly stay up-to-date on changes, new optimization techniques, and code base changes.

Yes, to some extent. Technical SEO comes down to understanding your websites platform, CMS, and code base. This is only possible with some developer and coding knowledge. Technical SEO skills involve being able to understand where and how to make changes using IDEs, FTPs or command lines and which files, source code lines and elements need to be changed.

Social media signals do matter for SEO and can be helpful. However, organic social is rather dead at this point in time, but it's important to keep the realm moving slowly forward so a company isn't AFK on  platforms if your target audience is there. It's an unending stream which never ends, so don't let posting and replying to the never ending comments and DMs suck up all the hours in the day.

Domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) are directly related to each other and take time to build.

• Domain authority is the sum of all external links pointing at your domain
• Page authority is the sum of all external links point at a page on your domain

Page authority is driven by good content. The more great pages you have, the higher those page authorities will be since more and more people will find them useful and link to them. Each of those pages add to your domain authority.

It can be worth A LOT for organic brand awareness and generating non-CPC traffic from SERPs. The value of organic traffic depends on your business model, where your customers are, and your strategy to target them.

The core of future SEO is helpfulness and usability. Google's Helpful Content Updates (starting in the fall of 2022) prove this is the future trend. Good SEO helps visitors find what the need on the websites they visit. This can take a number of forms including content, schema markup and structured data, and product information.

The usefulness and applications of artificial intelligence is growing by leaps and bounds each month. This can be applied to growth marketing in several ways.

1. AI Copywriting: AIs can write content. We know this to be true. However, the algorithms are not at a level where they can create good copy without human guidance and review. The content is still usable with human input, review, fact checking, and final proof reading. It should be used as a copywriting enhancer to produce more content.
2. AI SEO analysis: AI is great at skimming content, cataloging structure, and monitoring keywords. This can be applied to SEO analysis since you can easily measure you current content against competitor copy.
3. Dynamic AI guided customer flows: You have probably heard of A/B testing where you test user results between CTRs or CVRs of A or B. However, AI can enhance this testing by better understanding customers as they browse. Not only can the AI optimize between A or B options, but you can also add additional inputs, dataLayers, and conversion paths to help customers find what they need.

Understanding technical SEO is fairly simple, but the deployment of fixes with development teams can be complicated.

• Technical SEO comes down to optimizing a website's payloads, 3rd party scripts, on-page content (images/text fonts/buttons/icons/usable elements), and server stack to load as fast as possible.
• Everything loading on a site takes time. Less time = More speed.
• Websites DO need to load essential items on the page.
• The balance involves minimizing the load to fine tune the speed.

The CWV's for speed come down to three main aspects:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) = measuring loading speed.
• First Input Delay (FID) = measuring page interactivity.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) = measuring visual stability.

The harder deployment issues revolve around understanding:

• What optimizations are achievable with the current site's build, cache, and required payloads.
• Which roadblocks are unavoidable?
  • For example, somethings like Javascript can be inherently slow and blocking
  • 3rd party pixels and scripts like Facebook audience insight pixels are notoriously slow
• Work towards compression and minification with the removal of unneeded scripts from the payload.
• Deploy next gen images like WebP and compression.
• Warm and preload your site using CDNs like Akamai edge server.

90s are preferred for Core Web Vital scores. 100s are the goal (like this page here seen in the capture below).