How SEORadar helps manage technical SEO issues for massive websites

Seeking a better solution to manage hundreds of thousands of web pages

When your job involves managing the infrastructure for a website with hundreds of thousands of pages, catching errors that impact SEO on those pages can feel nearly impossible. But, for Jackie Chu, a web infrastructure and Intelligence lead who’s worked with Companies like Square and Uber, managing the impossible is just another Tuesday. 

“Most people aren’t aware of the complexity and the dynamic nature of large sites. We're always launching things, removing things, or having third-party engineers working on the site. There are a lot of issues with things like performance that happen from having a very decentralized web infrastructure,” she said. “When you're working in a big company, you don't have a ton of time to just be sniffing around your site trying to figure out what changes day over day.”

Traditionally, this data is captured by manually crawling a website to make sure everything is running. The challenge, however, is two-fold. Enterprise SEO managers don't have time to manually review crawl data for changes every day. And, second, some engineers don’t want their sites to be crawled. 

Despite the challenges, these were necessary tasks. Websites need to be online to do their jobs. When that happens, as Chu says, the website breaks.

“It just stops working,” she said. “Or, worse, you see a drop in traffic or revenue to those pages.”

Chu needed a solution that helped her stay on top of these issues. That’s where SEORadar came in.

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A simple automated solution that gets the job done

Chu first started using SEORadar years ago when a coworker mentioned it. The initial appeal of the platform was the ease of getting it up and running.

“The setup is really simple,” said Chu. “You just upload a list of your URLs and it starts monitoring. It’s really straightforward for anyone who does technical SEO. It's not a very complicated thing to get running.”

Once SEORadar was in place and monitoring the site, any time Chu needed help or ran into an issue, help was just an email away.

“Clay's always been helpful. He always gets back to me within a day of emailing him.”

Chu also found that the engineering teams, who would otherwise not want a tool crawling the site, didn’t mind.

“I've not had any engineers complain about SEORadar,” she said.

Most importantly, Chu found a tool that did what it promised.

“They perform one task which is helping you find regressions or changes in your site,” she said. “There's basically no other competitor that does that. It's incredibly helpful for the kinds of large, noisy sites that I manage.”

Less time spent catching more errors

As mentioned, Chu’s been using SEORadar for a long time now. It’s been a tool that she turns to to help manage the massive website she works on. SEORadar helps ensure that all the little things that can happen to break a website or page are caught as quickly as possible. 

“We probably find at least one critical error on the site a week that we probably wouldn't have found any other way thanks to SEORadar,” she said. “On top of that,” she adds, “At least once every half someone no indexes one of the main pages on the site, like the homepage, and that's a pretty big deal. We probably would've figured it out sooner or later, but without SEORadar you don't necessarily catch those things right away.”

With SEORadar, Chu and her team spend less time looking for problems and more time focused on big-picture projects.

“Sometimes your team has a lot of projects they're working on. The last thing they wanna do is spend all their time trying to find bugs on the site,” she says. “But that being said, if you find a bug or if a bug gets surfaced, you wanna know asap. It's just helpful to have SEORadar on the lookout for those things for you.”

One of the ways that SEORadar speeds up this process is with their integrations.

“I really like the Slack integration because it makes it easy to highlight those issues to everyone on the team,” she says. “When you're a big company, you get hundreds of emails a day. It's really hard to sift through emails and see what's wrong. But since the notifications come through Slack, we basically can triage it in real time depending on who owns the piece of the site that’s acting up.”

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