Olga is an SEO consultant at SEOSLY. She is a technical SEO specialist and an SEO auditor with 10+ years of experience. She has so far completed 200+ in-depth SEO audits. She has experience working at the SEO agency, as an in-house SEO, and as an independent SEO consultant. Olga is an SEO geek totally addicted to SEO news and SEO podcasts.
Olga has completed SEO courses and degrees at universities, such as UC Davis, University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University. She also completed Moz Academy! And, of course, has Google certifications. She keeps learning SEO and loves it. Olga is also a Google Product Expert specializing in areas, such as Google Search and Google Webmasters.
Olga can be reached on Twitter @olgazarzeczna or via LinkedIn.
Recent Shows with Olga Zarzeczna
541 | Dealing with Plagiarism and Imposter Syndrome w/ Olga ZarzecznaInterview / podcastStealing from SEOs? Really?
Olga Zarzeczna shares candidly her perspective on the recent situation she had to deal with – the theft of her own web content, which got published as someone else’s work on Amazon. It’s incredible to hear that it happened and the SEO community rallied behind Olga in extraordinary ways. Women in Tech SEO demonstrated their strength and support when this came to light. Key members in the SEO community also helped Olga navigate her own (unwarranted) imposter syndrome challenges.
Olga shares some important lessons from this experience and advises others who may be silently struggling with confidence. After listening to this account, please reach out if you have time to tell Olga how you feel about her contribution to the SEO industry!
The Discovery
The Timeline of Events
The SEO Community Rallies
How Could This Happen Today?
Dealing with Imposter Syndrome
The Supportive SEO Community: Women in Tech SEO
Lessons from SEO Theft
Try Another Community, But Not SEO!
Women in Tech SEO
[...]
November 1, 2022- 539 | Yet Even More Top SEO Mistakes w/ Olga ZarzecznaInterview / podcastMaybe Don’t Copy Your Competitor’s Schema?
We are continuing with OlgaTober with the second of three episodes covering our interview with Olga Zarzeczna, one of the top SEO Audit specialists today. We continued going through the list of top SEO mistakes made by sites that Olga has found over her years of performing audits.
Erin and Olga match their notes on some of the most critical, flagrant fouls in the SEO space. We also cover some more controversial “gray hat” issues regarding structured data.
But seriously, copying a competitor’s structured data? That actually happened?
Check it out today on the EDGE!
Key Points:
SEO Mistake: Targeting the Same Keywords on All Pages
SEO Mistake: +500K Excluded Pages in GSC
SEO Mistake: Chinese Characters in Search Results
SEO Mistake: Host Issues in the Crawl Stats Report in GSC
SEO Mistake: Pages or Resources that Should Not be Indexed by Google are Indexed
SEO Mistake: No Headings at All
SEO Mistake: Sitemap with HTTP links only
SEO Mistake: Website is Available and Indexable in Two Instances (Staging and Production)
SEO Mistake: Competitor’s Data in Schema
SEO Mistake: All bots Disallowed in Robots.txt
SEO Mistake: SameAs Pointing to Wikipedia
SEO Mistake: Using AI-generated Photos of “Authors”
SEO Mistake: ALT Text Stuffed with Multiple Keywords
SEO Mistake: Three different SEO plugins / Five Different Caching Plugins
SEO Mistake: Lack of Any Contextual Linking Between Blog Posts
SEO Mistake: Important Resources Blocked in Robots.txt [...]
October 19, 2022
- 537 | Top SEO Mistakes from Olga ZarzecznaInterview / podcastLet us count the ways…
Olga Zarzeczna joins the EDGE again to provide some fantastic insight into over a hundred SEO audits she has done. We have some of the top issues that she has seen, and you have it all here in the podcast. Well, not all of them – please check out her full article in the link below. We tackle some of the most important things to get right on this OglaTober episode. Yes, we have 3 episodes with Olga this month of October – might as well name it after her.
Dig in deep on the Best SEO Audit Mistakes….today on the EDGE!
SEO Mistake: Low Value Anchor Text
SEO Mistake: Homepage Content Invisible to Google
SEO Mistake: Random/unrelated Text in Headings
SEO Mistake: Corrupt And/Or Overly Complicated Structure Of Headings
SEO Mistake: Canonical Links Pointing To Non-Indexable Pages
SEO Mistake: Menu Links Pointing To Staging Urls
SEO Mistake: Horrendous Speed Scores
SEO Mistake: No Text on the Homepage
SEO Mistake: Lorem Ipsum Content on the Live Site
SEO Mistake: Links that Do Not Look Like Links
SEO Mistake: Non-indexable URLs in the XML sitemap
SEO Mistake: The Highly Complex Structure Of The Website
SEO Mistake: No Blog Section
SEO Mistake: No Custom 404 Page [...]
October 13, 2022
- 500 | Going Over the EDGE: Epic Fails for our 500thpodcastGoing Over the EDGE with the Most Epic Fails
EDGE of the Web is proud to bring you some epic fails shared by friends of the show. We wanted to lean into the 500, seeing that the server error code 500 is a bad thing, any way you cut it. We reached out to our guests of the past and asked them to share one of their worst screw-ups in SEO and digital marketing, the ones they really learned from. We wanted to share these with our listeners so you can learn too! Thanks so much to all of our listeners and guests over the 10 years and 500 episodes. We really are blessed to be able to do this and learn from the best. Special thanks to our 500th episode sponsor, Ahrefs! Check out their free tool at edgeofthewebradio.com/AWT.
Check out some great Epic Fails from our friends:
Epic Fails for the 500th
Benjamin Shapiro
Marie Haynes
Jonny Ross
Garrett Sussman
Title Sponsor of the 500th Episode: Ahrefs
Dixon Jones
Olga Zarzeczna
Andrew Optimisey
Barry Schwartz
Mordy Oberstein
Future paths of EDGE of the Web
Thanks to everyone who has helped us over the years!
#StandwithUkraine edgeofthewebradio.com/ukraine [...]
May 23, 2022
- 449 | The Best Google SEO Tools and Extensions with Olga ZarzecznaInterview / podcastOlga Zarzeczna appears on the EDGE for her second segment as we discuss her recent articles, a list of 52 SEO tools from Google and 79 Best Chrome Extensions for SEO as well as the incredible success she has had with your consultancy, being that her site has only been indexed for a year. This is how you do content, folks! Providing value every step of the way, here on the EDGE.
What spurred you to actually start your own business?
Olga’s initial strategy for her site. The uniqueness of her content.
How she’s keeping her knowledge sharpened.
Google Tools: Google Search Console Insights
Google Tools: Core Web Vitals
Google Tools: Page Speed Insights and Lighthouse
Google Tools: Google Chrome Dev tools
Google Tools: Data Highlighter
SEO Chrome Extensions: Olga’s Best Pics! [...]
September 21, 2021
- 447 | 65 Top SEO Audit Tools from Olga ZarzecznaInterview / podcastWho is Olga Zarzeczna?
Founder of SEOSLY, Olga is an SEO consultant and SEO site-auditor. Olga performs in-depth audits for big clients and teaches others how to audit on her site. She came into the industry in 2012, experimenting and creating websites. When her sites began taking off, she realized SEO was something she wanted to dive into. She created her site to share the things she has learned and the things she does and experiences every day.
The Fail of SEO Auditing: Relying on a Single Tool Too Much
What Factors Kept Some Tools Out of the List?
First Tools: Errors, Warnings, and Notice Audit Tools: Screaming Frog and Site Bulb
A Focus on the Semrush SEO Technical Audit Tool
The Requirement of SEO and Site Context When Reading Audit Results
On Crawl
NetSpeak
DeepCrawl: The Enterprise-Level SEO Audit Tool
AHRefs Website Analysis Tool: Best Site Monitoring Tool
Check My Links
Link Redirect Trace
Why Javascript Rendering Analysis is So Important as an SEO Audit Tool
Log Analyzer Tools: Why is it so important to focus on the logs?
Volatility Sensors
Great Guidance: How to Start Your SEO Audit Process
The Importance of Multiple Tools
Some agencies don’t take an audit as seriously as they should. They take a single tool and focus on the tactical aspect rather than the audit itself. An audit is a strategy document; like a physician’s tools, auditing is assessing and putting together a plan to rectify things working against the site.
There has been major growth in technical SEO audit tools. Due to the tools reporting everything needed without a deep dive into analysis, the reliance on one tool can be a downfall. With a massive amount of SaaS web-based tools present and such a comprehensive scope that tools create, SEO technicians think they can take a step back.
By using several different tools, Olga can look at specific issues from different angles or find something she wouldn’t have found with one tool with another. The different tools complement each other, and no one tool does anything comprehensively. The list of 65 tools Olga has created contains a specific feature that premium tools may have that some people don’t have access to.
Not Making the List
When it came down to those tools that did not make Olga’s list of auditing tools, most that didn’t make it were just too buggy. Some tools did not give what was needed of it and were not complete products. Olga sharing her list is to make sure people are experiencing the best tools in the industry.
Best Standard Tools
The top two on Olga’s list were Screaming Frog and Site Bulb. These two are good to use first to do a manual review and pin down the audit goals. Screaming Frog is one of the only tools to see your site at the core web vitals level page by page. It gives a full picture, showing how changing something globally affects every page on the website.
Site Bulb offers explanations that can be clicked on and read to learn new things or SEO tips. This is an advantage over Screaming Frog, according to Olga. You need to know how to read Screaming Frog’s audits as there are no explanations. However, Screaming Frog has a comparison tool that allows you to compare one audit to another. Both tools can run scheduled audits. Olga uses these two tools as her first and second crawlers.
SEMrush is web-based and runs automatically. It’s a good tool to have set up to be alerted and control things. SEMrush also has tips, like Site Bulb. Sometimes the alerts from SEMrush require some common sense to determine that a certain critical error is not something to worry about. Audits take contextual knowledge, so you can’t just read the reports or numbers. You need to look at the report and unpack it, which requires you to read it and have SEO common sense.
Structure Tools
Many tools overlap, which is an intellectual exercise as you must see what’s there, which helps less advanced SEOs learn the auditing process. NetSpeak is another crawler that is good for checking the status of codes and whether there are any 404s or other errors.
DeepCrawl is another structural analysis tool that can give more than most other technical assessment tools. The depth of analysis it does regularly shows key elements that need to be attended to, in addition to the crevices that most tools don’t get into. DeepCrawl is more useful on an enterprise-level for analysis as you need to know what you’re doing when using it.
AHRefs also has a good crawler best used for monitoring purposes. The monitoring offers alerts when a site is having problems. Running a crawl with it each week helps take a look at what’s going on.
Link Analysis Tools
Check My Links whether a Chrome extension is a link analysis tool. It quickly shows whether links on your site are broken, which is good for checking links on a per-page basis, not so much for checking your entire site. Link Redirect Trace is another link analysis tool good for checking the page to page. This plugin tool sees how a page behaves, checking whether a link is redirecting well, so you don’t have to check in the code.
Javascript Rendering is important for SEO analysis because if there are issues in the rendered HTML and it differs from the source HTML, the Google bot may not see the links. Javascript rendering checks on a page but can also see the bigger issues. Screaming Frog also allows you to render and compare each web page to the next.
Log Analyzer Tools
It’s important to do a log analysis and not just focus on a crawl, as it will give you the whole picture of what bots are crawlers visiting the site and what pages exactly are being visited. You can see what different search engine crawlers are doing. If you’re interested in what Google is doing, you can use Google Search Console Pro Stats which gives an idea of what crawling Google is doing. Jetoctopus has this log analysis tool, as well as SEMrush and On Crawl. On Crawl is unique because of the content depth and semantic analysis it does. Jetoctopus is essentially a web-based version of Screaming Frog.
Volatility Sensors and Algorithm Update Overlays
Penguin is a tool that can sync to Google analytics property to see a site’s performance there. Olga analyzes the visibility of the site, then looks at what’s going on regarding updates. She compares spikes and drops, which can sometimes give answers right away, but sometimes it requires an in-depth analysis.
Website Penalty Indicator helps the site, looking at whether an update caused the traffic drop. This tool shows a timeline of updates and fluctuations, comparing what’s happening on the site. Rank Ranger also allows you to see the day-to-day volatility. SEMrush also has a sensor tool that takes a look at volatility. Some other sensor tools to mention are Algaroo and SEO Weather.
Audit Guidance from Olga
For those looking to get into SEO auditing, Olga says to use site Bulb and read the explanations that they have on their site. From there, you can use an audit process, either her own or someone else’s, and go through each of the steps. You can Google guides when you don’t know something, but the best way to go is by reading and doing. [...]
September 13, 2021
