SEO Year in Review (2023)

We would like to thank Yannis Dimitroulas for his service to delasign and his knowledge in SEO. Without him, our advancements would not have been possible.

2023 has been a fabulous year of growth for delasign's presence on the web. We grew by over 2700% and thanks to the work of Yannis Dimitroulas, in December 2023 we found out that we had committed errors that could have led to doubling that growth.

Let's discuss how this started and all the lessons we learned along the way.

Over a year and a half ago, our Founder Oscar de la Hera Gomez started documenting everything that he knew with relation to Swift with the vision of being able to boost the performance of the organization on iOS, iPadOS, TVOS, MacOS or WatchOS projects as well as aid the onboarding of new technical employees.

This has since expanded to all the knowledge and processes that we have and carry out at delasign and at the time, resulted in a spurt in growth which led delasign to go from less than 100 impressions and 10 clicks a day to surpass 1000 impressions and 100 clicks in a single day - a feat that at the time felt like extraordinary progress.

In Feburary 2023, Oscar wrote an article titled How to enable Developer Mode on an iPhone or iPad which led to extraoardinary growth and which elevated all the other pages along with it.

This demonstrates our first lesson of 2023: One page can lift up an entire website.

Another lesson that could be taken away from this is: Content you think might not be helpful is the most helpful.

As delasign.com crossed 400+ blog posts, the build process behind delasign.com began to fail to the point that we could no longer fix, update or post new content.

To solve for this, we upgraded our codebase and architecture to be able to scale to millions of pages.

Shortly after, we noticed a significant drop in our Google Search Console performance, which we attributed to a drop in the performance of How to enable Developer Mode on an iPhone or iPad and moved on, producing more quality content at scale.

However, this was not the case and in fact it was because we messed up our canonicals, which was only made apparent to us in December 2023 thanks to the work of Yannis Dimitroulas, who also made us realize that we had not setup our robots.txt file correctly and that our sitemap was not accessible.

This demonstrates to the second lesson of 2023: Metadata can make or break a websites SEO.

Even though it took us till December 2023 to fix the metadata and optimize the SEO of our website to a 95% health score in Ahrefs, we still witnessed extraordinary growth thanks to the addition of 500+ articles.

This demonstrates to the third lesson of 2023: Content is King.

As part of our experiments on Ahrefs, we learned that not all robots can crawl a webpage after load time - although it appears Google has found a way.

This means that if a codebase is not written to offer all the content at load time, robots may not be able to correctly asses a webpage and depending on the scale, an entire website.

To test this hypothesis, we adapted the codebase of delasign.com to make all the content accessible at load time. This resulted in an incredible boost in the quality of an Ahrefs crawl.

This demonstrates to the fourth lesson of 2023: The content you show at load time affects the SEO of a webpage.

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