Serverless applications that run on the edge are going to be the future of enterprise SEO deployments

Nick says: "I've been obsessed with edge SEO for nearly two years now. SEO teams need to understand how they can start utilising the edge, and the opportunities it provides. It's quite a complex subject with various levels of understanding around it, but I'll give a simple rundown of what you can do. The edge is CDNs, or Content Delivery Networks, such as Fastly, Akamai and Cloudflare. These were previously used for content distribution, but they've gone far beyond that. Now, we can hold data on the edge with KV-Store, we have increased processing power, and we have increased memory. We're moving into a situation where we can have a serverless environment, and we can run more complex computation on the edge. That gives huge opportunities for SEO.

As a practical example, we can start to move all our redirects onto the edge. Previously, managing and improving redirects in an ongoing process would be quite a challenge for an SEO team. Issues like flattening redirect chains, dealing with link rot and finding better contextual targets for links can be complex. If you can move these into the edge, and start developing logic around that, you can be fixing and improving redirects as ongoing workflow.

The edge can provide opportunities in everything - from dealing with redirects, rewrites, or schema, to stitching data from databases on the origin server into the page at the edge, for the end user. There are so many possibilities that you have with this technology. The edge is part of the architecture, and it has certain pros and cons against the origin server that you're currently using."

What are the pros and cons of using the edge?

"To get around problems on the origin server, there are things that should be done on the edge, and there are things that should be done on the origin server. You should always ask yourself where your problem should be fixed. When you're approaching it from that angle, your perspective changes.

To use our previous example, redirects is something that works particularly well on the edge. There's no point getting a user in via the CDN, taking them to the origin server and then redirecting them back and forth. It's a huge waste of time. By putting redirects on the edge, you provide a much faster experience for bots and users. You can save up to 800-900 milliseconds per journey. When it makes sense to serve content to the user at the point of interaction with your network, it's something you should be doing on the edge."

What size of business or website should be using the edge?

"It is primarily in enterprise. Platforms like Akamai and Fastly have quite significant costs associated with them, so they suit larger enterprises. However, Cloudflare is used by a huge number of companies, and it's very accessible. The capability is there, but it is work - it's politics to get these things deployed, and get these processes built. If you are redirecting dozens or hundreds of links, you might not go to the edge. However, for redirecting links in the tens of thousands, edge is a solution.

Like any project in SEO, it's about getting things done at the client level you're at. The edge is a toolset that you can utilise and access. It may well make sense in terms of the reward that you can get for the client, for the effort that needs to be put in. Having knowledge about what you can do on the edge allows you to bring it into your calculations, and bring it to the client as a possible solution."

What are some of the initial steps that an SEO should be taking to get started?

"First, like anything in SEO, do the background learning. You have to have a good knowledge before you start engaging. Edge involves developers, so you're going to have to have the knowledge to enter those conversations. Take time to learn edge from tools like Cloudflare - they have published a huge amount of material for people learning how this works. Set up your own test environments, do some simple 'search and replace' scripts, to take bits out of pages and present them back. You can start to teach yourself. There is a lot of politics involved with these front-end teams, and you need a certain level of knowledge to start interacting with them successfully."

Are there tools that SEOs can access for having specific services, like schema, delivered on the edge?

"There are lots of tools that are looking at how to do this on the edge. It's going to be the way forward for this kind of content delivery. Specifically, in the schema space, tools like Schema App are looking at edge delivery. At the moment, they use tags via Tealium or Google Tag Manager to insert into the page, but they're trying to move this towards edge. There are definitely SaaS platforms out there looking at how to incorporate this as well.

Edge compute is how edge has changed this year. Standard edge had standard key/value pairs and very limited storage, but computed edge is a leap to 500,000 Key-Value Stores and massively increased computational power. It's happening this year, so it's still very new for a lot of SaaS platforms, but it's absolutely the way I see them going. There will be an increased number of products and offerings, and you're going to find specialists who will help you to get these projects deployed."

Is it a set-and-forget situation, or is this something that SEOs need to be doing on a regular basis?

"It depends on what you're trying to do. For link management, the project would be set up and then used as an ongoing process. It would give you easy interfaces to manage links, upload links, and deal with REGEX - in terms of redirections. You would have a system to easily deal with issues, such as chain redirects and link rot. Often, it's about setting up this capability for an SEO to then run with.

However, edge is always evolving, it is a developing platform. You may, down the road, want to do something more complex. You might want to do different things for different users, or for different people in different locales - you might even want to integrate it into different business processes within your company. There's always room for developing on the edge, but for bringing that capacity to SEO teams, it's very much project-based work."

What are the main benefits of using the edge?

"It definitely gives you the ability to do things at scale, because you're taking the load off the origin server. It will also help with the time it takes content to load on a web page. Performance-wise, when you're delivering on the edge it's closer to the user. You will have significant page speed improvements.

There are environmental and cost benefits as well, to reducing some of the waste crawls that we have across big enterprise sites. That will become more important over the next few years. So much of the capability of the web is used up by bots. Finding ways to make this more efficient is something that's at the top of the list for Google, and for every large enterprise site. They want to decrease the costs associated with crawl efficiency, provide a faster service, and make happier sites for Google. As an added benefit, they will also become more environmentally-friendly."

How does an SEO articulate the value of the edge to a general marketer?

"You would look at the specific use case that you're addressing. To go back to the redirects example, you may have realised that you are getting conflicts because you have redirects in many different locations around the origin server. You can explain that bringing them to the edge would simplify this, by having them in one place so that you can start to make improvements. You can talk about link recovery, because links coming in to 404 pages have very little value. It will give you a better process for dealing with that problem and bringing links into better-mapped places around your site. This will increase the SEO value, and the experience for users who are coming through from third party sites. It's the same arguments that you have for tactics on the origin server. It's just a different way of solving your issues - and it may be a better way. Use the same business logic.

Another case for using the edge is how agile and efficient it can be. There may be reasons why it's difficult for you to fix these things on the origin server, and edge may be a more elegant solution. Something that was low-priority, and was going to take several months to resolve on the origin, could be done in months, or even weeks, on the edge."

Can the edge help reduce work for the dev team, and avoid the limitations of a CMS?

"There are always going to be some things that should be done on the edge, and some things that should be done on the origin server. In certain situations, you will need to fix things in your underlying structure. You shouldn't use the edge as a way of bypassing difficult decisions about your CMS and your origin. You might find that the benefits you can see to doing something on the edge actually provides a business case for fixing the CMS, and the inherent issues that you have.

It's all about process. If the process and the solution is better on the edge, then do it. If you're hiding tech debt that you have with the CMS, then you may find that it's better to make those fixes."

What's something that SEOs should stop doing to spend more time understanding the benefits of the edge?

"SEOs need to understand scaling in order to be effective. Some SEOs are still focusing on individual fixes for large enterprises - perhaps they're still doing their meta or titles manually. That's not scalable, especially recently. Google is developing their understanding of how title tags work, and the data that they're going to pull in to form the title tag. You need to find ways to scale up. If you want to be effective, work out where to spend your time effectively. The tactics that work best are the ones that scale quickly and deliver results for the business."

You can find Nick Wilsdon over at TorquePartnership.com.