What to ask your agency about XML sitemaps

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on XML sitemaps, these questions are worth asking early.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

A sitemap helps crawlers find pages links do not reach well. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Keep it current or it works against you. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What this looks like day to day

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about XML sitemaps before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Keep it current or it works against you — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.