SEO Fault Finding

SEO Fault Finding Case Study – Educational App Store

Educational App Store is the UK’s number 1 one-stop-shop for the best apps designed to aid learning. With a large repository of the most popular educational apps available for download and a great selection of honest app reviews, the site has grown to be the first choice for countless educators and learners around the world.

The Problem

Boasting a large selection of categorised apps, news and reviews, Educational App Store enjoys a large number of pages, posts, categories and tags. However, the large number of urls generated by the website was proving difficult for Googlebot to effectively discover, crawl, index and rank just the pages that were intended to appear in Google’s search results.

Managed by web developer and entrepreneur Fariz, the site had enjoyed consistent growth for a number of years, however a period of falling rankings and traffic indicated the site was losing ground and was likely to drop out of the first page of Google’s search results for a large number of target keyword phrases. Worse was that Google Search Console was indicating that the site was error free causing much frustration to Fariz and his experienced team.

Because the website was built using a bespoke customised content management system and due to the fact that the owner wanted to enjoy a full understanding of the problems Google was having, I was asked to provide consultancy services that would generate all the information needed to allow the client to fix the problems in-house.

This not only included lists of errors, but also their causes and instructions on how to fix each tyoe of fault.

The Solution

To keep costs to a minimum I proposed 4 separate 2 hour sessions that would span 2 months. This plan would save Fariz from paying for the tools required to do comprehensive seo faultfinding and would give him plenty of time to implement the recommended fixes I listed after each session.

By providing me with access to the site’s Google Analytics account and Search Console Profile, I was able to go ahead and crawl the site with Screaming Frog Pro, set up a Moz campaign to spot technical errors and export a whole bunch of incoming link reports that would help identify other opportunities the site was currently missing.

After crawling the entire site with Screaming Frog Search Spider, I exported all of the individual sets of hidden errors and for each, listed which pages it affected and detailed instructions on how to amend the site template files to resolve each one. By being available to answer more specific questions that arose during Fariz’s fixes, we were able to eliminate all but a handful of issues.

Then, by taking it a step further I ran the site through Majestic SEO, a service that discovers pages on other websites that link to the App store. Many of the linked to urls no longer existed so I also exported url lists from Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

After sorting the exported lists, removing duplicate items and compiling a list of linked to pages that no longer exist on the site, we were able to map those old urls to existing urls and redirect all that neglected “link juice” to our current pages.

The Results

Following months of declining rankings and traffic our handful of fault finding and fixing sessions resulted in a huge reduction of technical SEO errors that Fariz was previously unaware of. Taking our error count from around 4,700 issues to around just 600 – the remaining issues were all quite minor and related to overly long meta titles that were being automatically generated by the site.

Fixing all of the temporary redirects, broken links, missing meta data and by redirecting many of our incoming broken links to current page urls was shown to vastly improve the efficiency of Google’s crawl rates throughout the site, leading the search engine to discover more of our content and updating its index of the pages we wanted to rank in the search results. Within a couple of weeks our rankings had started in increase and so did our organic search traffic – by 60%, taking our monthly traffic higher than it had been in the site’s history.

Having turned the declining traffic round so that the site increased visits from its target market was generating more and more downloads each month Fariz was not only overjoyed with the sharp increase of monthly downloads and the revenue it generates but is also able to monitor and resolve any other difficult-to-see SEO errors in-house. With no further spend required for SEO he is able to focus his attention on implementing the conversion rate optimisation recommendations I made, to further increase engagement, downloads and ROI from the site.

The Client Tesimonial

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