Technical SEO Auditing
Help Google crawl, index and rank just the right pages!
Unsure if your website content management system isn’t configured to publish dozens or even hundreds of urls containing thin, empty or duplicate content from post tags, logged-in pages and attachment file urls? You could be making Google’s job of crawling, indexing and ranking your website very difficult. See the benefits of a technical SEO audit below.
Technical SEO Audit and Optimisation Case Study – Sphere Digital
Sphere Digital are fast becoming one of the country’s top recruitment agency specialising in the digital marketing and digital media jobs sectors. Search for Digital Recruitment to see how they are doing in Google UK.
The Problem
Sphere’s website is the main source of business from new clients looking for trained staff and also for candidates looking to find a new job. But after a slow decline of search traffic from Google over the previous 6 months, it was believed the large number of configurations errors in the site content management system was holding the site back in the search engine results pages.
Furthermore, by accidentally removing Google tracking code from the site in June 2014, the Brighton based design agency had left Sphere with no idea of the traffic generated and little confidence the situation could be resolved without outside help, before traffic plummeted any further.
The Solution
Although Sphere found they were tied to keeping their web design agency’s bespoke content management system and that they would be charged to make the site search engine friendly, we were still able to identify and fix whole host of hidden configuration errors, broken links, indexation issues and masses of duplicate content urls, all hindering Google’s good work.
With basic configuration of the site’s robots.txt file to disallow duplicate page urls in place and new functionality to allow the adding of bespoke meta data, I was able to identify and optimise the top 15 main pages with target keyword phrases and the omitted qualifier and modifier keywords – including recruitment website site essentials such as, “jobs”, “vacancies”, “recruitment”, “staff” and a range of specific phrases covering the most profitable roles on offer.
Once the basics were in place and the majority of errors fixed, I worked with Sphere’s in-house digital marketing executive Niomi to complete the 6 day SEO campaign to further improve our already increasing Google rankings via better internal linking, improved calls to action wording in page meta descriptions and by fixing dozens broken links overlooked by the previous webmaster.
- Robots.txt file configured to disallow paginated page urls
- New functionality to add and optimise bespoke meta titles
- Keyword research and optimisation for target phrases
- All broken links and many usability issues resolved
- Huge decrease in errors in Google Webmaster tools
The Results
- 66% of all technical seo issues resolved
- Increased crawl rate from Google robots
- Increased rankings for our target keywords
- 50% increase in monthly natural search traffic
- And increasing to beyond 70% after 4 months
The Conclusion
The increase in rankings, traffic and business generated from the website improvements was quite a surprise to the designers and Sphere founder Niall Phelan, who rightly exclaimed that it would be highly unlikely a 50% or even 10% increase in business could be generated by the addition of a new member of staff. Indeed, with the SEO campaign costing less than a tenth of the salary of a new member on the sphere team, SEO soon became a high priority win-win situation for the growing company.
Since seeing the benefits of having a trained search marketing consultant oversee work done by website designers, the firm enjoys a better understanding of the value of a well configured website content management system and have made steps to further train their in-house staff to oversee new issues and opportunities as they arise. See what the company founder and director said about our amazing results:
The Client Testimonial
Niall Phelan – Director at Sphere Digital.
The Client Testimonial
Ed Steer – Managing Director at Sphere Digital.
See more Search Engine Optimisation case studies, view my SEO packages and prices or get in touch for a free SEO review for your website.
