Technical SEO Case Study
You may have heard the story recently that “Technical SEO” is just make up. Anyway a bad article that is generating a lot of backlinks for Search Engine Land from outraged SEOs around the globe. Danny Sullivan the publisher of Search Engine Land admitted last week at SMX Seattle that they thought the article would generate a lot of interest but he did not agree with it. How could you. I want to share with you a national retailers site that had to have extensive “technical SEO” and what the results were.
SEO Scrum
Whenever we bring a new client on board we conduct what we call an SEO Triage then an SEO Scrum. The Triage typically is conducted by a single analyst who focusses on the major technical SEO issues and prioritises them. We use Agile development methodology, where “scrums” are used at the start of each project to determine its direction . This simply means the head of each department (Advertising, Development & Account Management) come together to discuss the findings of the Triage.
SEO Triage Findings
For this client we discovered major issues that they were unaware of. Whilst they are a very switched on, savvy online & offline retailer there were many issues that Google was seeing that no one knew about. Here are the highlights of what we found.
- Indexed Pages 4.5 million
- Sitemap Pages 12k
- 2395 sitemap errors
- 404s 1.4 million
- 1500 duplicate title tags
- 2500 duplicate meta descriptions
The issue I would always tackle first in this situation is try to get the Google index to match actual number of pages the site has. It did not have 4.5 million. The sitemaps had about 12,000 pages but in reality it should have been closer to 11k. Over the course of a year we’ve managed to get the index down to 95k but the client’s site is large with many stakeholders. In this situation it’s more expedient for the client to have us maintain the index as best we can rather than invest in a major rebuild and workflow changes.
Technical SEO Results.
We still have a lot to do on this site but the results speak volumes for the power of having a healthy site. As you will see from the video not only are all metrics up but it looks like mobile is about to overtake their desktop traffic.
When you see mobile growth like that in transactions, I can understand why Google seems to be living in a mobile first world. By the way to achieve these numbers above, no new backlinks were sought.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
