Last Minute Website Audit Saves Startup's SEO

Outcome

We helped their development team correct issues that were made during the development design and development process that would have negatively affected the lead generation performance of their website.

Background

We first worked with the company two years before their redesign. We were introduced to them through a client of ours who was a business consultant tasked with growing the software developer’s business. And we spent several months helping them improve their site structure and content. They wanted us involved with the new website so we could migrate over all of the “good stuff” that had been built up.

Process

We performed an audit of the website prior to launch and provided recommendations. These included correcting the following problems:

• URLs, page titles and descriptions didn’t match the previous site. We exported the correct information and migrated it to their development site.
• Close to 1,000 words were removed from their home page which meant it may not send the same signals to Google as it once did. This copy was moved to a separate page that was optimized for search engines and monitored.
• Web pages were buried deep into the site without links, making it unlikely anyone would ever reach those pages. We recommended a different blog structure and interlinking to reduce the number of clicks needed to reach this content.
• Privacy Policy and Legal pages were left off the site. We advised on adding these back into the footer of the site.
• Google Analytics tracking was left off the site. We notified their developers to add this back before launch.

Conclusion

The end result was a website with a slight fluctuation in search rankings that returned to an almost perfect match of the previous site’s search activity within two weeks.