A technical SEO case study

There’s been a story going around that technical SEO is something made up by SEO experts, and this trend has been angering SEO professionals around the globe. We admit there’s a lot of value in adding great content to your site, but if the technical aspect isn’t as it should be, you’ll never get where you need to be. To prove the story wrong, I took a look at one retailer’s site, just to show what good technical SEO work can do for the bottom line.

We do what we call an “SEO Triage” for every new client that comes on board. This typically consists of one analyst looking at all the technical SEO issues the site may have, and listing the issues that need to be dealt with in priority order. After this, the head of all our departments meet to discuss solutions to these problems. With this client, we found a long list of problems that they were unaware of. We found thousands of sitemap errors, millions of indexed pages that didn’t exist, and thousands of duplicate Meta tags, among other things.

We started by working toward getting the Google index to match the actual number of pages on the site. We’ve done a massive amount of work on the site, and we’ve moved the errors from millions to thousands. There’s still a lot to do before the site’s where it should be, but the numbers speak for themselves. We’ve only done technical SEO work on the site, and the revenue is up almost 200 percent in just the last couple of months.

One of the most surprising results is the numbers connected to mobile. Google is pushing mobile configuration everywhere, and for good reason. On all metrics across the board, mobile numbers were just about twice those of the desktop results. Clearly, mobile is the place to put your efforts right now.

For more information, visit the StewArt Media website.

Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business  StewArt Media  has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.