Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Improve website performance and search engine results by conducting a site audit and implementing on-page technical SEO improvements.
THE CLIENT:
Electro-Max, Inc.
In 1998, Kevin Grant, an aviation maintenance veteran of the United States Marine Corps, founded Electro-Max, Inc. (EMI). With the goal of providing superior metal finishing through the process of electropolishing and passivation, EMI has grown tremendously over the last 20+ years into one of the biggest Nadcap-accredited electropolishing companies in the country.
THE CHALLENGE:
EMI was struggling to attract website visitors and had site-wide performance issues
As one of the premier electropolishing and passivation companies in the country, EMI needed their website to show up in search engine results when people were looking for stainless steel finishing. The website had user interaction problems, including slow page load times and a confusing sitemap that caused penalties with search engines. Additionally, EMI needed keyword research to find the best keywords they should be targeting with their website content.
THE JOURNEY:
Learning that all SEO services aren’t what they claim to be
Originally, EMI was aware of the need to drive organic traffic to their website and sought outside help from an overseas SEO provider. Unfortunately, after an initial increase to performance, EMI’s website saw a steady decline in organic web traffic and a definite decrease in the website’s search engine results page performance.
THE DISCOVERY:
Ethical and Affordable SEO
EMI soon realized the overseas SEO firm had utilized black hat SEO tactics to get a temporary initial boost at the cost of long-term penalties from search engines such as Google and Bing. SEO has frequently been sold by unscrupulous vendors as a way to “trick” search engines into showing your website first in their results page. However, this is only a short-term solution, as search engines primarily are concerned with delivering what their customers (the people searching) are looking for. As companies like Google and Bing spend more time and money developing their search engines, their technology becomes exponentially better at discovering which websites are attempting to trick their crawlers - subsequently penalizing the offending sites. These problems drove EMI to look for help fixing their SEO issues with an emphasis on ethical and affordable solutions, while still maintaining the best practices for long-term SERP performance.
THE SOLUTION:
Custom Direct Site Audit, SERP Reports and Ongoing Monitoring
CDI recommended performing a site wide, page-by-page audit to assess potential site issues and identify content that would benefit from on-page technical SEO, to improve organic traffic and search engine results page performance. A streamlined sitemap needed to be developed, re-organized and uploaded to Google to improve ease of their crawler reading the website. Additionally, page load times needed to be improved to reduce bounce-rate and any other penalties from Google for a poor user experience. Keyword research would be conducted to identify important search terms to track and once the on-page optimization resolved the issues on the website, a monthly site audit and creation of a Search Engine Results Page [SERP] Tracking report including website analytics would be conducted to proactively fix any future issues, monitor the site changes success, and make future recommendations for improvement.
THE IMPLEMENTATION:
A site audit revealed over 1,000 potential issues that needed to be addressed. While some of these were minor, arising from the use of an outdated website builder theme, most of the issues were fixable. That said, many of these issues were severe, including several page errors:
- nearly 200 bad link issues
- 800 image issues
- 40 meta tag issues
CDI conducted a page-by-page cleanup including fixing meta-descriptions, alt and title text on images, page titles and headers, and optimizing links. We conducted Keyword Research to identify several important words to rank for and optimized page content for these search terms. Pages were optimized to load faster with a variety of updates, including reformatted, resizing, and uploading images at smaller, web-friendly sizing, while retaining the image’s high quality. As part of our service, EMI received monthly SERP reports outlining their keyword rankings, website traffic, and Google Search Console reports, as well as a monthly Site Audit to catch any future issues and backlinks reporting, to monitor the quantity and quality of pages linking back to their website.
THE RESULTS:
Ethical, Affordable, Reliable SEO
After conducting the page by page on-site SEO, the total number of potential issues was cut from over 1,000 to less than 300, all of which were minor issues, which can be fixed in the future with website design upgrades:
- Website load times decreased from as high as a 90 seconds per page down to less than 10 seconds.
- Over six months, organic traffic rebounded from a 43% decrease from the previous period, to a less than 9% difference.
- Client’s search results began ranking for the first time for newly added and important industry keywords.
- EMI saw a 72% increase in the number of industry keywords ranking.