If you’ve been reading my blog you know that I’ve been focused on social media strategy over the past year or so, but deep in my heart I geek out about technical SEO. The structure of your website and your hosting infrastrucure can have a huge impact on your website performance and traffic.
The site that needed SEO technical fixes:
When I first started at Ketchum, I was assigned a website (which was powered by WordPress) that need some SEO love and I decided to tackle the technical SEO issues first before starting any promotion or content optimization plan. The technical issues included:
- duplicate pages
- 404 pages for critical content
- missing 301 redirects
- no meta data
- no blog feed
- no xml sitemap or webmaster tools accounts
- page speed issues
Total time to cleanup the fixes= 3 months
I spend the first three months of the project working with our development team to address the technical issues. We did no promotion or content optimization during that time period and instead just worked on “cleaning up” the site.
The results
Here are the results from our technical SEO fixes. The first two screenshots are from SEOMoz Tools and the last is a screenshot of traffic improvement from their Google Analytics account.
By just fixing the SEO technical issues over a 3 month period we were able to increase traffic to the website by 27.89%!
Are you ready to get started with your own SEO technical audit?
If you’re interested in conducting your own technical audit of your site, you should check out Annie Cushing’s super comprehensive SEO technical audit checklist.
P.S. Don’t forget social!
In addition to the above fixes, I was a few months later able to add (in addition to their ShareThis button) Facebook like buttons on the site. We were again not doing any other promotion or fixes at the time.
Look at the data below from Bing Webmaster Tools! Installing a Facebook like button is clearly a direct signal to Bing. And this is from a site that didn’t even have that many people actually using the Facebook Like buttons on the pages.
Even though it’s more challenging to explain to your clients why technical issues matter to web traffic, hopefully the charts above will help you win that argument. And if you haven’t dug into how technical issues can impact your SEO results, here’s your nudge to do a SEO site audit today and create a roadmap of how you’re going to tackle those technical issues!