Technical SEO is the foundation of any website’s success in organic search. It’s the first barrier to entry for indexing by the major search engines, and for large sites, technical SEO improvements can really move the needle.
At WO Strategies LLC, we are passionate about how important technical SEO is and how impactful it can be for large enterprise-sized sites.
All of our new client engagements start with a benchmark as input for the overall SEO strategy. Our technical + and competitive benchmarks are simple and 100% actionable.
The Impact of Our Technical SEO Recommendations
Here are some of our technical SEO case studies:
Case Study 1: National Cancer Institute
Challenge: NCI had lost organic traffic and did not have an SEO strategy or staff in place.
Strategy: During the initial SEO audit, we recommended they adjust their dynamic clinical trial results to create optimized landing pages to match the current search volume, which was focused on cancer clinical trials by cancer type.
Results: 79% increase in the total number of clinical trial-related keywords
Case Study 2: American College of Cardiology
Challenge: ACCF’s journals were not being indexed or ranked quickly enough to generate expected citations.
Strategy: We did a full technical SEO audit and recommended one fit to solve a search bot crawl trap.
Results: The technical recommendations fix began in March 2019, and one month later was already ranking for 40k additional keywords, 1,500 on page one.
And the results from a recent client migration. 2M URLs and 150M backlinks:
Client Testimonial
“Katherine supported our SEO program at the National Cancer Institute. She led capacity-building workshops for content owners and the technical teams, conducted market and competitive analyses, and mentored me personally. She is very knowledgeable in SEO strategy and has wonderful interpersonal skills. Definitely recommend to anyone looking for an SEO audit of their digital presence!“
– Yael Nussbacher, Senior Manager of SEO and SEM at The Great Courses by The Teaching Company
Here are the areas that we cover in that benchmark and strategy:
Technical SEO Audits/Benchmark:
- Crawl and Indexation Issues – We first analyze all issues related to your website being crawled by the search engines and added to search indexes. We look at items like robot files, XML sitemaps, redirect loops, page load speed, and other areas affecting indexing.
- On-Site SEO – These are the critical areas of on-site optimization that have the most significant impact on SEO, from keyword selection, copy quality and focus on searcher’s intent, URL structure, site usability, schema markup, internal linking, and much more.
- External Linking – One of the top two most important areas driving ranking in Google today is the quality and number of links to your content. We analyze the critical areas of external linking, link quality, and volume of links in comparison to your competitors. We also look at topicality, anchor text, and local citations. If your backlink profile is extensive, we evaluate whether you might have malware or an active SEO attack. We’ve evaluated sites with just a few up to 150M backlinks.
- Social Media – We will investigate how you use social media to support organic rankings. How well are you integrating your search and social efforts to enhance your social visibility? This particularly matters with video visibility and YouTube.
- Mobile Visible and Usable – Google now uses a mobile crawler and CRUX measurements in its rankings, so ensuring that your site is mobile-friendly and usable is mission-critical, and we outline where your site might not meet that expectation. We also highlight where you might have issues with compliance with ADA guidelines.
- News, Image, Audio Optimization, Local Search + Discover – We look into how well you leverage your media assets to gain organic exposure across multiple Google channels and drive traffic to your site.
- Competitive Assessment – With your input, we assess how savvy you are against your competitors and outline the gaps from a technical, content, promotion, or resource perspective.
Our output:
We provide you with a prioritized list of items that are holding back your site’s organic performance, as well as “low-hanging fruit” opportunities that we think you should take advantage of to propel your performance beyond those of your site’s competitors.
Our process:
- Turnaround time on most audits is 30 days from the date payment is received.
- All audits also include a kickoff call to understand your site and business goals and a review call (up to 2.5 hours of review and consulting time via phone, Skype, Google Hangout, etc.).
- For all audits and strategy services, 50% payment is required upfront before work begins.
- Note: To perform the audit, the WO Strategies team will require access to your web analytics platform, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, YouTube, server logs, etc.
- We hop on the phone to walk through your audit and prioritize the fixes, and we are then available for an additional week to answer via email any other questions you might have.
Consulting Services for Technical SEO Strategies
General and ad hoc strategy
In addition to the audit services, we also have also served as a technical SEO consultant when a brand needs a partner for a major website transition like migrations, site launches, or overall site improvements and measuring the impact of technical SEO improvements.
We provide the following services:
- Topical competitive analysis
- Backlink Audits and Negative SEO Attack Mediation
- Evaluation of server log files, and
- CRUX audit to help improve load times and usability signals
Website Migrations
We have been brought on board as a partner for half a dozen website migrations from smaller sites to sites with millions of pages and 150M+ backlinks.
We work with you to:
- Map out the SEO requirements for the migration
- Fix technical issues that could impact indexing on your current site
- Map redirects
- Check the production servers + redirects prior to the new site’s launch,
- Have hands-on involvement on are there on launch day to ensure that the site is positioned as best as it can be from a technical point of view, and
- Ensure that your live site is free of technical SEO issues that could impact your organic traffic.
You can hear more about our large-scale website migration experience in our interviews on the Technical SEO Podcast and the Women in Tech SEO podcast.
Carbon Audit for your Website
As a part of our CRUX audits, we can help you benchmark your site’s current carbon footprint and create a plan to reduce the impact your website has on the environment.
Technical SEO Training
We excel at educating others about technical SEO so that they can manage their own enterprise-sized sites. Trainees from our programs can now crawl their sites to find issues and are confident in their ability to ticket and discuss technical SEO issues with their development team.
As a part of our capacity-building service, we create customized technical SEO training and coaching programs for your staff. This includes finding software solutions that support your in-house resources and the creation of workflows and processes that ensure that technical issues are addressed so that your site has a better chance to increase its online footprint.
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