Technical SEO Case Study For a Website with 30k+ Pages

Organizing All the Pages

All of the 30k pages on the website weren’t organized properly. Also, there were no SEO tactics such as optimization, crawl and index, etc.

Although organizing web pages is not particularly difficult for an SEO expert, it becomes challenging when the number is so huge. No matter how difficult the job was, we couldn’t let it continue to be that way.

Most importantly, poorly organized websites make it difficult for users to find the information they need, which lowers engagement and results in poor conversion.

When pages are properly categorized (in website & sitemap), it is simpler to:

A well-organized website is also essential because search engines give it preference.

Despite so many difficulties while organizing, we succeeded by following a good plan and schedule. It took less than a month with my team because we divided tasks and worked based on daily goals.

Removing Tons of Broken Links

Generally, when a company runs campaigns for different occasions, it creates business events and makes announcement-related content. They also link these promotions to many pages. And after a certain period, they delete these contents. Because of this, broken links are created.

It’s not good for a website to have broken links, as it can negatively impact the user experience. As a result, the conversion rate may decrease. Not only that, Google never gives priority to a webpage that contains broken links.

It is common to have broken links on large websites. So, we ran a quick SEO audit and found tons of broken links.

After that, we created a customized report, adding the content URL, broken link, anchor text, and source. And then we send it to the technical department to resolve these errors.

Fixing No-Index Pages That Were Linked to Index Pages

Linking no-index pages with indexed ones provides zero benefits on SERPs. When no-index pages get linked with live pages, lifeless pages eat the crawler’s budget just to link up with an indexable page.

We found this same issue on the client’s website. We delegated the issue to the content dept. They removed most of the no-index pages. But a few were left that seemed valuable.

For those left-out pages, we aligned with the dev team.

The whole process gave us an improved internal linking structure for the website.

Setting Up robot.txt File

As said earlier, our client’s website had been wasting its search engine crawler budget on low-quality pages that didn’t require crawling. It happened because they weren’t using proper technical SEO practices, most importantly setting up a robots.txt file.

After we optimized the website and set up a proper robots.txt file, the search engine spiders were able to work more efficiently. This resulted in a lower overall cost for the website owner and less wasted time for the search engine crawlers.

Identified a Lot of Thin Content

Thin content is unable to fulfill the search intent. Having thin content on a site can have a negative impact on the ranking or optimization.

When we found a lot of thin content on the client’s website, we suggested the client rewrite those pages to make them more valuable to the readers. We also suggested them add more value to the content by adding supporting information, images, videos, and other elements that can make it more interesting.

Duplicate Heading Tag (h1, h2)

The business website was also missing proper content structure or heading tags. We understood that’s why search engines were unable to understand what the content was about.

We came forward and added heading tags properly. This resulted in a good SEO score and proper optimization.

Created a Visual & Automated Dashboard Where Clients Could See the Website’s Daily Updates

Automation is mandatory to observe a large website’s progress, performance, and errors. Manually finding issues would cost too much time and money.

So, we had to build a visual and automated analytics dashboard to keep track of the site’s daily updates. The decision helped both our team and the client to reach our goals.

We created a customized GDS report dashboard that was completely automated. Google Data Studio was our best option because we could use customized options to show only relevant data for our needs.

Prepared an Action List of How Their DEV Could Solve the Issue

It’s always important to make a website’s interface attractive, lightweight, and useful. While working with a Fortune 500 company, we noticed a lot of heavy coding work, design failures, improper placement of CTA buttons, and more.

Without solving these problems, it was not possible to showcase our work. For that, we created an action sheet so that the client’s DEV could be aware of the issues and resolve them.

Consultation on How We Could Ignore These Kinds of Issues in the Future

After completing our deliverables, we explained the major problems we had faced in our journey and consulted some solutions to avoid them further.

For example, we had noticed silly on-page SEO mistakes on multiple pages. That’s why we suggested the client train their editor and hire an On-page SEO professional.

Hard to Implement Because the Site is Built-in Raw Coding

Because the site was developed using raw coding, we had to collaborate with the developers to implement our technical SEO factors changes. It was difficult because we had to make sure that the developers understood our changes and why we were making them.

We Had to Make Client-Side DEV Take Actions

We needed a developer to put our strategy into action for the custom-built website. The client had a very strict policy about only using client-side DEV for changes. They were not as well-versed in everything as our team. For that, we had to explain many things before they worked on our plan.

The Reporting was Built-in & Customized GDS

To accurately report to the client on the website’s daily growth, we had to use GDS. This was difficult because we had to customize it so that we could obtain relevant and detailed information about the website. To do so, we learned how to use customized GDS and make sure that we were tracking the right metrics to report back to the client.

Improved Keyword Ranking & Traffic

The first and most important thing our client wanted to see was an improvement in their keyword rankings and traffic. After all, that’s the whole point of doing technical SEO, to make the website more crawlable and rank keywords to the first page.

We were happy to report that our clients have seen significant improvements in both keyword ranking and traffic after working with us.

Increased Dwell Time

We have seen an increase in dwell time on the site since the implementation of our technical SEO strategies. This means that people are staying on the site longer and engaging with the content more.

If you are a learner, you might wonder how it is possible to increase visitor time by doing technical SEO. Well, we made sure that the website loaded quickly and that there were no broken links or other errors that would cause someone to leave the site.

We also optimized the website for better engagement with the user by adding internal links and relevant CTAs.

Technical SEO Health Improved Rapidly

The overall target of our project was to make the website technically sound and engaging. After finishing our tasks, we saw a significant boost in the SEO health score. It was a few times more than before started our journey.

Website Achieved All-Time Best Conversion Rate

One of the ultimate goals of technical SEO is to improve the conversion rate on the website. After all, if a website is getting a lot of traffic but no one is converting, then it’s not doing its job.

After implementing our technical SEO techniques and checklists, core web vitals improved in a short period. And so did the organic traffic and visibility. It lead to genuine target audience pole. So, conversion became easier and faster.

Want to know more about how SEO can increase conversion rate? Read our eCommerce SEO case study.

Create an SEO Friendly Site Architecture

You need to organize and categortize your site pages properly to index and rank. Unorganized, unlinked, or orphan pages are often skipped by crawlers.

Create proper categories and subcategories for the pages. Then, place all the pages in their right main or sub categories.

Focus on Noindex and Canonical Tags

Pages that don’t need to index or appear on visitors first hand should have noindex HTML tags.

Furthermore, you need to use canonical tags to help Google know which page to feature in a specific topic. For say, you have 5 pages on ABC topic. Among them, use this tag only on the mostly relevant page.

Plan Technical SEO Before Building the Website

You should plan for technical SEO in the same way that you plan the purpose, architecture, and design of your website.

This means having a clear understanding of how you want your website to be structured and how you want users to be able to navigate it. Once again, consulting with an experienced technical SEO strategist can be extremely helpful in this planning process.

Always Use Metadata

By metadata, we mean meta title, meta tags, meta descriptions, headers, image alt text, etc. Using these tags or data helps search engines understand your content. Googlebot won’t read or understand like humans. So, you need to use tags for their ease.

Avoid Duplicate Content Possibility

A good way to avoid duplicate content is by using canonical tags. But if possible, figure out duplicate contents and remove them. Otherwise your rank and index possibility might drop.

A Decent Page Speed is a Must

When page loading takes too much time, bounce rate automatically increases. You need to improve your page speed for all types of devices including mobile, desktop, and tablet.

For mobile optimization, try using AMP plugins into your website. Apart from it, decrease media file sizes and use CDN for better speed.

You can rely on GTMetrix to know the exact website speed. Core web vitals like LPC, CLS, and FID should be well-optimized for better UX.

Audit Websites Regularly/At Least Once a Month

To maintain good technical SEO health, it is important to perform regular website audits. This will help identify any new technical SEO issues that may have arisen and need to be fixed. There are a number of different SEO tools that can be used to perform website audits, such as Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, etc.