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Hello! We’d like to share another case study with you and offer you a bonus.
But first, a short introduction. In it, we would like to emphasize that we are very pleased when the stories of cooperation with customer continue due to the positive experience of the first interaction.
We wrote about such a development in this case study. PIEONEERS, the company we’re talking about in this article, has also contacted us before. Their first order was illustrations for the JEVITTY mobile app, which you can read about here.
Today, we will talk about marketing analysis, in particular, SEO audit to improve positions in organic search in the US and Canada.
The project is a development company from Canada called PIEONEERS.
The head of the project is Serhii Soloviov.
The service — marketing analysis, including SEO audit.
Our team
About the customer and his expectations
PIEONEERS is a team of developers that helps to create web products and mobile applications. Their expertise is Ruby on Rails, Python, React, Android, iOS.
While working on this customer’s first order, we realized that we had a lot in common. PIEONEERS themselves say this about themselves:
Customers appreciate the team for going beyond the expected project results and exceeding expectations. PIEONEERS also make sure that their products attract the right audience, achieve their goals, and open up new opportunities for users.
To ensure all this, PIEONEERS is constantly improving. Therefore, the company’s management decided that it was time to improve the corporate website. To do this with a predictably good result, they first needed to analyze the current state of the resource and get recommendations from an SEO specialist.
Customer’s request. A detailed SEO audit allows you to see the shortcomings of the site from the point of view of search engines and eliminate them, strengthening your position in Google search results.
Our proposal. We offered to analyze:
Given that the company has been operating for a long time and plans to continue its development, an audit is absolutely appropriate. After all, in order to scale your business, you need to be at the top of search engine results.
Based on our analysis, we had to draw conclusions and provide recommendations for improving SEO, which would allow us to
- attract more interested audiences from organic search in Canada and the United States;
- increase the time users spend on the website with the help of high-quality content.
Research
We divided the work into several blocks, analyzed each of them, and drew conclusions. Bonus for you: the structure of the case study is built in such a way that you can use it as a checklist for your project.
Analysis of the website structure
We have identified both positive and negative features.
Breadcrumbs are an important element of website navigation. They help users understand how to go back one or more steps. Breadcrumbs have a good effect on behavioral factors, as well as increase the conversion rate of a resource and its position in search engine results.
Analysis of the technical component
Users usually don’t see the “backstage” of websites, but search engine crawlers pay maximum attention to them. Analyzing this block, we emphasized in the report the points that should be corrected.
- Redirect for broken links
We saw that the site has a number of broken links that work through 301 redirects. This needs to be fixed, and the number of such links should be minimal. It is ideal if there are none at all.
2. Defining canonical URLs
Search engine crawlers cannot literally “read” what content a page contains. Therefore, when you have pages with the same content, you need to add canonical URLs so that the page points to itself. This will allow search engine crawlers to understand which page to index.
Let’s take an example: in the <head> of the page https://pieoneers.com/blog/top-5-reasons-to-use-firebase-as-a-backend-for-your-health-and-wellness-app/ you should add
<link rel=«canonical» href=«https://pieoneers.com/blog/top-5-reasons-to-use-firebase-as-a-backend-for-your-health-and-wellness-app/” />
3. Optimize the code and website loading speed
In the course of the audit, we realized that not all pages load fast enough. This is not good from the point of view of search engines and users.
The optimal score for this parameter according to the PageSpeed Insights service is 85+. We can see that
- the main page of the site has a score of only 70;
- the page of the case category — 75;
- case pages — 30.
We provided recommendations to improve these indicators.
We also showed which components of the technical structure of the site were fine:
Content analysis
We saw that the title and description meta tags on certain pages need to include the slogan and company name.
They should look like this:
- Meta title: Mobile App Development Company — services PIEONEERS.
- Meta description: iOS and Android applications with high-performance architectures, modern tech and elegant user interfaces in Vancouver Canada. Fluent in Swift, Java, React, Unity, and Objective-C. Let us help you build your dreams — web & mobile development by PIEONEERS.
You should also use H2 instead of H3 headings.
Among the positive aspects:
- correct image addresses;
- effective alt and title meta tags for images.
Analysis of integration with social networks and search engines
Above, we advised you to add breadcrumbs. After implementing this recommendation, you need to make their micro-markup.
We also noticed that the existing micro-markup of the organization’s contacts should be improved:
- add a photo of the facade of the building where the office is located to the image variable;
- add the Address variable.
The micro-markup on social media also needs to be improved. Namely, a block with social networks should be added to the “local companies” section:
It is also better to add the ability to share content on social media to your website pages. This is relevant for case studies, blog articles, and pages describing the company’s services.
On the positive side, everything is fine with the Open Graph protocol.
Content analysis
When we studied the site, we saw the following picture for Google.ca queries. The resource is ranked for a very small number of queries that can hardly be called effective in terms of attracting organic traffic.
This is how the top phrases are distributed across the pages of the site:
This is the distribution of phrases in Google.com:
In general, we see that 73.35% of the traffic in the 16 months preceding the analysis was generated by the main page. We can conclude that other pages are not optimized and effective enough to attract users.
The images on the site are also not optimized and generate no more than two clicks per month.
There is also no regularity and variety of content. At this stage, we developed an algorithm for working with content. You can find it below in the recommendations section.
Analysis of reputation management elements
It is really important for potential customers to get confirmation of the contractor’s reliability. Case studies are of great importance in this regard. They are available on the PIEONEERS website, but they can be improved. For example, in the following ways:
- add a customer’s assessment of their work with the company to the customer’s review;
- create a separate section on the website with testimonials (here you can use both quotes from the cases and testimonials without cases, and, if possible, video testimonials);
- create a rating system for blog articles;
- add a question and answer section to help drive additional organic traffic for key queries.
Recommendations we made to the customer
You have already seen some of our recommendations in the analysis. But there were some additional tips. One of them was to set up Google Analytics.
This solution is necessary for the following reasons:
- Understanding the current state of affairs on the website (visits, key queries, bounce rate, etc.) and tracking changes;
- creating an analytics database in case of problems with other analytics services.
They also advised replacing the HTTP protocol with HTTPS, and specifying Canadian dollars as the currency, as this is correct given the company’s geography.
Another important point is setting goals. At the time of the audit, they were missing. A logical goal for PIEONEERS to track is sending consultation sign-up forms.
We also emphasized the need to track the 404 server error in Google Analytics.
We also paid a lot of attention to creating the content management algorithm mentioned above.
Here’s what we suggested to do.
- Take into account the experience of successful competitors in terms of promotion and their semantics and repeat the best practices, improving them. To implement this recommendation, we analyzed competitors’ websites and provided our customers with files with key queries.
- Develop a content plan with headings and topics for publications in such a way as to take into account the main key queries and add them to the website organically. Add tags.
3. Add a page about the team. It will increase the level of trust in the company as a whole and become another source of traffic.
4. Link materials on the site to each other. That is, add links to other pages of the same site on internal pages.
5. Publish different content formats: infographics, screenshots, photos, videos. If they are relevant to the topic of the site and optimized, even non-unique multimedia content will increase traffic.
6. Set up an XML feed for Google news. It will allow you to submit cases, articles, and news to this search engine. This way, you can significantly improve your search engine rankings and get additional traffic, because people are more likely to click on the content that Google recommends.
Based on the analysis of competitors, we also concluded that you shouldn’t try to over-optimize your texts. In fact, it is quite enough to write high-quality materials on topics related to the company’s business.
Such human-readable and natural texts work well for search engines. They are also valuable to the users who read them.
Conclusion
The customer highly appreciated the scope of the work done by our team (the main report is 44 pages long, but it includes files with semantics, detailed competitor analysis, and documentation for implementing our recommendations).
The customer also liked the fact that most of the recommendations could be implemented gradually and independently.
Important: This was not a standard marketing analysis with a focus on the website, as this was the client’s priority. Instead, you can learn about a full-fledged marketing analysis in our case study.
Did you like our case study? You can conduct a mini-audit yourself by downloading our guide file.
