We recently onboarded a web development agency who wanted us to audit their website, alongside providing white label SEO services for a handful of their clients.
I wanted to share this case study because we uncovered several major issues that were having a huge impact on the agency's organic traffic presence.
We work with a lot of agencies, so there's a good chance that if you're reading this, your agency website could also have some of these SEO issues, leading to reduced traffic and, more importantly, lead flow for your business.
Our Audit Process
Our audit process is quite straightforward, using tools like Screaming Frog and Ahrefs to run audits alongside a manual check of every important URL for any changes that are needed.
This includes things like editing on page content, optimizing meta titles and descriptions, redirecting pages, deleting entire pages, and much more.
The Main Issues We Found (And How They Were Resolved)
Even in the initial audit stages, we noticed there were many issues with the site.
Let's take a look through some of the most important.
Staging Sites Indexed
The biggest issue that this agency website faced - by far - was that staging sites were being hosted locally on the main domain and were indexed.
This meant that the site ranked for thousands of keywords, not only competing with their own clients but also bloating the index and showing to Google that they were not relevant to their main service.
Topical authority is a big ranking factor. It essentially means that a site that focuses closely on one topic will rank well for that topic (this is a simple interpretation, but you get the idea).
A web development agency website, therefore, should rank for relevant terms like 'web designers' and so forth. In this case, the site was ranking for completely random keywords relating to websites that they had built for clients.
The quick fix here was to noindex all of these pages. This quickly dropped the number of irrelevant keywords that were indexed.
Main Lead Generation Keyword Targeted By 4 Different Pages
Another huge issue for the agency was that their main lead generation term was being targeted by 4 different pages.
If you aren't aware why this is a problem, it's due to something called keyword cannibalization or when multiple URLs try to rank for the same keyword, and none of them do.
The solution here was deleting two of the pages (we checked the referring domains and traffic first) and deoptimizing another for the keyword, while optimizing the last for the target keyword.
Google Map Pack Directions (On Every Page)
A pretty outdated local SEO tactic is to add manual directions along with the map pack to help the Google Business Profile rank more highly and get more clicks.
This is extremely outdated, and the agency had this on pretty much every page. We made it a priority to quickly remove this from every page, leaving the map pack integration behind.
No Service Dropdown On Main Navigation
The last issue I wanted to cover is that the agency did not have a service dropdown with their main services highlighted on the main navigation.
In fact, there were no links to their services at all on the main navigation, which is problematic for two main reasons:
- It makes it difficult for potential customers to see what services they actually offer.
- It is bad SEO practice and makes it less likely for the service pages to actually rank.
Luckily this was another easy fix.
We also found 7 other service keywords that they added to the main navigation through keyword research.
Is It Normal To Find These Kinds Of Issues?
You would be surprised how easy it is for a website to go into maintenance mode for a few years and for lots of SEO issues to build up over time.
Across most of our audits, particularly for small businesses or agencies that have been around for years, we do tend to find lots of issues that are very easy to resolve and can have very positive impacts on organic search quickly.
The general theme we see in these cases is websites where the lead flow is consistent enough due to word of mouth or a well-established Google Business Profile presence, which leads to the main website being neglected and then building up a range of SEO problems.
The good news is most of these problems are very easy to fix and can improve traffic in a matter of months.
If you need a white label SEO audit for your agency or client, feel free to get in touch today - we'll even do a free Loom audit to give you an idea of the problems we would fix.