Introduction.
Just as usual, here’s another seo audit for a startup consulting company in Poland. It’s called the Startup House Development.
This company is a group of start-up teams and individual developers to hire, that provides full-service products for clients that are large corporations and scaling startups. They stay with their clients from the start until they (the client) reach their business goals. They have offices across several locations in Poland, Austria, Germany, UK, Finland, Dubai and the UAE.
The almost perfected look of the website would make anyone want to see its performance and functionality, particularly how it’s helping its visitors. So, I audited the site to check.
Here are some important things they did wrong.
Hreflang Implementation.
Since the company has offices in multiple cities, the choice of implementing international SEO is great, but it’s implemented wrongly. Imagine selecting another language, Norwegian for instance, and only the top navigation changes, the content of the page doesn’t change. This isn’t good enough for user experience as you expect those switching to other languages to want their content delivered in that language.
You’ll see below that the page URL is supposed to be a Norwegian language page, but the content is in English.
And when you switch the language to Polish where they did a little bit of a good job, they implemented Google translate to switch the languages from English to Polish. Meanwhile, best practice doesn’t advise the automatic generation of language using JavaScript or any other means. The best way is to translate the English page to the other language so that the context and meanings are not left out.
Recommendation.
Create a hreflang strategy to know which languages you want to feature on your website. Then invest in having expert translators write the prioritised pages in the language you which, and they can upload on the Norwegian or Polish side of the website (and following the write linking nomenclature), then ask your developer to generate the hreflang scripts (here’s a tool I use to create my hreflang scripts) for each page and their complementary languages, then push them on the respective page headers. This is so that Google easily access the pages and ranks them based on your searcher’s IP address and preferences.
Internal Vs External Links.
Looking at the image below, you would only imagine how difficult it is for this website to stand alone. Over 50% of the entire pages are from external websites. Those assets would not only drag the website but will also pose a threat if the website depends on those external links for too long.
Recommendation.
Analyse all the external pages, and select those that if you part ways with, the effects would be negligible on your website. This could be some assets that don’t add much value to your website or a link whose link juice doesn’t count.
Reduce Duplicates.
No matter how solid the content on your website is, once you start having duplicates, either in form of content, titles or description, Google begins to see your unique pages as the same. So this website has about 65 page title duplicates. And while this is normal to have, the webmaster can do better to reduce it.
Recommendation.
Differentiate each of these pages with one or more unique parameters and everything will be just fine. For instance, this page (http://start-up.house/en/development-team/alesund) could have its title as (Custom Software Development | Startup Development House | Alesund) to differ from the others. And same can be done to make others stand out.
Also to note, it’s best practice to have every link on your website end with a “/“ (backward slash). All the links on this site don’t.
Missing Alt Text.
Google likes it when all the images on your website have alt text. It not only helps them understand your website but also shows that you really care to accommodate everyone on your website irrespective of their different abilities and internet strength. Alt text suffices for a website user when the image doesn’t load.
Recommendation.
Revisit your website and add alt text to the images with missing alt text.
Mobile Performance (Website is too slow on mobile)
According to ExplodingTopics, 92.3% of internet users access the internet using a mobile phone and 60.67% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website is not mobile responsive, you’re going to be losing out on great opportunities.
Your website performance is only 32%. it’s important we fix the Javascript rendering or any other issues that may be causing the mobile drag on your website.
(Other images are having difficulty to load due to some server error. Click here to access the full article on Google Docs.)
Recommendations.
Fix the issues itemised in the image below and you’ll be sure to here’s a tool I use to create my hreflang scripts. Simply send it to your developer and he’ll know where to touch.
On the content side, the website is leaving millions of dollars on the table. Though the organic traffic on the website has been a little stable in the last six months. And the site has changed positions on SERPs but that’s only on the 4th and 5th pages.
And it has lost in very good positions by dropping from 1 to 3 for the keyword “big bashing,” and from 12 to 14 for another keyword, “definition blue ocean strategy.”
That said, there are other untapped keywords that the website can leverage to stand the test of competition. And these are of very good search volume to try.
Summary.
SEO is an ongoing effort. If you understand this, you’d see the need for you to continuously conduct an SEO audit to improve your website so you don’t lose on the profits when it’s ripe. Are you a business in the any industry and you’re struggling to maintain a steady sit on Google’s first page, let me help you. Send me a message, and we can kick-start the process.
