I was working with a client last week when they asked me to look at why one of their landing pages “wasn’t converting”. Now I know landing pages are often considered as solely pay per click assets, but I do like to remind people that you need to look at your landing pages from an SEO perspective too. This landing page of theirs was not just an isolated, stand-alone page, but it was in their main navigation and directly accessible from the menu system. So it was a landing page for organic traffic too. The same applies for any page that a visitor lands on regardless of the source – it is still a landing page.
It’s at this point, being asked to see why a landing page doesn’t convert very well, where you’d be forgiven for leaping straight into CRO – the acronym stands for Conversion Rate Optimisation. CRO is the action of analysing and modifying a web page to try and increase conversions. Saving the details for another blog post, I’ll simply say that CRO tends to involve looking at the user journey and user experience to understand and make any adjustments to layout and functionality in order to improve conversion rates.
Looking at the landing page, I immediately used the powers bestowed upon me from 25 years of doing SEO.
SEO Before CRO
First up, I tested the landing page performance on Google Lighthouse. I tested on desktop first and then on mobile using Chrome, obviously, and in incognito mode.
Next, I analysed all the Core Web Vitals data thrown up by Lighthouse.
From these two analyses, the usual culprits were playing up – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) was high so there was an opportunity to resize and optimise the images. (Script) Thread work was an issue too, so looking at which scripts they were running would be a priority.
Additionally, the mobile performance was poor, so this required immediate attention, dependent on the proportion of mobile users but also from the fact that Google conducts mobile-first indexing, so this could be impeding organic crawling and ranking.
Then I looked at the source code served to the final page – This was one landing page with one HTML title and meta description – if they were running PPC, they’d need different versions of the landing page (LP) to achieve better Quality Scores (QS) in Google Ads.
I also noticed too many empty line breaks. Now call me old fashioned, but when I hand-coded my HTML and we only had 56k dial-up lines, every empty line was an overhead. It still is even though we’re pushing far more code through more bandwidth. Reducing this down and compacting or minimising the code was going top be useful. In this case I chopped down ~1,100 lines to just ~660 lines and reduced the basic HTML from 49k to 44k – while that might seem like nothing in the grand scheme of things that’s still a 10% saving on the base code. Every little helps and these incremental gains all make a positive difference.
Oh, and this was a howler – they had something like six, yes SIX, H1 tags. How is Google supposed to understand what the page is about when there are conflicting primary headings?
Remember – I was supposed to be looking at how to increase the conversion rate and yet I found issues that SEO would fix.
What’s more, this page was created by a big digital marketing agency – how could they have produced something with such obvious schoolboy errors?
So this is where I ask if you need a second opinion on your SEO?
Two Agencies’ SEO
A couple of weeks ago, another client asked for a second opinion on their website’s SEO. They’d been through two digital marketing agencies already. The first was very good but expensive. The second they went to because they wanted to save money. They did indeed pay less money but after six months their rankings that had initially gone up started to tank.
I had a quick look at the new content they’d added to their website, mostly blog posts to directly answer common questions and issues in their industry and… Before I’d even had the chance to analyse the SEO aspects of their content, I spotted a real obvious issue – It looked like they’d used generative AI to create their webpage content.
Now I’ve previously experimented with creating “quick and dirty” posts for websites using AI and there’s a certain look and feel to the basic gen AI content from ChatGPT for instance. If you write a straightforward prompt asking the AI tool to create you a blog about a subject, the default output tends to be a fairly light and with limited copy and lots of bullet points. There’s a “look and feel” to the usual unsophisticated AI generated content and this had all the hallmarks.
I even ran their content through an AI content checker and whilst it indicated that the text was “87% human generated” I wasn’t convinced. Call it my “spidey senses” and over two decades of content writing experience.
Another thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was that the blog posts were on pages with no navigation – the website’s main menu system had disappeared from the blog section after they’d ported this part of the website to a “poor man’s HubSpot”. I’m not even convinced that HubSpot id the right solution except for big-budget clients. This was probably not helping with a loss of internal linking that they once had.
Marketers That Don’t Get SEO
Another website that I had to “rescue” recently was one where a traditional marketer took over from a digital marketer. Thinking that “SEO is easy” they simply cloned an existing WordPress web page and pasted in their newly written blog content.
Wondering why their new article wasn’t being indexed and ranked, they asked me to have a quick look. It was obvious from a glance at the backend that they’d left in all the key aspects of the surrogate post and their new H1 didn’t match the old title, meta description, and page slug (URL), plus the Yoast SEO focus keyword and “traffic light” system were obviously all lit up red.
I’m so glad that they were switched on enough to notice that they’d not seen results and asked me for a second opinion on their SEO.
Website Designers That Don’t Do SEO
Whilst I’m on a roll, it’s not just regular marketers who don’t really get SEO, but it’s been a common thread throughout my last years at a digital marketing agency that I saw almost every website designer and website developer knock out great web looking websites whilst totally overlooking the SEO.
However, on two occasions I worked on the SEO for some websites that had been live for a few years and the developers had committed the cardinal sin of blocking crawls in the robots.txt file! As soon as I detected this issue, I changed the disallow directive to an allow directive, and the search spiders came in and happily crawled and indexed the sites.
To finally see ranking and traffic was amazing for the clients but shocking to me that these had been left unnoticed for, in once case, at least two years! The figures on the second month’s report were flattering to me, to say the least. Having to relay search traffic increases of hundreds and thousands of percentage points was almost embarrassing too.
Now in their defence, web designers are website designers and web developers are website developers, right? Well that’s absolutely fine but the most versatile ones are those that know how to do SEO as well. Fortunately for me, web designers that do SEO are not that common, so a second opinion on a website’s SEO before it goes live will help your traffic no end.
Ideally, you want that SEO expertise at a much earlier stage of the process.
Need a Second Opinion on Your SEO?
You might need it. An analysis of your current SEO might “save your life”. You see, there are lots of convincing and persistent outfits that offer SEO and still can’t get you results.
If you’ve had an SEO, a digital marketing agency, or a brand new website design and you’re not seeing the results you were expecting, then I’ll be more than happy to take a look and see what your website needs.
Like I said, if your existing SEO is good, I will say so. I’m not here just to make work for myself. If you do need better SEO then I’ll say that too. I’ll clearly point out what you need, how long it will take and how much it will cost. Of course, I will also recommend ongoing SEO because, when you have an experienced “white-hat” SEO doing the work, you get genuine results.
For second opinion on your SEO call me on 01252 692 765 or complete the form. And if you need more, I can do full on SEO audits for you too.