This is the second of our series of stories revealed by Niswey digital audits, featuring a European conglomerate with over 650 companies.
When this conglomerate’s India team got in touch with us (and a few other digital agencies), they were beginning to lay down the goals for their website in the new global format. Their prime requirement from a digital marketing agency was for them to have an online marketing strategy, focusing on great SEO strategy.
Their brief to the agencies was to take a look at their site and come back with recommendations. Since they weren’t sure of their objectives, we just had to explore as we deemed fit. Because we are used to starting with marketing objectives and goals, this felt a bit like taking shots in the dark. But we went ahead and did our audit anyway.
We ran our SEO tools and checked out the site code, and discovered that the site had very little content and couldn’t possibly rank on any keyword they might choose. We found technical issues with the site, such as URLs with duplicate content (Google hates that!), and missing robots and sitemap files. The site loading speeds on desktop and mobile devices were also tested, and the results were not terribly great.
And as with the other company we had audited, this one too had issues like missing titles, meta descriptions, etc. A quick look at the meta descriptions told us that no effort had gone into crafting them. But then, since the site didn’t have any online marketing strategy to begin with, we couldn’t expect the SEO work to be exemplary!
Images had not been optimized, and H1 and H2 tags were missing in many places, while many were duplicates.
We also looked at the advertising happening around keywords that could be matched to the conglomerate—and found that the conglomerate’s rivals as well as Chinese manufacturers were leading the game on certain keywords. So the conglomerate would need to have its objectives clear on this front as well.
We shared these insights with them. They invited us over, and we listened to them talk about their objectives and ambition with regard to the website. We learned about their tech limitations, as they had to adhere to a global mandate for the CMS, design and template.
Hmmm. More challenging than we first thought. But hey, that’s more fun, right?
So we racked our collective brains and came up with a plan that would solve their SEO and challenges, phase by phase, while working within their tech limitations.
And once we get to the implementing their online marketing strategy, we are expecting to hit the website traffic goals that the conglomerate has defined for itself.
We will be sure to bring you more stories in this series. Till then, check out our first digital audit story, about an online product startup that didn’t have an online marketing strategy in place.
