Define what aspects of the new site are causing the steep fall of organic traffic, and organizing these opportunities for improvement for the implementation teams. Construct a comprehensive SEO strategy that addresses on-page, off-page, and technical improvements. Set standards for net new content, new pages, file naming, and keyword research. Lastly track the success of individual efforts and report these wins to leadership on a weekly cadence.
Trane HVAC redesigned their residential website and faced a 90% loss in organic traffic, inaccurate analytics, and poor site performance in the following months.
First conduct a thorough SEO audit of the site to determine the main pain points of the site, and identify easy wins to quickly boost SEO in the short term and set long-term SEO tasks for the team to work toward to drive slow but compounding SEO growth over time. Set SEO strandards for net new content early, and find what amount of content is feasible for the content team to produce monthly, then build a content calendar to ensure post consistencty.
In the first week of my consulting work for Trane, I completed a deep dive into all aspects of the site, focusing on: On-page, Off-page, and technical SEO implementation as it currently is. The audit revealed critical technical and on-page issues causing the site to lose significant ranking power. I then organized the tasks needed to correct Trane' SEO into short-term and long-term, then prioritized the tasks by priority.
Short Term Tasks
Long Term Tasks
Solving Trane's drop in SEO and bringing the organic traffic back up from a 90% drop was the first priority. Then implementing changes to keep a consistent growth in organic traffic month over month was the next step.
The main causes for the Trane websites significant loss of organic traffic and visibility can be boiled down to these 3 main issues:
Adding canonical tags to all pages of the site relieved some of the duplicate content issues the site faced and corrected much of the inherent penalties the Trane website was facing from google. The product pages and dealer pages, which are the highest converting pages on the site, were receiving practically no organic traffic due to two main reasons: each product page and dealer page featured almost no unique content when compared to pages in the same path, and the UX of the site hiding internal links to the product pages -making it difficult for users to follow a natural progress through the site from homepage to product categories to products.
After implementing SEO standards for newly written content, I worked with the content teams to prioritize products by popularity and engage the teams to write 150+ words of net new content for each product page to alleviate the duplicate content restrictions between the pages.
With Dealer pages the process was much longer, requiring the content teams to gain approval for any net new content with the dealer themselves, which often took weeks to meet an agreement let-alone approvals. Dealer pages became a much longer term task that required Trane to engage with dealers more.
The average page load speed for the Trane site was 15 seconds, getting this number down to 2 seconds was the goal. Resolving the page load speed would lead to less bounces, higher organic traffic, and higher conversions/engagement as the site become much faster and easier to use. To resolve page speed, I preformed a deep dive into the sites code running multiple site wide tests to identify what was slowing down the site inside of the site's code. In the code of the site I found tens of unused scripts that was causing significant slow downs, and overall uncompressed images across the site. To fix site speed I started tasks on removing the unused scripts, clean up the code overall, and lead an initiative to compress and properly name all 400 images on the site.
The Trane site was missing a consistent header structure, causing google to have a hard time determining the focus of many pages across the site. Setting content standards to include 1 H1, 2 H2s, and any number of H3s was the first step. Redeveloping the content on the site to fit into this structure was a longer term task, as many pages utilized H4s and H5s alongside 4 - 7 H2s. Confining the content ot the previously mentioned structure lead to more focused pages and lead google to more easily identify the focus of the pages and articles.
After 2 months of project organization and task launches the decline in organic search was halted, resulting in the first positive month of organic traffic growth in 5 months. Form there the organic traffic of the site continued to grow, leading to a 23% increase in organic traffic in the next 2 months and the end of the consulting project.
Control Advertising Agency - Aidan Eaton
