The Powerful Magic of Alt text
Website Ecosystem SEO Initiative
The websites in our ecosystem were massively underperforming in search. We evaluated the problem to discover that the most basic SEO best practices were not being utilized. What followed was tedious work with amazing results.
What this says about me...
- Not all digital experience work is flash and glamour; some of it is tedious. But I’m here for it if it gets results.
- I believe that the basics are often overlooked, and following best practices can give you an edge.
- I develop strategies with practical impacts.
- I’m willing to learn new things to deliver a great digital experience.
Role
SEO Strategy Contributor
Best Practice Implementor
Data Tracker & Analyst
Team
Director of Web Strategy
Tools
WordPress
Yoast
Overview
Carson Group is a wealth advisory firm that also offers business and marketing support for other “partner” companies. Shortly after starting work there, I was given a project to develop the SEO of all 95 of the partner sites. Because these sites had little to no existing image alt text and titles that were unintelligible, that was the first major undertaking: to provide alt text and titles for the images on key pages and any downloadable resources offered on the site and track search listing results.
Business Challenge
Help partner websites that we manage to be found in search results at a higher rate. This was compounded by the mistaken circulation of a stat that oveer 50% of our sites were found on the first page. When the numbers were evaluated, it was closer to 7%.
This is how we do it
discover
Research
Understand
Empathize
define
Problem
Goals
Timeline
design
Strategic Solution
Implementation Plan
Data Tracking Method
— discover —
Site SEO Baseline Assessment
Discovery began by assessing the current search rankings of each partner site and Carson Wealth location against the search term “financial advisor [city].” The same methodology would be enacted quarterly to track results against the benchmark.
Evaluate Against Best Practices
SEO best practices, including a keyword-rich meta description, site title, and appropriately labeled images served at a reasonable web resolution and file type with alternative text applied, were evaluated across several example sites. It was determined that most were missing these valuable pieces of information.
Understand Impact
Before undertaking a tedious process of updating this granular data, it was important to understand why we would do it. Ultimately, search engines were using these pieces of information to determine which sites to show to searchers, and our sites were falling short. This had a real business impact. People looking for advisors were not finding our partner businesses–affecting their bottom line.
— define —
Problem
Partner sites were not ranking in search, and they were steamed about it.
Goals
Get partner sites to the advertised goal or better within 1 year.
Timeline
ASAP. But more like 10 months.
Goal Statement
Benchmark the Google search ranking of each partner site against a pre-determined keyword search term using SEMrush. Evaluate partner sites and Carson Wealth locations against SEO best practices. Develop a strategy to implement best practices before the end of the year. Re-evaluate search rankings against the same term quarterly to track progress.
— design —
Strategic Solution
The need was clear. Update all partner sites as well as Carson Wealth to meet the minimum best practice standards and measure the results.
Implementation Plan
I created templates for the meta descriptions and resource alternative text for repeated content that existed across the ecosystem to mitigate decision fatigue. The site list was divided into manageable chunks and assigned monthly in order to meet the deadline. A tracking document was set up to ensure that anyone on the project could see and understand the status of a site at any given time. This was communicated to the account managers so that they would have access to information their firms might request.
Data Tracking & Analysis
The tracking document was set up in an Excel spreadsheet with the benchmark data. Each quarter new data was pulled for each site and evaluated against the previous quarter. Using conditional formatting, we were easily able to identify rank ranges (1-10 = first page shows up green).
Results
The impact of making these simple, if dogged, changes was remarkable. When the project began, of the 153 locations analyzed (many sites had multiple locations including the 50 or so Carson Wealth locations) only 33 ranked in the top 10 search results (indicated in green) while more than 60 were not shown in search results at all (red).
As you can see in the charts below, by the fourth quarter of implementation, nearly 80 locations were appearing on the first page (green), and fewer than 10 remained not shown (red).
— reflect —
Impact
Taking the time to implement the SEO best practices very quickly moved the needle on the search engine rankings of our partners and locations. This showed a distinct rise in impressions and clicks as their average position moved toward the top.
What I learned
Sometimes small changes make a big difference. This SEO work was behind the scenes, but still had a measurable impact. Not everything needs to be “designed” but you can take a designer’s approach to undertaking ecosystem-level change. What I began to understand is how important it is to make the right changes for the right reasons, the value of benchmarking, and the importance of tracking and analyzing data.
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