HorsepowerFreaks.com SEO Audit
Overview
HorsepowerFreaks.com, one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s Hot 500 for 2007, is a leading eCommerce site providing aftermarket, OEM and performance parts for cars, trucks and SUVs. Having managed search engine optimization (SEO) in-house for years, they saw a significant decrease in search engine rankings over a year ago, primarily on Google. Fearing they had been “sandboxed” by Google, HorsepowerFreaks.com engaged Anvil to audit the SEO updates that were made to the site and provide recommendations on how to regain and improve on search engine rankings.
Objective
To determine what design, content and/or code elements of the HorsepowerFreaks.com were hindering organic search engine traffic and provide recommendations to resolve these issues.
Challenge
HorsepowerFreaks.com is a very large eCommerce site with thousands of pages. Inconsistency in rankings and overall volume of site made it challenging to get to the root of the problem quickly.
Strategy
Anvil’s strategy was to audit a sampling of ranking and non-ranking pages. Anvil found that many pages had 404 errors and lacked proper 301 redirects to new pages. This not only posed an indexing problem but also prevented sales to those product pages that were recreated as new URLs. Anvil also identified issues with URLs, site structure, file layers and duplicate content, and made recommendations for resolving outstanding issues.
Results
After a few weeks of having implemented Anvil’s recommended changes, HorsepowerFreaks.com gained rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN and started to see traffic once again. In the words of Chris Bergemann, President of HorsepowerFreaks.com, “I wish I hadn’t waited 2 years to do something about our site. I took a big pass through our site and changed it considerably, not only for the search engines, but for usability and appearance. Now after making the changes that Anvil recommended, not only has Google started sending me traffic again, but Yahoo traffic has increased as well, doubling the organic traffic to my web-site.”
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