Technical SEO can reveal opportunities to significantly improve search engine accessibility to your website and relevant traffic
The Challenge
Olive is a leading healthcare operation AI solution and 2020 CB Insights Healthcare Digital 150 company that recently received a valuation of 1.5 billion dollars. Olive has rapidly risen to start-up “unicorn” status by streamlining all organizations that use her. Olive frees up administrative tasks that humans are now doing and is committed to helping carve out 1 trillion dollars in waste out of Healthcare.
A true healthcare innovator, Olive’s extensive library of online content includes data sheets, case studies, blog articles, press releases, white papers, and more. However, all this content led to a common issue of duplicate content that is often experienced by start-ups and leads to negatively impacting their site’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
At the time, Olive was in its early stages with regards to developing its digital marketing capabilities. Prioritizing the role of digital marketing in accomplishing their growth objectives, Olive sought to partner with an agency that could meet them where they were – an agency that could accelerate Olive’s digital level maturation and business growth.
Insights
- Parallel Path completed a technical SEO audit to provide both initial and ongoing accessibility analysis and recommendations. This is important to ensure search engines can properly crawl, index, and understand Olive’s website.
- Olive’s Technical SEO Audit included: thorough website audit and analysis, website taxonomy (technical structure, sitemap.xml, Robots.txt, and other technical assets and files, Site speed auditing, Crawl error reporting, duplicate content analysis, and schema deployment.
- When Parallel Path dug into the accessibility report, it identified some common challenges for websites with a lot of content to manage that can greatly affect the site’s accessibility to search engines.
- During the technical audit Parallel Path discovered that search engines were not able to see certain site links because they were delivered by javascript.
- Parallel Path found duplicate content on the site, including multiple page headers and in the footer of each page of the site, which was a remnant of an old plugin. Because this content wasn’t visible to users it also was not apparent to the client, which is why it’s important to conduct SEO technical audits. Even though this content wasn’t visible to users, it was to search engines and therefore affected Olive’s organic traffic performance.
- Why does this matter? Having hidden, duplicate or irrelevant content is detrimental to keyword targeting on the page. Essentially, these words were skewing what search engines thought the page was about, offsetting that page’s keyword focus. Removing this “invisible” content gave Olive’s organic traffic a big boost by allowing the Olive domain to outperform competitors.
The Solution
As an essential aspect of their digital marketing ambition, Olive enlisted Parallel Path to identify opportunities to improve their SERP (Search Engine Results Page) presence and increase relevant traffic. For websites with rich content libraries such as Olive’s, some important opportunities to audit include page crawlability, site link visibility, and identifying any duplicate content.
To solve the problem of the site’s duplicate content, the Parallel Path team combed through and manually replaced every instance of duplicate header content. Parallel Path created an XML sitemap to make all links accessible to search engines again and worked with the company’s development team to scrub the CMS plugin that was populating duplicate footer content across the site.
Results
For the footer content specifically, and other fixes that required a complete recrawling and reindexing of the site, it took about a month for improvements to start showing in organic search metrics. The results were significant including increases in organic sessions (traffic), the average rank of page content on the SERP (search engine result page), and click-through rates.
The website and its SEO were a critical early step of a digital marketing strategy contributing to the rapid growth Olive experienced in 2020.
“We are a dynamic healthcare technology company that is growing fast, so we need a partner that has the right blend of vision and execution to get the job done. Parallel Path understands our ambitions and makes smart recommendations to help us achieve our goals. They are very data-driven which we appreciate and we are pleased with the results we are getting. And, they are fun to work with too!”
– Director of Marketing, Olive.