Case Study • Food & Agriculture • SEO Audit

Leading Nationwide Poultry Producer

Industry:

Food & Agriculture

Services:

SEO Audit

Results:

3.5-fold increase in monthly organic sessions

The Challenge

periscopeUP was hired in 2015 to assist one of the country’s largest poultry producers rank for more recipe, cooking technique and general poultry terms following their website relaunch. A pre-launch audit revealed a non-secure site and a number of issues with URL structure. We moved the new site over the https, and re-configured the URLs to be more SEO-friendly. This included updating any URLs with underscores to instead utilize dashes. We also created a new sitemap that did not include extraneous pages, and set-up a dynamic sitemap generator to create a new sitemap any time a change was made to the site.

The Solution

Shortly after relaunch we saw that Google Search Console was flagging thousands of crawl errors. It appeared that Google had found and crawled an old cached version of the site, resulting in thousands of external “not found” errors. To address this issue, we implemented redirects for the external crawl errors and carefully monitored and addressed internal crawl errors and redirects. We also ensured that all recipe print and view pages were set to no-index, no-follow to avoid a duplicate content error.

While identifying and addressing the large number of technical SEO issues, we began optimizing metadata and on-page content for hundreds of recipes and dozens of cooking technique pages. We continued coordinating our optimization efforts in tandem with the client’s content generation schedule.

The positive results shown in the graph below illustrate the importance of keeping a website healthy from a technical standpoint. A technically sound site that produces a steady stream of relevant, optimized content will enjoy a continued increases in organic sessions.