Bio
The People Pod is a growing specialist recruitment agency that works with a number of highly popular UK brands, identifying the best retail & hospitality, digital & technology, legal & finance and sales talent on the market.
Starting out as two guys with over 20 years of sales and recruitment experience, an opportunity arose to put an untraditional twist on the modern-day recruitment experience, and thus, The People Pod was born. From here, they have formed a business that focuses on quality over quantity, and has built a public platform to allow recruiters, employers and candidates to uniquely interact and engage.
The Brief
The idea behind this project was to increase organic exposure on Google UK search results and to increase visibility for both recruiters and prospective jobseekers. They wanted to target high volume keywords and to also focus on niche sectors of their recruitment following.
The Issue
It was evident that major tweaks were needed throughout the website to improve rankings and the user experience. These issues were made clear to us when a site audit was undertaken. Some of the key findings of the site audit were:
Orphan Page - There were pages which were isolated from the rest of the website with no accessibility, and no links to be recognized or given authority.
Image file sizes too large - The images on The People Pod were too large throughout the pages, which directly resulted in the page speed being decreased throughout the website.
Canonical Issues (points to redirect, duplicate pages) - There were similar or duplicate pages on the website which did not specify the canonical page, which instructs search engines to show the preferred version of any given page within their results. The lack of a canonical link meant that Google may have had issues interpreting which URL was the preferred version of any given page and this was leading to a potential loss of ranking opportunities and a dilution of authority throughout the site.
Timeouts - Timeouts occurred when requesting pages, hindering the user experience. This caused issues for Google’s ability to crawl the website and thus, understand the site effectively.
A Number of pages with 'noindex' - There were a number of pages with a ‘noindex’ meta tag, meaning that these pages would not be recognized or be crawled by Google. As these pages were not visible at all on the search engine results, they could not be ranked.
Redirects - There were a number of redirects on the site, which led to the disruption of the authority flow throughout the site and therefore, hindering the user experience.
Meta Description - There were instances where the meta descriptions were either too short, too long or non-existent.
Alt text - There was no keyword relevance to the images shown on the pages, meaning that Google was not able to interpret the content of the image files.
URL Restructuring - A large number of the indexed URLs were littered with query strings and other meaningless characters. In these instances, we looked at changing the URL structure to make it more keyword-rich and shorter.
HOW WE DID IT
Orphan Page - We assessed the website navigation and link architecture to ensure that all of the relevant pages were easily accessible.
Image file sizes too large - We optimized the images which were slowing down the site speed by resizing and compressing them, whilst ensuring that the image quality was still high.
Canonical Issues (points to redirect, duplicate pages) - There were similar or duplicate pages on the website which did not specify the canonical page, which instructs search engines to show the preferred version of any given page within their results. The lack of a canonical link meant that Google may have had issues interpreting which URL was the preferred version of any given page and this was leading to a potential loss of ranking opportunities and a dilution of authority throughout the site.
Timeouts - As this wasn’t a temporary issue, we reviewed a list of the URLs that were timing out. From here, we were able to reproduce the server issue which was reported in ahrefs, identify bottlenecks and rectify the situation.
A Number of pages with 'noindex' - A number of pages were already set to ‘noindex’ within the website, so we reversed these, where relevant, by removing the appropriate robots’ meta.
Redirects - Within this review, the URLs listed with 302 redirects were amended to URLs with 301 redirects, where the situation was permanent. Also, where appropriate, we changed modified links to point to their final destination thus cutting out the redirect out of the equation.
Meta Description - Once the issues were reviewed, we made the appropriate amendments to the meta descriptions, keeping them within Google’s recommended character count and ensuring they were keyword-rich and as relevant as possible.
Alt text - We enhanced the site’s images by inputting concise and descriptive alt text, allowing Google to identify the description of the image and also benefiting the user experience.
URL Restructuring - We simply cleaned up the URL, keeping it relevant to the Google search query but inputting rich keywords to make it look clean and thereby enhancing the user experience.