How Cindtoro helped this holdings company increase SEO by 92%

Company Overview

This holdings company provides flexible, highly customized debt and equity financing solutions deploying capital into commercial real estate loans designed for institutional-caliber partners. The firm has closed over 5 billion dollars in deals over the past 10 years and has weathered numerous real estate cycles

Goals

The firm’s main goal was to increase their Google search ranking whenever their brand name was searched by a potential client. (for the purposes of our NDA we are not allowed to release their name)  

Challenges

Initial SEO Assessment

The first thing we did was start off with our initial SEO website audit. We needed to find out if our preliminary searches were in fact correct so our team could see where the company was performing for their brand name in addition to the services they were looking to get found for. When we ran their websites through Cindtoro’s SEO audit tools we came back with many different things that was hindering the holdings company from achieving their desired outcome.

Low technical SEO score

The firm’s website suffered from numerous issues including but not limited to broken links, slow loading pages and no alternative text on key images. If you don’t know what any of these issues we are going to break them down below.

Broken Links

Broken Links cause issues to a website in numerous ways but one of the most devastating issues that happen is when a search engine crawler encounters these links it will stop the crawler dead in its tracks which then stops the search engines ability to discover new pages the firm may have created. This also leads to a wasted crawl budget (the resources that google has allocated to discovering more content on a website.)

Lack of Alt Text

The lack of alternative text means that a search engine is not able to understand what images are about. Search engines rely on people in putting alternative text inside an image to guide them down the path of understanding what it is about. The holdings company had no alternative text in any of its images so they had at the time lost the ability to capitalize on additional places to put new keywords.

Slow Website Load Time

A website’s loading time is a direct Google ranking factor per the core web vitals 2021 ranking factors according to Google. For additional context this was a historic 1st in the world of SEO ) Google does not release their ranking factors due to abuse by people looking to manipulate them in negative ways. Any time we get a glimpse into what controls top placements on Google its best to trust in the small pieces of info we get. In this case the holdings company’s slow load time was caused by unminified JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files.

Outdated Image file formats

Images that are served in outdated formats will cause a browser to load a website slowly as they are rendering the resource. These images will compound the negative effects unminified JS and CSS has on your website.

It also means that this causes harm to a website’s SEO performance because for every XXX% ( CITE A STATISTIC ) increase in load time it will cause a XXX percent in user drop off and an increase in bounce rate. Meaning more people will visit your website and leave after visiting 1 page.

No Keyword Strategy

The company had no solid keyword strategy or topical map to inform their content creation. This is vital if you want to succeed in SEO. You cannot just write post with no plan in place. Here is why this is bad for their optimization efforts.

As Google was looking at their website the search engine was having a difficult time understanding exactly what the company was about. This happened for two major reasons: first to not having the proper keywords in the correct places and second they did not produce enough content for their company to be seen as an authority in their space.

What We Did

To achieve the desired results for the client we started we tapped into our technical SEO team to fix the issues they were suffering from.

Fixed Broken Links

We chose to fix the broken links 1st because as we covered above it is critical for a search engine to discover as many pages as possible. A website that loses out on crawl budget from broken links does not win favorability with Google. Broken links are also considered a technical SEO error means they are the severe and should be fixed immediately before all else.

Implemented Alt Text

If you want to maximize your effectiveness of alternative text then you need to know how to use keywords in images and filenames. Many SEO companies do not take steps to optimize both the filenames and alt text with keywords. 

This helped the search engine in two ways. The first way the extra keywords gave the holdings firm the ability to rank for more keywords and implementing the keywords in the filenames allowed us to provide Google with additional information regarding what the image was about

SEO Optimized Images

Also during our process of implementing the alternative text and filename updates we SEO optimized all the images on the website. We did this by converting the less optimal Jpeg to Jpeg 2000, WebP and AVIF file formats.

Minified JS and CSS

After the Cindtoro team took care of the broken links, and optimized the images we then had to modify the way that javascript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files were loaded. When an SEO specialist talks about minification of JS and CSS they are referring to reducing the amount of whitespace and comments inside of the code. This makes the code nearly unreadable by people but it benefits a website’s load time helping to load the website faster improving the SEO score and core web vitals 

(show screenshot of before and after JS AND CSS is minified)  

Updated website with keywords

The final step to optimize the firm’s SEO was to modify the way keywords were placed throughout the website. Search engines are always looking for ways to classify websites into different categories and keywords are the most important factors to do that. Cindtoro placed keywords of their brand name as well as the financial lending services they provided throughout the firms website by doing this we were able to improve the search engine crawler’s understanding of the content which helped to improve ranking positions and gain the company the relevant traffic it was looking for

Results

After the Cindtoro SEO team fixed all of this issues laid out above the website experienced significantly better SEO performance lending to an increased search engine traffic by 92%, 211,000 Google impressions, an increased click through rate (CTR) from 3.7% to 4.8%, a total of 8,838 clicks and most importantly the firm ranks for their company brand name above all competitors. The capital firm had numerous competitors all of which had either the same or similar names. This was a huge win for them (we redacted the name due to NDAs). The firm uses our services to maintain their current SEO positions and continues work with Cindtoro after 5 years.