How Cindtoro Recovered Lost Google Rankings For A National Energy Procurement Firm

Company Overview

The energy procurement firm was originally started as a self-funded operation in 2009. The firm has become a national leader in auction-based energy procurement, helping to provide their clients a superior, cost-effective way to buy renewable and traditional energy and natural gas to power their operations.

Goals

Our client had one goal in mind. Recover their Google rankings they had lost due to their web design. As with all digital marketing and SEO projects the Cindtoro team takes a forward thinking approach to set our clients apart from their competitors and get them the results they come to us for.

Challenges

Lost Google Rankings Due To Website Redesign

There are lots of issues that can take place with a website redesign. Lost Google rankings should never be something that any company should suffer from. When any company redesigns their website, if done correctly can they receive better Google rankings and enhanced performance because of user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) improvements.

Poor Technical SEO Health

We ran a Cindtoro SEO audit to figure out what other issues they were experiencing. It came back with quite a few things. Their score was a 79 out of 100 so not terrible but also not ideal. (just as a background, while it is possible to achieve a technical SEO audit score of 100 it is not likely due to a website’s continued evolution and things breaking.

Unminified JS and CSS files

Javascript and CSS files are crucial to the development of a website. They make everything function properly and bring together elements of: motion, color and other key pieces of website functionality they also help to enhance the overall user experience. However, for optimal SEO purposes these files should be minified (shrunk down) to reduce overall size and enhance load times.

The client had 1,885 unminified JS and CSS files that needed to be fixed. Performing this technical SEO optimization can be tricky at times due to the possibility to break the intended functionality of the website so it should only be carried out by qualified professionals.

Missing meta descriptions

Missing meta descriptions are not a known Google ranking factor but they do pose issues for rankings in a roundabout way mainly a website’s lost opportunity to convert more of those passing search engine users into new visitors and improve CTR. which is a ranking factor. The client had a total of 152 missing meta descriptions.

Title tags too long

Title tags that are too long create something called truncation, this is where Google cuts off the title of your webpage. Title tags can also be rewritten automatically when a title is over 60 characters.

Slow Page Speed

Page speed is also a known Google ranking factor. A fast website speed will result in a more enjoyable user experience, while slow site speed will result in a poor user experience. If a website is slow to load, people are more likely to leave, which decreases time on-page, which is another category that is considered. Therefore companies with a fast-loading website have an ability to attract more online business compared to a company that has slower loading times.

There are many origins of slow page speed but the main ones are unminified javascript and CSS. Then you have other issues such as images not being served in optimal formats or too many third party tracking scripts.

No Keyword Strategy

The lack of a keyword strategy makes it difficult to rank on search engines. While search engines are smart and they do use complex algorithms to understand content. The use of keywords is critical to their understanding of a webpage and website as a whole. The lack of a keyword strategy means they have to work harder to understand what the website is trying to convey.

What We Did

Since we had identified the issues they were struggling from within our SEO audit we could now take the necessary steps to solve the challenges they were facing. There is no right or wrong order of operations to fix SEO issues. So here is how Cindtoro did it.

First - Setup Tracking Analytics and Data

We set up google analytics (GA), and google search console (GSC). We were looking to track the bounce rate, user engagement, overall organic traffic and search engine rankings for specific keywords. We had a total of 34 keywords which we will go over in the next section. 

Second - Keyword Research

As we discussed previously keywords are one of the most important aspects of a search engine’s understanding of a website. We used our in-house – robust keyword research process to identify the search queries aligned with their distinct goals. We came up with 34 unique sets of keywords. Here are a few of them: 

Education energy procurement: 97

Energy procurement auction: 8

Crypto mining energy procurement: 16

Natural gas procurement: 14

Healthcare energy procurement: 10

Reverse auction for energy procurement: 7

Ai and energy procurement: 96

Energy procurement for green energy project developers: 95

Hospital energy procurement: 94

ESG energy consulting:  37

Portfolio energy procurement: 26

Supply chain energy procurement: 88

**Reminder about the Google ranking system** which is laid out as follows: 1 – 10  is the first of Google, page two are ranks 11-20 and so on and so forth. As you get further away from the first page the less search engine traffic you will receive. 

Third - Improve Title Tags

We took the keywords we identified in our keyword research process to improve their title tags, helping to shorten and optimize them as best we could. 

Fourth - Improve Page Speed

Improving page speed in this case happened to be a complex process. Since the Cindtoro team did not build the website we had to take into account reasons why the previous developers utilized the elements they did. The site had numerous moving elements throughout which meant lots of javascript. We were able to perform some enhancements but not to the extend we would have hoped as this would have broken the website

Fifth - Optimization

As we applied fixes we wanted to see the improvement that took place on the Google search results pages. We made additional adjustments as needed but most of the time with SEO it takes about three to six months before you start to see any improvements. This happens because of constant algorithm updates and “reconsideration” processes that need to take place to ensure Google trust the website.

Other Considerations

It is worth noting here that the client had hundreds if not thousands of other issues that we addressed; however we picked out the ones that normally cause the most problems with a website’s SEO. This does not mean that the issues are all the same across the board for every website as every situation is unique.

Results

The results were nothing short of spectacular! After we ran the client through the Cindtoro SEO process and fixed the above issues and others that were not documented in this case study. Our client soared through the rankings achieving 1st page Google rankings in a matter of weeks. Nearly all keywords approved by the energy procurement firm’s marketing manager reached the first page of Google. 26 of the 34 keywords experienced significant increases – multi page jumps to the first page.