Our clients come to us with a wide range of issues affecting their websites.
\nTraffic has stalled. Conversions have dropped. Organic revenue isn’t growing the way it should be. At first glance, it looks like a ranking problem. Fix the rankings and everything else follows.
\nExcept, for most clients, that’s not the case. It’s never just a ranking problem. Poor rankings are often a symptom of a bigger problem, or problems.
\nWe reviewed all of our case studies to understand the recurring problems affecting our clients’ websites and uncovered some significant overlaps.
\nWe analysed issues across all case studies. Here’s how often each one came up.
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Visibility is only useful if you’re visible to the right audience.
\n100% of the case studies we analysed had poor or misaligned commercial visibility, meaning that even when they were attracting traffic, they weren’t reliably attracting people who were likely to become customers.
\n\nI-Finity ranked for just 19 keywords when they came on board – many unrelated to its core services, and rarely appearing on page 1. This meant it was largely invisible for the specialist searches most closely connected to high-value opportunities.
\n
Poor visibility to the right people can happen for a variety of reasons, including:
\nRanking for a search term isn’t enough on its own. Keywords and queries need to be relevant to what the business sells and what potential customers are searching for to be valuable.
\nBut a lack of content wasn’t always the cause. For many of our clients, the issues went deeper.
\nWhile thin, low-quality or missing content can cause problems, other issues can also limit organic performance. These include:
\n\nVantage Leasing’s website was built on a car-leasing CMS designed for the industry, not for SEO. While the CMS was suitable for numerous competitors, it was preventing Vantage from adding the kind of content required to rank on page one. Edge45 worked closely with web developers to build a new site and new content that could support its SEO strategy.
\n
Businesses can have a lot of content, or very little, and still have a content problem. What matters is having the right content, in the right place, for the right reasons.
\nContent needs to match user intent, communicate the business’s USPs and ultimately support its commercial goals.
\nIncreasingly, that also means making a business’s expertise, services and differentiators clear enough to be understood and surfaced in AI-generated answers as well as traditional search results.
\nReaching the right people is only half the job. Once they arrive on a website, it must be easy for them to understand what the business offers, find what they need, and take the next step.
\nMore than three quarters of the clients we worked with had problems with the user experience (UX) or conversion journey that prevented visitors from converting.
\nThese problems included:
\n\nCreated Brilliance sold a high-consideration product with a buying journey that could last months, but its website wasn’t giving visitors enough reassurance or clarity to move forward. Edge45 identified and addressed blockers including unclear payment information, insufficient clarity around delivery and warranties, and product pages that needed clearer pricing and calls to action.
\n
User experience issues matter because there’s no guarantee that organic traffic will translate into more enquiries or sales. The website needs to be set up to convert that traffic, making UX an important part of a comprehensive digital strategy.
\nA strong proposition is only useful if customers can see it. 78% of the businesses we analysed weren’t clearly communicating why potential customers should choose them.
\nBusinesses frequently had:
\nBut these proof points weren’t always being surfaced, particularly on homepages, key service pages or product pages where they mattered the most.
\n\nH2ecO came to us with strong Google reviews and a strong reputation among clients for their reliability and service, but these assets weren’t being communicated clearly enough.
\n
Customers don’t necessarily arrive on a website knowing why a business is better than its competitors, so the site needs to make that case for them.
\nThat doesn’t mean developing more reasons to stand out, it can be as simple as making sure their strengths are on display.
\nTwo thirds of the sites we reviewed weren’t simply missing rankings, their architecture wasn’t properly supporting the way customers searched, browsed and moved through the website.
\nStructural issues we found most often included:
\nA website can have strong content, valuable products and services and plenty of good reviews but still struggle if structural issues make important pages difficult to find or interact with.
\n\nNorthern Monk had strong brand awareness, but its ecommerce navigation didn’t link directly to core beer categories such as IPA and Stout. Edge45 made important commercial sections easier for customers and search engines to discover.
\n
A website needs to reflect the way customers think and search for products and services. When important pages are hidden away or disconnected no amount of ranking improvement fixes a route that doesn’t exist.
\nTechnical SEO can be the foundation for a lot of issues further down the line. While clients came to us with a range of concerns, in 78% of cases technical problems were restricting organic performance.
\nThe issues varied considerably between websites and included:
\n\nWith millions of pages and constantly changing data, technical problems on ukphonebook.com had the potential to be amplified across an enormous site. Edge45’s audit uncovered issues including missing canonical tags, orphaned pages, internal-linking problems and content that wasn’t visible on mobile – all of which could restrict how effectively important pages were discovered and understood.
\n
Technical SEO problems can have a significant impact on organic performance but fixing them is rarely the sole solution.
\nAs our analysis demonstrates, a range of issues can lead to poor visibility and weak commercial performance, and it’s usually more than one issue doing the damage.
\nLooking at these issues individually is interesting, but it doesn’t reflect the full scope of what businesses were dealing with when they approached Edge45.
\nBusinesses often had multiple issues reinforcing one another and our most interesting finding was how often these individual ones appeared together.
\nSome of the more frequently occurring overlaps included:
\nThe findings from our client analysis can be grouped into five areas businesses should consider when assessing their website performance.
\nThese five areas provide a starting point for understanding website performance without reducing the problem to a checklist of SEO fixes.
\n1. Visibility: Are you visible for the searches most closely linked to revenue?
\nRanking for hundreds of keywords doesn’t mean a website is attracting valuable traffic. Assess whether the searches you rank for are relevant to your products, services and target customers – and whether important terms are actually generating meaningful visibility.
\n2. Content: Do you have useful, targeted pages covering what customers actually search for?
\nMore content isn’t automatically better. Review whether your existing content matches searcher intent, communicates your expertise and USPs, and covers the products, services and topics that matter to your audience.
\n3. Structure: Can customers and search engines easily reach and understand your most valuable pages?
\nNavigation, internal linking and site architecture all contribute to how a website is understood and used. Important pages shouldn’t be difficult to find, disconnected or buried within an architecture that doesn’t reflect how customers search.
\n4. Conversion: Does each important page make it clear why someone should choose you and what they should do next?
\nOnce you’ve attracted the right visitor, the website needs to give them a reason to stay and a clear route to becoming a customer. That means communicating your proposition, addressing objections, building trust and making the next step obvious.
\n5. Technical: Are technical limitations preventing otherwise strong pages from performing?
\nTechnical SEO provides an important foundation, but it shouldn’t be viewed in isolation. The goal isn’t to fix technical issues for the sake of completing a checklist; it’s to remove barriers that could be preventing valuable pages and content from performing.
\nBusinesses don’t usually approach Edge45 because they want a higher number in a ranking report.
\nThey want more enquiries. More sales. More revenue. Or less reliance on increasingly expensive paid acquisition. Rankings and organic traffic can be useful indicators of performance, but they’re not the end goal.
\nOur analysis of existing client work shows that poor organic performance is often connected to a much wider set of problems across content, structure, technical SEO, user experience and conversion.
\nThat means the most valuable question isn’t simply “How do we rank higher?” It’s “What’s stopping this website from performing commercially?”
\nOnce you identify that, you can start fixing the cause rather than simply treating the symptom.
\nNot sure what’s actually holding your website back?
\nTalk to Edge45 about a website audit to identify the SEO, content, technical and conversion issues standing between your website and better commercial performance.
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