MQL/SQL Generation Over the Year: Promoting SPD’s Brand with Comprehensive Website Work

Every business dreams of being instantly found when a potential customer enters a search query in Google. Brands allocate significant resources to promote their websites, making it increasingly difficult for search aggregators to rank them.

As a result, companies find it more challenging to generate leads and convert them into profits. The issue isn’t just the absence of target keywords on landing pages. Factors like loading speed, navigation, and the overall user perception of the website also influence a potential customer’s willingness to engage with the brand.

Effective website and business promotion requires a comprehensive understanding of the situation, analysis, and improvement. This includes technical audits, SEO (On-Page Optimization), page code modernization, and much more. These were precisely the aspects missing for SPD, and working with them became a valuable experience for both parties.

Around 100 pages made it to the top 5 search results, generating thousands of monthly organic leads and increasing the conversion rate. And this is just a part of what Luxeo’s experts achieved. How? Read the following sections to find out!

Brief Overview of the Client

SPD is an IT company specializing in the development of complex large-scale solutions. These range from corporate platforms for businesses to user applications with deep integration of artificial intelligence and other innovations.

Years of experience and hundreds of products with a broad audience confirm SPD’s expertise.

The more complex the project, the better SPD handles it. This is a fact confirmed by market statistics of published solutions.

Key Project Results

Over nearly a year and a half of fruitful collaboration between SPD and Luxeo, the following achievements were made:

– Nearly a threefold increase in the number of top 1 positions among the website’s pages. – More than 100 new and updated landing pages and SEO materials. – Increased traffic in priority areas and its conversion into MQL/SQL.

How was this achieved?

1. A comprehensive audit identifying critical issues. 2. Joint efforts to address shortcomings and the reasons for inadequate site ranking. 3. A clear understanding of SPD’s business specifics and needs.

Client’s Challenge

A busy brand sometimes simply doesn’t have the capacity to monitor the functionality and ranking of its own digital resources. Over time, this leads to slower website load times, and pages (specifically, their content) lose relevance and no longer align with market trends.

This very issue prompted SPD representatives to reach out to us.

The main requirements were:

1. Generating MQL/SQL. 2. A complete technical and SEO audit of the website. 3. Increasing the volume of valuable traffic. 4. Improving the brand’s position in Google search results.

The request was received, processed, and the collaboration began. Luxeo and SPD – a tandem that proved to be remarkably effective.

Our Approach

After assessing the potential scope of work, we concluded that a full analysis of the website was essential. Using Google Search Console and additional tools, we identified that the resource had several significant issues and required immediate expert intervention.

Of course, we provided SPD with a report detailing the nature and root causes of these problems, offering a thorough description and recommendations for fixing them. But let’s take it step by step.

Optimization is a process that is carried out gradually and thoughtfully, so we divided it into stages, prioritizing each:

• Technical Aspects. Fixing issues like the absence of a sitemap, incorrect page markup, excessively long content loading times, etc.
• SEO. Updating and optimizing content, refining microdata, building a backlink profile, etc.

This wasn’t the final plan of action, as during the collaboration, we uncovered additional, less obvious issues that also needed to be addressed. However, we managed to complete the work on time and even achieved better results than initially expected.

Technical Aspects

The site analysis revealed several issues that affected the website’s performance and navigation logic, which in turn impacted its indexing and ranking. We provided a detailed description of these shortcomings and proposed several algorithms for their elimination. Below is a brief overview of the main ones.

Site and Page Loading Speed

The performance of the website and its pages is one of the key factors in search engine ranking. Using PageSpeed Insights, we determined that SPD’s current site loading speed was, to put it mildly, unsatisfactory:

The desktop version of the page takes over 2 seconds to load. In 2023. This is unacceptable.

After checking the mobile version, we were even more surprised:

It’s hard to imagine anyone waiting half a minute for a website to load. Not today.

The tool identified the reasons for the low performance, which we then passed on to SPD’s technical team for correction. Some other technical issues also impacted the loading speed of the resource, although not as critically (spoiler: they were also resolved).

URLs

We discovered a significant number of broken links (code 4xx) and redirects (code 3xx), which harmed site navigation and affected the generation of links appearing in search results in response to certain user queries.

A page with the URL:	Which URL returns a 4xx code
https://spd.tech/tag/travel/	https://spd.tech/tag/travel/<img%20width=
https://spd.tech/tag/fintech/	https://spd.tech/tag/fintech/<img%20width=
https://spd.tech/tag/fintech/	https://spd.tech/tag/fintech/<img%20width=

And also:

A page with the URL	Which URL returns a 3xx code
https://spd.tech/insurtech-software-development-services/	https://spd.tech/insurtech-development/modern-technologies-and-custom-software-development-in-insurtech/
https://spd.tech/dedicated-development-teams/offshore-software-development/	https://spd.tech/hire-java-developers/

Accordingly, we additionally checked the sitemap and compiled a list of URLs that need to be fixed or removed.

As a bonus, we discovered that the resource lacks an XML image sitemap and alternative tags for the images. This issue was also included in the optimization roadmap.

Static Weight

The link weight affects the site’s indexing by search engines, so we analyzed this element as well. Here’s what we found: some links to external sites diminished the value of the pages they were placed on. For example:

On which page is the URL located	External URL	Anchor
https://spd.tech/	https://pitchbook.com/	Pitchbook
https://spd.tech/software-product-development/product-development-process/	https://hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile	this article
https://spd.tech/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection	https://www.cloudflare.com/5xx-error-landing	Cloudflare

Not very valuable external resources, are they?

For links of this type, we recommended using the rel=”nofollow” tag to exclude them from indexing.

We also found broken URLs that were being indexed successfully but returned a proud 404 error when attempting to load the target page. Here are some of them:

https://spd.tech/uk/java-course/ https://spd.tech/ec+D2:D4102ommerce-development-services/ https://spd.tech/university/ https://spd.tech/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/logo_vertical_blue.svg https://spd.tech/uk/ https://spd.tech/uk/internship-2021/ https://spd.tech/uk/university/ https://spd.tech/uk/about/

Note: these are backlinks placed on external resources.

To resolve the issue, we recommended replacing the links with current ones or at least setting up a 301 redirect to the existing target page URLs.

Page Markup

During the audit, we found that only part of the microdata was being used on the site. Consequently, the search engine may misinterpret the content of the pages, leading to incorrect indexing. There was also an issue with the length of the Title for some sections of the site.

It was quite logical for us to propose enhancing the existing page code (especially for service pages) as follows:

<script type=”application/ld+json”> { “@context”: “http://schema.org/”, “@type”: “SoftwareApplication”, “name”: “H1”, “description”: “Description”, “applicationCategory”: “https://schema.org/Organization”, “operatingSystem”: “Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android”, “aggregateRating”: { “@type”: “AggregateRating”, “ratingValue”: “4.9”, “ratingCount”: “24” } }] </script>

Featured snippets are exactly what the page code was lacking.

Note that for SPD, we used real ratings and metrics taken from Clutch, Trustpilot, Google My Business, and others.

HTML/CSS Errors

Finally, let’s discuss the most interesting aspects from a technical standpoint. Using tools like https://validator.w3.org/ and https://jigsaw.w3.org/, we found that the site contains validation errors in its CSS and HTML code. While these do not directly affect the site’s ranking, they are one of the sources of the performance issues described above.

It’s good that the tools highlight issues — it makes them easier to fix.

Thus, we addressed the main challenges related to the technical aspects of the site. It’s time to move on to SEO.

SEO

On-page optimization, structure, content: these are all components of SEO that we focused on in this project. We traditionally used tools like Serpstat, SEO Ahrefs, and others. The result was an improvement in the site’s ranking, but more on that later. For now, let’s briefly discuss the issues and the methods we used to resolve them.

Content Markup

Well, this is a problem common to the vast majority of websites. We’re talking about content markup, its structure, heading rankings, meta tags, alt text, etc. For example:

The highlighted elements can be styled differently, and H3-H4 should be used exclusively within the body of the content.

Here, a graphic block would also be more appropriate.

Actually, just like here. 

The solution was consistent for all similar instances, specifically using <span>/<div> tags for the headings.

We also noted the absence of alt and title attributes on some pages of the site, particularly on images, like here:

And if the alt attribute contained a keyword, the indexing of the page would be slightly better.

It’s clear that the solution to the problem is generating Alt/Title tags using a template:

All: {H1}, image № {image-number} Title: {H1}, image № {image-number} – SPD Technology

Nothing complicated, but it’s part of the site’s optimization.

Semantic Core

Semantics, meaning relevant key phrases, organized into clusters and filtered by value, conversion rates, number of queries, etc. Everything needed for on-page optimization.

You won’t believe it, but that was just the beginning.

Next was the calculation and planning of the number of links needed to bring the site and its individual pages to the top of search results.

Thus, we assembled the semantic core, but the most interesting part was yet to come.

Content Plan

We spent considerable time and effort preparing a roadmap for content publication in the blog and on external resources. Moreover, we developed briefs for the copywriters, establishing optimal requirements for the materials to ensure proper indexing and ranking of the content. And the result proved to be worth it.

Results

One and a half years of collaboration between Luxeo and SPD yielded quite positive results for the latter. We literally poured our hearts into this project, constantly monitoring metrics, making adjustments, and ultimately nearly exhausting ourselves. However, we were satisfied. Why? Because we achieved SUCCESS!

Fifteen months of collaboration between Luxeo and SPD unfolded in a sprint format and brought the desired results, such as MQL/SQL metrics, organic lead generation, and a ticket to the top of Google search results.

Conclusion

Covering all of SPD’s target clusters, technical optimization of the site, and comprehensive SEO. Nothing special? But what a result!

Thousands of leads each month, a position in the top search results, and conversions that increase revenue and the company’s market value. In fact, this is just an interim stage of the collaboration between Luxeo and SPD. Yes, the project is currently complete, but we do not plan to stop here; we will continue to support SPD!

Want to achieve similar results? Discover how our team can help promote your site. Contact a Luxeo manager for a consultation!