OPERA BEDS CASE STUDY
Opera Beds is a UK manufacturer and supplier of specialist beds – from profiling care beds to adjustable beds, rotating chair beds and more. See how SEO-Audits.io uncovered flaws with their SEO strategy.
Opera Beds
Opera Beds approached SEO-Audits.io through Daniel Foley’s SEO Consultancy. The audit was recommended to Opera Beds as they were concerned that after a long period of SEO investment – no traffic growth and limited ranking changes were all there was to show. Rather than continue to persist with SEO, they were recommended to have an audit that would identify what the potential issues were with their SEO strategy.
In more than 16 months, there had been no start to end traffic gains.
How We Helped
SEO-Audits.io conducted an intermediate audit for Opera Beds, firstly tearing apart their search console data and evaluating brand / non brand / non blog click performance, impression and page level performance. We quickly established a lack of growth – we then evaluated the website, changes in content, the strategy, link acquisition and more. We produced an audit explaining why there was no growth and some of the recommendations for how that could be changed.
Identifying Lack of Ranking Gain
A part of identifying the lack of ranking gain was to evaluate whether common issues had been addressed by the third party involved in SEO delivery for Opera Beds – in our evaluation – it was clear that numerous issues persisted, such as a large volume of dead URLS / index bloat and active cannibalisation.
The websites index was full of dead / weak URLS as well as search console which showed a large portion of excluded URLS (crawled/discovered currently not indexed)
Poor Quality Spammy Link Building
During the audit – we discovered that the link profile for the domain was incredibly spammy – exhibiting hundreds of referring domains with over optimised anchor texts from a mix of “exploitation” sites i.e. EDU domains with unclosed/unmodded comments through to poor quality PBN style sites with random link injection.
The domain was saturated by poor quality links – a strip back in the link audit revealed a weak link profile (genuine links).
Content – A Sad Story
A full content audit was undertaken for Opera Beds – we split the content assessment between PURCHASE INTENT and RESEARCH INTENT – we analysed content at product / category level and noted that many URLS failed content NLP / topical relevance coverage scores. We benchmarked GSC query performance for key URLS and observed onward decline – meaning a lack of value or full intent alignment saw URLS begin to lose ground.
We found duplicate content and other issues that impeded product, collection and article performance on the domain.
Poor Product & Category Performance
A diluted search console profile based on URLS that existed vs URLS that performed painted a stark picture – the domain was propped up with blog content. For all the URLS that exist for PURCHASE INTENT only a small portion of them generated sufficient clicks.
Poor product performance, weak product query coverage and cannibalisation issues all resulted in general eCom underperformance.
PBN or Not to PBN
Sadly – the client was unaware that their link profile was heavily driven by PBN (private blog network) links from poor quality sites that were full of random, plagarised content and clear network footprints. This was highlighted and a full list of known / detected links provided – this helped the client in their decision making with their “then” current SEO resource.
Large link networks were used, there were stacked tier 2, 3 and tier 4 links and lots more!
On Site & Core Web Vital Issues
We found a lot of basic issues that hadn’t been addressed from Shopify’s dreadful default canonical setup with PRODUCT URLS layered below collection URLS as well as dynamic filter URLS being indexed and more! On top of that, even basic things such as core web vitals had been left – albeit not a deal breaker for SEO – the performance trajectory for the website was downwards – therefore all quick wins and key issues should have been addressed.
Search Console Coverage & Exclusion Issues
The websites search console profile was full of growing EXCLUSION issues – whilst some were benign – many related to a lack of VALUE URLS – Google was crawling and indexing random combination URLS (from filters) and stacking up the Crawled – Currently Not Indexed numbers – there were duplicate without user selected canonical issues and lots more!
User Behaviour – A Telling Story?
We’re always interested in user behaviour factors – for the client we did a tear down of segmented engagement data by various demographics. We looked for correlation factors associated with initial page landing / exit, potential for pogo, elevated session duration by pop open tab functionality and more.
Turns out the clients content wasn’t overly engaging – but did it need to be for a site where atypical user behaviour is to find a site and exit through an affiliate link?
End Guidance for the Client
We provided end guidance as to why their SEO strategy was going nowhere and the best thing that could be done. We gave clear and concise information for the client to decide on.
Opera Beds – The Outcome
Opera Beds have been working on the resolutions highlighted by our audit process. They have since taken resource inhouse to build links, generate content and strengthen their overall organic profile.
Our Clients Have Included
