SEO practices for a limited website with a structured template
Objective
Today, I'm going to talk about a website SEO project and how we optimised it for a website with limited SEO elements that can be applied using a structured template.
Challenge
As usual, we were working on a project to diagnose the website's SEO and apply SEO improvements based on the items that need to be improved, but we found an issue while applying technical SEO to the website.
As many other websites do, the website had the same template for pages in similar categories, such as About Us, Services, and Products.
This meant that the scripts needed for SEO could not be applied to each page because they were using the same template.
Using the same template is visually pleasing because the design is unified, and it is also convenient for development because only components that are commonly used need to be developed and used continuously.
However, there are limitations to introducing each page's unique content to search engines.
At that time, if you modified the title and description tags of product introduction page A, for example, the title and description tags of product introduction pages B to E, which used the same template, would also be modified.
This resulted in many pages that were not indexed or not visible at all because search engines already recognised them as duplicate content.
Concepts
Applying SEO scripts unique to each page would have required manual development for all pages, so we compromised by not touching areas that used the template function as much as possible and manually developing and optimizing only where necessary.
In other words, it was a collaborative process of automatically applying common template features + manually applying individual features.
From a consulting perspective, we deliver the best case for maximizing the effectiveness of SEO, and as such, it was key to understand the current planning/building environment of the website and find a compromise that can be applied realistically.
Samples/Cases
Resolve duplicate Meta Title & Description based on the same content structure
Referring to the product introduction page of A above, the T&D was previously applied with almost the same template as below.
BEFORE
Because of this format, products A through E all had the same title "Product Introduction - {{Brand Name}}", and search engines recognized all of them as duplicates and did not display them properly.
Therefore, we developed a way to manually add the name of each product before the text "Product Introduction" in the Title, and modified the Description to take the first sentence of each of the first and second paragraphs.
AFTER
While it would have been best to create and apply a unique Title & Description for each page, the compromise we reached was that developing every page manually would have been difficult due to lack of resources and future maintenance.
Fortunately, the content was well structured according to importance, so it was possible to apply it like this. Of course, the actual content was also optimized based on target keywords 😊
Conclusion
In fact, it's almost always a point of contention when working on an SEO project, so it's all about communication with the client.
- explain all the things that need to be improved for the best SEO results,
- understand what can actually be done based on their development and publishing environment,
- find out if there are suboptimal ways to make it better,
- finally, I think it's important to reiterate the SEO benefits that can be expected within the scope of the application.
In the case of the above project, there were limitations, but by finding and applying the next best solution, we were able to increase organic search traffic by about 6% and increase the number of incoming keywords by about 19%.