SEO and Support for SME Business
A successful local business had launched a new website, which they were happy with from a design perspective. They set about a series of post-live changes to improve Search Engine Optimisation. Two issues came to light:
- Site speed
- the ability to get changes made in a time-frame that suited the business.
Brief:
Timely changes, SEO is so successful client stops other forms of promotion. Akriga asked to develop second site in French.
Client:
SME business ABC Inflatables
Skills:
SEO, Apache server tuning, timely support, foreign language websites
Challenge:
“When we approached Akriga, we had just redeveloped our website. Unfortunately, the redesign had taken far longer than promised and the costs were higher than expected and our relationship with the web designer had broken down.
We had a lovely looking site but Kate, who gives us advice on SEO, was very concerned about a number of the technical aspects. Put simply, it looked great but it loaded too slowly and there were too many broken links. Kate recommended that we should talk to Akriga and ask them if they could take our site and make it work, without breaking the bank.”
Solution:
The original author had already installed a caching plugin but the site was still slow. Waterfall analysis suggested that the site was on slow hosting because the Time To First Byte was long.
Effects of long TTFB on site speed followed by a move to faster hosting
By moving to Akriga hosting we could not only speed up the website but also the rate at which change requests were dealt with. After a smooth transition to our hosting we set about implementing a number of technical SEO changes and content fixes.
Structured Data Bloat and SEO
Structured data is generally considered a good thing, its the corner stone of the semantic web. You can, however, have too much of a good thing.
Our SEO expert determined the site suffered from “structured data bloat” and we set about trimming it down. Firstly, structured data (SD) is OK on the homepage, but Google doesn’t want it everywhere. In this case the SD comes from Yoast so we have
/**
@params array $yoast_data_array, int $int
@returns array
If homepage serve Yoast's JSON+LD markup (Organisation, etc) BUT *only* on homepage.
*/
function filter_wpseo_json_ld_output( $yoast_data_array, $int ) {
// If homepage serve Yoast's JASON+LD markup (Organisation, etc) BUT *only* on homepage.
if ( is_front_page() ) {
return $yoast_data_array;
}
else {
return array(); // Not homepage, return an empty array
}
};
// add the filter
add_filter( 'wpseo_json_ld_output', 'filter_wpseo_json_ld_output', 10, 2 );
Second source of extraneous SD is WordPress’ own Hentry data. Unfortunately the X theme uses the presence of certain hentry_ classes to add images via the isotope script. Thus we have
/**
* Remove 'hentry' from post_class()
* For posts (i.e. not pages) such as News rm hentry structured data but retain
* img loading. Matching styles are in ak_fixes.css
*/
function abc_remove_hentry( $class ) {
//if ( in_array( array('type-page'), $class ) ) :
if ( is_page() ) {
$class = array_diff( $class, array( 'hentry' ) );
//return $class;
}
else {
// Not a page, rm hentry but add our own tag to retain img loading via Isotope
$class=str_replace('hentry', get_hentry_replacement(), $class);
//return $class;
}
#endif;
return $class;
}
add_filter( 'post_class', 'abc_remove_hentry' );
/**
@params: None
@returns: String replacement of hentry structured data tag
@calledby: ./framework/views/global/_script-isotope-index.php, abc_remove_hentry()
Return string constant used to remove hentry but retain styling.
*/
function get_hentry_replacement () {
return HENTRY_REPLACEMENT;
}
Outcomes:
- Fast site
- Expertly optimised for search engines
- Excellent working relationship
- Akriga was asked to take on development of a French language site for the business.
“It was like a breath of fresh air! Ade and Ian reassured us that they knew what was going on and they gave us clear costings for each step in the project. They moved onto their own hosting and then started working their magic. They talked to Kate and understood what we needed for a faster, reliable site.”