Technical SEO Audit

www.bedkingdom.co.uk
 01 Competitor analysis

Agenda 02 Intro to technical audit

03 Technical audit elements

04 Priorities
Competitor analysis
Top level domain analysis
Domain traffic
Organic traffic
Organic competitors

Happy Beds Cuckooland Room to Grow

Content gap
Explained

Untapped
• Keywords for which you have no rankings but at least one of the other competitors
do.

Missing
• Keywords where you have no rankings but all of the other entered competitors do.

Weak
• Keywords for which you ranks lower than any of the other entered competitors.

The full excel document will show you more details of each one of these
opportunity areas.
Content gap
Untapped keywords
Content gap
Missing keywords
Content gap
Weak keywords
Content gap
Next steps

Review where competitors are ranking between position 1-10 (first page) and
order by search volume, this is where you can see the biggest opportunities
from your competitors

You can spot if you already have a page targeting this term, in this case the
content needs to be updated to be in line with what the competitors have

If we’re missing a page targeting the term but ensure it’s not going to cause
cannibalisation with your other pages
Intro to the technical audit
 Audit Deck Format
Each story consists of the following areas

Issue area or story background Specific issues Specific solutions to

Found the issues

• Explanation and Impact of

the Technical SEO Topic • Outline of On-site Issues • Outline of recommended
Impacting Performance fix(es)
• Best Practice Tips and
Supporting Stats / Case • Screenshots to Illustrate • Additional detail provided
Studies Issues separately if required

• Links to Educational
Resources
 01 Crawling

02 Content

Primary issues
03 Faceted navigation

04 Robots.txt

05 Site speed

06 Website architecture
 01 404 errors

02 External links

03 Title tags

Secondary issues 04

05
Meta descriptions

H1 tags

06 Pagination

07 Image alt tags

08 E-A-T
Crawling
Crawling
• Based on trust and authority signals, search engines will
dedicate resource into crawling your site

• If your site is structured poorly, is slow or has lots of duplicate content, this means search
engines will waste crawl resource in unimportant areas and by hitting errors, resulting in:
• Important areas of the site being neglected in terms of crawl frequency
• Hindered SERP visibility – especially on long-tail queries
Crawling issues
Crawling issues
• Google Search Console is the best tool
to show us how Google are access,
crawling and indexing the site

• We can see here they have found over

17k pages which are not indexed. It’s
important to review these to ensure no
priority pages are within that list

• It’s also important to review the

indexed pages to ensure there aren’t
any unexpected pages in there
Crawling issues
• This is a list of reasons why the 17.8k
pages are not indexed
• When reviewing this most are coming
from alternate pages having a canonical
tag
• This is due to to the way categories link to
product pages which are then
canonicalised to a different URL for
example this product
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/childrens
-beds/kidsaw-jcb-junior-bed.html is
canonicalised to
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/kidsaw-jc
b-junior-bed.html
• Other pages with this reason are
parameter pages being canonicalised
back which is correct, but these pages
should be blocked (not paginated
parameters)
Crawling issues
• The other reasons include blocked by
robots.txt which is a valid reason. The
only issue here is the current robots.txt
is not blocking anything so all rules
may have been removed (we should
revert back to the old robots.txt unless
this was done for a reason) I have
included a copy of the old robots.txt in
the supporting documents folder
• The next reason is 404 errors, which
need to either be removed in internal
linking or redirecting to the nearest
page (list of these provided)
• There are over 1k noindex tag pages
which when looking all seem to be
parameter pages which is fine
Crawling solutions
Crawling solutions
• The issue with internally linking to
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/childrens-beds/kidsaw-jcb-junior-bed.html then
canonicalising to https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/kidsaw-jcb-junior-bed.html is you’re
creating 2 URLs for 1 product URL

• We should update all internal links to point to the product URL which comes off the root
URL, this will stop Google having to crawl both URLs

• Review the old robots.txt and revert back so we don’t have pages we want blocked being
crawled from search engine crawlers
404 errors
404 errors
• 404 Not Found is the status code returned to a client when
it attempts to access a resource that does not exist

• This is a natural part of any website and is not problematic

• However, whenever internal or inbound links point to non-existent (404) pages, this link
value is lost and it is also a waste of a search engine’s crawl budget

• We must ensure that all links point to live pages in order to

maximise the distribution of link authority through the site
404 error issues
404 error issues
• A high number of 404 errors are pointing to
old product URLs. This can be frustrating to
both users and search engines who come
across these pages.

• How do you currently handle out of stock

products or discontinued products?

• There’s a full list of effected URLs in the

supporting documents folder.

Source: Google search console coverage report

404 error solutions
404 error solutions
• If there is a genuine 404 error on site, that’s fine, it’s a very natural thing to have, but we
shouldn’t be internally linking to these pages or have them in the sitemap. The internal link
should either be removed or updated to reflect the new URL
Handling out of stock products
• If the product is temporarily out of stock, we should keep the page on site and just display a
note to tell the user this product is out of stock. We could also add in a notify when back in
stock button which will help with conversions
• If the product has been discontinued, we can remove this from the site but implement a 301
redirect to either the most similar product, or to the parent category page. This ensures no
link authority is lost by 404ing the page
• Another option would be to leave the product page as it is with a call to action with similar
product options, but this can get difficult to manage as the product list will keep growing.
• Update product structured data to reflect stock status
External links
External links
• Links from external sites that point to 404 Not Found URLs will not be feeding any link
equity into the site

• It is possible to reclaim this equity by redirecting the links or repointing them at from the
source

• Using our internal toolset we can identify any historic 404 URLs that are present on the
domain (even orphaned URLs) and the link equity that they hold
External link issues
External link issues
• When checking the
Bedkingdom backlink
profile, I can see there are
6 broken backlinks pointing
to old product pages.

• There’s one link from a DR

50 site which is worth
reclaiming.
External link solutions
External link solutions
• To gain the authority from these lost/broken backlinks, we should
implement a 301 redirect from the broken link to the most similar
page on site. If a similar product doesn’t exist, we should redirect
it to the category that product belongs to.
Website architecture
Website architecture
• Duplicate content can be created through negligence in the
URL structure on a site, in two ways:
• Trailing slash versions of URLs being accessible and not canonicalised
• URLs being accessible irrespective of character case (i.e. upper case and
lower case, or a mix)

• When present across a website at scale, this can have significant

implications and could fall foul of the Panda algorithm
Website architecture
issues
Website architecture issues
• There’s references throughout the website
to URLs with both trailing and
non-trailing slash.

• This can cause duplication issues as both

are indexable but have exactly the same
content.
Website architecture
solutions
Website architecture solutions
• Most inlinks are pointing to the trailing slash version of the URL.

• We should implement a .htaccess redirect rule for all non-trailing slash URLs to 301 redirect
to the trailing slash version.
Title tags
Title tags
• Page titles act as one of the main indicators to search
engines as to the topic of a page on a site

• They are very important from an SEO perspective, lending a large weighting in terms of
ranking performance

• Page titles should be unique and optimised around a keyword strategy in order to
maximise visibility for the site
Title tag issues
Title tag issues Duplication
• There are 463 duplicate page titles
which shows and highlights where
we may have duplicate content
issues

• One of the big areas I spotted with

this issue is all of the pages in the
knowledge base sub folder have
the same title ‘Question’
• https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk
/knowledge-base/ - The title
should be the question, this
would help with FAQ queries
Title tag issues Duplication
• It looks as if the /knowledge-base/ part of the site shouldn’t be
crawlable and indexable as it’s relating to specific products rather
than an FAQ/help section across the whole site

• If this is the case, we would recommend to add noindex tags onto

these questions so they’re not indexed
Title tag issues Missing https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/highsleepers.html

• There was only 2 missing meta

tags but one led me to this page
/highsleepers.html which doesn’t
look to be in use.

• This looks to now be housed under

/childrens-beds

• Do we still need
/highsleepers.html? Shall we
redirect to /
childrens-beds/highsleepers.html?
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/childrens-beds/highsleepers.html
Title tag issues Too long
• We have 123 title tags which are
over the limit therefore truncating
in the SERP snippets you can see
on the right
• When title tags are too long, we’re
at risk of Google re-writing them
which may end up being incorrect
and lose CTR
• If the title need to be this length to
fit in the product name, we should
leave this
• It’s important to still keep the titles
optimised if we do re-write to
shorten them
Title tag issues Too short
• There are 712 title tags which are
too short on the site

• Some of these are due to

duplication such as ‘Question’

• Short title tags are an opportunity

to optimise for more terms or even
look at ways we can incorporate
the brand name on the end of the
title such as | Bedkingdom
Title tag solutions
Title tag solutions
• Change the title to match the H1 on all pages within the knowledge base section.
• Review other duplicates titles and rewrite and update them. If the page shouldn’t exist and
there’s a newer URL, delete and redirect to this page.
• Review long page titles and see if there’s anyway we can reduce the limit to ensure they
don’t get truncated/re-written.
• Review short page titles, there’s room for further optimisation/brand exposure on these URLs.
Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions
• Having optimised meta descriptions will not directly
contribute to improved ranking performance

• However, it is a great way to create a more attractive listing in the search engine results,
and can increase the number of clicks to a site

• Click-through rate is used as a ranking factor, therefore having optimised meta descriptions
can indirectly improve ranking performance
Meta description issues
Meta description issues Missing
• There’s only 5 pages with missing
meta descriptions but it’s always
good practice to have well
optimised descriptions as this can
help with CTR from the SERPS.
Meta description issues Duplicate
• There’s 774 pages on the site
which have duplicated meta
descriptions

• These are effectively your shop

window to try and get people to
click through to the landing page
which is ranking

• You should make use of this space

to write enticing content to
increase CTR
Meta description issues Too long
• When meta descriptions are over
1,011 pixels, they truncate which
you can see in the examples on the
right.

• Often the calls to action are at the

end of meta descriptions meaning
these are not seen by the user.
Meta description solutions
Meta description solutions
• Add meta descriptions to pages which are currently missing them

• Ensure all meta descriptions are unique (other then parameter and paginated pages)

• Re-write meta descriptions which are too long for pages which are ranking on page 1
H1 tags
H1 tags
• Use header tags on the site’s pages to structure content
and help search engines understand the layout of the page

• Header tags should be considered on every page of content and range from <h1> (main
heading) to <h6> (smallest sub-heading)

• From a keyword optimisation perspective, the <h1> tag should be optimised as it can
contribute to improved ranking performance
H1 tag issues
H1 tag issues
• There’s 2 issues relating to
duplicated H1 tags

• The first is there are multiple URLs

using the same H1 which can
highlight duplicated content or 2
URLs which may be optimised for
the same term causing
cannibalisation https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/apollo-zoya-mattress.html
• The second issue is that pages
have multiple H1 tags often which
are the same content. We should
only have 1 H1 tag on one page
H1 tag solutions
H1 tag solutions
• Re-optimise duplicated H1’s to remove duplicated content and target specific terms relating to
the category page. This will help reduce cannibalisation

URL Current H1 Suggested H1 Average monthly searches

https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/furniture
Mirrors Living Room Mirrors 4.4k
/sofas-living-room/mirrors.html
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/furniture
Mirrors Bedroom Mirrors 1.3k
/bedroom-furniture/mirrors.html

• Remove the 2nd H1 appearing on pages

Pagination
Pagination
• Many sites use paginated content to ease navigation within the site. For UX, most of the
time there will be a pagination bar with links showing numbers and/or “next” and “prev”
arrows. Below is a typical example:

• Unfortunately this set-up can create a lot of duplication and crawling issues in terms of
SEO. It is therefore important to set-up your pagination with the attributes rel=“prev” and
rel”=next”
Pagination issues
Pagination issues
• There’s duplication pagination rel=“next/prev” code appearing on paginated sequence pages
• We only need one of these, if we have 2 there’s more chance it may go wrong and could end
up conflicting each other
Pagination solutions
Pagination solutions
• Remove the duplicated pagination code and just have 1 instance
of this
Faceted navigation
Faceted navigation
• The faceted navigation or filter system is a great tool for users as they can filter down to
the types of products they may be looking for

• But it can cause big issues for search engines creating infinite URLs to crawl and really
bloat the size of the site causing issues for search engines to crawl

• If done correctly, the faceted navigation can be a great addition for SEO, being able to
create landing pages very easily which can be optimised for long tail search queries
Faceted navigation issues
Faceted navigation issues
• Everything highlighted in the red
box has a nofollow tag on the link,
signaling to Google not to follow
these links, this is only a signal and
Google might still follow these so
it’s best we block URLs via the
robots.txt file if we don’t want
them to be crawled

• Some of these pages get a lot of

searches every month which at the
moment we are not taking
advantage of

• With the current set up Google

can’t see these pages and index
them for search
Faceted navigation
solutions
Faceted navigation solutions
• If we want to gain traffic from long tail searches, this is where the faceted navigation can
come in handy. Enabling in the backend to select an option such as ‘White double beds’ to be
indexable, crawled and therefore indexed is how we can do this. Having the ability to add in
custom meta data here is a must. This is a complex dev task, and will depend on how the site
is built, but we want to create URLs for example:
• https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/double-beds.html?color=White would turn to
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/double-beds/white and all content would be optimized
around ‘White Double Beds’ The reason we have to change the URL is so it’s more user and
SEO friendly and so we can block some of the parameter pages to ensure not all of these
pages get crawled
Faceted navigation solutions
• Opening up faceted navigation options should be done based on data, how popular
categories are, how many searches per month and how many products are available within
that category. For example if the white double bed category only had 5 products, we wouldn’t
suggest to open this for search as there isn’t enough product range to compete with the
competition. We would suggest anything over 6 products
• Keyword research will need to be carried out around these categories to get a better
understanding on what gets volume and what doesn’t, which will then drive which options
should be crawlable
• To help ensure the facet navigation doesn’t get crawled, we should block the parameters
within the robots.txt file. They are non-indexable and nofollowed so this is another way to
ensure they don’t get crawled by Google.
• The next section gives examples on how to do this
Robots.txt
Robots.txt
• The robots.txt file is an exclusion protocol which can deny
search engine crawlers access to particular files and/or folders that are not relevant for
organic search users 

• The location of an XML sitemap is also specified within the robots.txt file

• Implementing a robots.txt file and using it correctly will stop undesirable files from being
indexed by the search engines and allow more important pages to have an increased
chance of ranking

• On the other hand, important resources needed by SE’s to render the page correctly might
be blocked. If it is the case, pages were these resources can be found on might not rank as
well as they should
Robots.txt issues
Robots.txt issues
• Currently nothing is being blocked
in the robots.txt file

• We do have reference to the

sitemap which is good

• The old robots.txt contents seems

to have been removed in the past
month, was there a reason for this?
If this was a mistake we should
revert back to the old robots.txt file
Robots.txt solutions
Robots.txt solutions
• We should block all access to admin areas, checkout processes and account
URLs for example:
• Disallow: /customer*
• Disallow: /checkout*

• We can use this to also ensure the facated navigation parameters are being
blocked by adding this for example:
• Disallow: *color=*
• Disallow: *product_list_order*
• Disallow: *size=*

• We shouldn’t block ALL parameters as this is how paginated is implemented,

just all parameters being generated from the faceted navigation
Site speed
Site speed
• Having fast-loading content is now vitally important as the web and search engines
develop

• Users are becoming increasingly impatient, and slow-loading content will result in a higher
bounce rate and/or bounce-back-to-SERP rate

• Search engines will favour fast-loading content over slow, and the effects will be
noticeable in terms of organic ranking performance
Core web vitals
• From June 2021 Google introduced a new set of new metrics to measure user experience
called Core web vitals. This is a ranking factor and is applied at page level
Core web vitals
• Google uses 3 main acronyms (LCP, FID and CLS) to show how your website is performing:
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user
experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
• First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages
should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user
experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

• Since the update Google announced there is SOME benefit from improving pages from a
‘poor’ score to a ‘needs improvement’
Site speed issues
Site speed issues
• There is a Core Web Vitals section
in Google Search Console which
gives you actual user data (which is
what Google use for ranking
purposes)

• The split this out into Mobile and

Desktop devices but we should
concentrate on mobile to begin
with as this is where we get the
most traffic
Site speed issues
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/childrens-beds.html
Site speed issues
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/beds.html https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/beds/ottoman-beds.html
Site speed issues
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/beds/ottoman-beds/flair-lucinda-chesterfield-side-lift-ottoman-bed-silver-velvet.html
Site speed issues
• Mobile device priority
issues can be seen on the
right hand image

• We have severely poor

scores with CLS on a
mobile followed by a high
amount of ‘need
improvement’ URLs for
LCP

• The next slides will show

how to improve CLS and
LCP scores
Site speed issues
CLS improvements

Homepage
• You can visibly see the CLS shift see from the video recording, the
owl image slider is causing a huge shift as the content below
loads in before the slider, therefore pushes the content down
once it does load in

Solution
• This is a common issues with image sliders as they can take a
long time to load in. What we need to do is define a height on
the image slider div before it loads in. This way when the content
below loads, it is already positioned where it ends up after the
image slider loads in. More information about this issue and
example code to solve this can be found here:
https://bordermedia.org/2021/12/owl-carousel-cls-cumulative-la
yout-shift-fix/#:~:text=Owl%20Carousel%20CLS%20Problem,less
%20than%200.1%20is%20good
Site speed issues
CLS improvements
Category pages
• There’s an issue sitewide with the logo
which is loading in after some of the
content on page causing a shift
• On sale and next day delivery buttons
seem to load in then position
differently which then moves the
content including the trust pilot
widget up, causing CLS issues

Solution
• Resolve the logo loading issue or give
it a fixed height so it doesn’t push the
rest of the page content down when it
loads in
• Load the on sale and next day delivery
buttons outside of the content box or
after the content box has loaded to
stop the shift on page
Site speed issues
CLS improvements

Product pages
• We can see product pages have a much smaller CLS issue than other
areas of the site but there’s still issues
• The logo is causing issues which is explained on the previous slide

• The other element causing CLS to fail is the image carousel, same
issue as the homepage one, there isn’t a fixed height therefore it’s
pushing the content down when it loads in

Solution
• Resolve the logo loading issue or give it a fixed height so it doesn’t
push the rest of the page content down when it loads in
• See homepage image carousel solution to apply the same fix here
Site speed issues
LCP improvements

• Most LCP elements are being flagged as images, which are either loading in too large or
they’re loading in after other elements have loaded in the DOM
Solution
• We need to ensure only critical JS and CSS loads in before page content so this doesn’t slow down the paint of
the page
• There is a lot of unused JS, can this be put at the bottom of the page to help with not blocking other resources
and critical elements loading in quicker?
• Removing unused 3rd party JS files is another good way to help with this, reviewing GTM containers and
removing script tags that are old can help
• Reducing image sizes can also help, I have exported a list of images above 100kb to help spot optimisation
opportunities
Image alt tags
Image alt tags
• Because search engines cannot read images, the alt tag
can be used to give further context around an image and help with the understanding of
what the image is

• Alt tags can also be useful from an SEO perspective as they can improve a site’s visibility in
Image Search across the major search engines

• This can result in greater clicks and sessions to a website

• The alt attribute provides alternative information for an image if a user for some reason
cannot view it (because of slow connection, an error in the src attribute, or if the user uses
a screen reader
Image alt tag issues
Image alt tag issues
• There are 56 images with a missing alt attribute

• This is an opportunity to rank better in image search but also help users with
accessibility issues understand the website
Image alt tag solutions
Image alt tag solutions
• Add in alt text to images inlinks which are missing this element
• <img alt=“alt text goes here”>
Content
Content
• Content is a huge part of a website and one of the main factors to what makes you rank on
search engines

• Having high quality user first content is really important, Google have recently released an
algorithm update which looks to reward websites who provide helpful content to users
who may be asking questions or looking to purchase products online

• Ensuring you have landing pages for highly searched for terms is a must and it’s important
for Google and other search engines to be able to find, crawl and index this content

• Having an active blog can also help gain top of the funnel traffic but can also provide
Google signals that you are an expert in your industry providing content around your topic
Content issues
Content issues
• There is a blog present on Bedkingdom
but it doesn’t have regular content, there
has only been 6 posts in the past year
• There is little to no evergreen content.
This is content which is topical and
relevant all year round, we have pages
such as
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/bed-sizes
and
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/bunk-bed-
guide-buyer-guide but we need more of
this type of content to help rank for more
terms
• There is currently no help and guides
section which would be a good way to
capture question based queries.
Content issues
• There is currently no colour pages across Average monthly
categories within the site Keyword
searches
• Competitors have these pages to capture White bed 5,400
traffic around specific colour search queries
such as ‘white double bed’ White bed frame 5,400
• When looking at the SERP for these types White double bed 4,400
of queries, they all return specific colour
pages not a general ‘double bed’ page White bunk beds 3,600

• The average monthly searches for these White single bed 3,600
terms and when expanded to different
Black bed 3,600
categories can really add up
• This is quite a specific term for a user to Black double bed 2,400
search for implying they know what Black double bed frame 1,600
product they want, so we should be ranking
with a page that satisfies their needs
Content issues
• Other competitors have content and
internal links above the fold but
Bedkingdom do not do this
• Instead all content on category pages is at
the bottom of the page which can be seen
as a hidden / spammy SEO tactic
• The combination of both above fold and
bottom page content is best
• Including internal links at the top of the
fold is also good for both users and search
engines to find relevant content faster and
to help with website crawlability
Content issues
• To help content rank for question based
queries, we should include the question
in the headings

• For example, rather than saying small

single on the bed size guide, changing it
to what size is a single bed? Can help
capture traffic for this term
Content solutions
Content solutions
• Frequently post content on the blog, keep this on brand and topical, writing
about content which isn’t related to the rest of the site can harm you

• Create landing pages targeting coloured beds, this can be done via the
faceted navigation at scale or keep the faceted version blocked and create
them as pages. Ensure they are internally linked!

• Review the category page template and rearrange content to show above the
fold on mobile devices as well as adding in further internal links to deeper
category pages
E-A-T
E-A-T
• E-A-T- stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It comes from Google’s
Search Quality Rater Guidelines—a document used by human quality raters to assess the
quality of Google’s search results.
• If you’re searching for the correct dosage of aspirin when pregnant, then E-A-T is undoubtedly
important. If Google were to surface content on this topic written by a clueless writer,
published on an untrustworthy website that lacks authority, then the probability of that
content being inaccurate or misleading is high.
• Google refers to these kinds of topics as YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics:
• Some types of pages or topics could potentially impact a person’s future happiness,
health, financial stability, or safety.
• If your site is built around a YMYL topic, then demonstrating EAT is crucial.
E-A-T issues
E-A-T issues
https://www.bedkingdom.co.uk/blog/author/Levon-Hall.html

• There are no authoritative blog

author profiles, there’s nothing that
explains who the author is and why
they are an expert in this industry
• Time4sleep have Jonathan linked
on their posts with links to his
LinkedIn and Twitter which is a
good sign of E-A-T
• Some of the payment logos are
quite old such as PayPal
• Google reviews aren’t pulling
through so this could have a
negative impact on trustworthiness
E-A-T solutions
E-A-T solutions
• Give blog authors more of a profile explaining what they do at Bedkingdom, link out to their
social profiles if possible

• Update payment logos so they’re all up to date

• Fix or remove the Google review widget

 01 Crawling

02 Content

Priorities
03 Faceted navigation

04 Robots.txt

05 Site speed

06 Website architecture