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Auto Batteries is primarily an information site that drives referrals to local automotive dealers to allow customers to find batteries at local stores for the customer’s specific vehicle. Auto Batteries primarily uses SEO as their core strategy. Their goal is to find people who need a new battery and direct them to a local retailer who sells batteries from an Auto Batteries partner.
Auto Batteries was built on a very old version of Angular which was causing major problems with site indexing, crawlability, and core web vitals.
I had to work very closely with their development team to update the site, fix the crawlability, and improve the web vitals.
Additionally, there were several images that were not optimized for search traffic. I went through the whole site and helped optimize all images. Including:
There were several instances that the title tags and H1 tags did not match up. I went through and updated all pages to have optimized titles and H1s.
I also went through and helped create the meta descriptions for the pages in a way that was good for both Google and users.
Finally, I got all the pages indexed on GSC by fixing the crawability and providing Google with an updated sitemap.
There were several keywords that Auto Batteries was ranking well for, but could be doing better. Auto Batteries mainly forced on ranking for keywords that would lead people to buying a battery. For example, one of their top performing pages is on how to jumpstart a car. That is great because there is a direct problem with their car battery.
We also needed to rank for “battery finder” keywords.
If we break it up, we have some obvious searches that we want to rank for:
There were also some keywords that indicated a person might be in the market for a car battery:
Finally, we had a few clever ideas:
These indicate that the person is getting rid of a battery and might need a new one to replace it.
When we had all of our keywords, we needed to organize them in a way that makes sense. As with all my projects, this is organized into 3 categories:
Here, we’re going for any keywords with a large impression share, but ranking in positions 4-15. Most of these were improved on by simply fixing site issues and updating the blog.
The kind of keywords we saw here included:
These are the keywords that would have the most impact on the Auto Batteries site. The main keywords we targeted here included:
There was some overlap with the quick wins section making this an easier process. Because Auto Batteries is primarily a battery finder site, we wanted to go after a lot of local type of keywords.
These are keywords where the competition rankings in the top 10, but Auto Batteries does not.
The biggest problem we saw here was that we saw that we always ranked lower for the “how to” version of the blogs that ranked high. For example, we ranked high for most searches involving “jump start”, but we ranked low for “how to jump start”.
This gave us clear direction that we needed to phrase our content in the for of “how to” guides.
Other keywords we saw included:
With all the effort we were putting into Auto Batteries’ website, we needed to see what was working and what wasn’t.
We set up GA4 and GSC to see which blogs we bring in traffic, and which of those blogs were leading to people using the retail finder.
We found a couple of searches were bringing in a lot of traffic, but it wasn’t going anywhere.
We also found that most of the keywords that lead to action on the site were very action oriented keywords.
Leadership, management, and business needed reports that showed the top performing blog posts and the month-over-month comparisons. I used Lookker Studio to create reports that were clear to key stakeholders.
It showed the top performing blogs, the searches people made on the Auto Batteries search function, what kind of batteries people were looking for, their geo location, and the retailers who were getting the most traffic.
There were a few site security issues we ran into for auto batteries. They were related to SSL certificates and security headers.
We worked with a security team to fix the issues.
Because Auto Batteries serves as a global site, we needed it to be compliant with all tracking regulations.
I managed the implementation of the site’s cookie management so that all requirements were met.
There were a number of people who needed training on how to continue optimizing Auto Batteries’ website. I created and delivered training documents and videos on how to use GSC and GA4, technical optimization requirements, and how to conduct research for ongoing content strategies. I also had several direct 1-on-1 training sessions to help individual stakeholders.