Rebecca Chan Events

Improve Website Speed

Rebecca had done a phenomenal job building her website and it had all the hallmarks of a successful business. She had an enormous amount of well written content featuring many of the events she has done, along with beautiful imagery and a few well placed forms to help capture potential leads.

However, as time passed and she focused more on her growing business, her website backend began to develop some issues that caused it to load slower than desired. GT Metrix is one of our favourite tools for measuring website pageload performance as it give a great deal of information about how a site loads and what is slowing it down.

Swipe left or right on the image below.

The Results – Before & After

The initial scans of Rebecca’s site showed that the average page load speed was quite low which is common among websites with many images, plugins or other features. The three things we did that made the biggest impact on her website speed were:

SEO Cleanup

We conducted comprehensive audits of Rebecca’s website using two of our favourite SEO Tools; SEMrush and BrightLocal. Through these audits, we discovered a treasure trove of opportunities to correct minor issues that were appearing across multiple pages without any warning. 

Although she and her customers would never have seen these errors, when search engines audit your website to determine your search rank, they see these errors as red flags and may potentially decrease your site’s ranking as a result.

Mixed Content Issues

Internet security has become more important than ever. When you load a webpage, your browser communicates with the website’s server using an encryption protocol called Hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS). If a website is loading some resources on HTTP instead of HTTPS, it can trigger “mixed content” issues which can lower search engine trust and impact your ranking. Google Chrome and other browsers flag all non-HTTPS websites as not secure.

A few years ago, most websites were still hosted on HTTP, so it is very common for websites today to have mixed content issues. We were able to resolve many of these by simply using Cloudflare which can force all traffic through the secure protocol. Unfortunately, there were still a few persistent errors that required some custom code to the website that would force the remaining resources to be loaded from HTTPS.

Error 404 Pages

Sometimes during the natural evolution of a website, you might change the URL of a webpage or delete a page you no longer need. If that page had been linked to by another website, the link would become broken and result in something called a 404 Error- Webpage Not Found. This can result in a real loss of customers and traffic as visitors who click a link to your website may immediately bounce after seeing the error.

We made a list of all of the 404 errors that were being flagged by search engines and noticed that they stemmed from just a handful of pages that had been changed. By adding a few page redirects, we ensured that the old pages would redirect traffic to the content they were looking for, offering a better site experience for visitors.

Internal Links Broken

Along with the 404 errors mentioned above, there was a similar issue with internal links on Rebecca’s website that was linking to content that no longer existed. Sometimes when deleting a page or a post, we don’t delete the links that were pointing to that content. As a result, we get broken internal links which show up as a yellow flag for Google’s Page Crawlers. To fix these, we made a list of all the broken internal links and either updated the link URL to point to the updated content or removed the link entirely to avoid the yellow flag.

SEO Content for Corporate Event Planning

When it came to her evolving business, Rebecca expressed interest in developing more leads in the Corporate Event Design niche which she was having amazing success in. As Rebecca had done a wonderful job on her SEO so far, she already knew how difficult a journey it can be to rank for a particular keyword, especially a competitive one such as Wedding Planner Toronto, which she was already #1 for. She knew her journey to begin ranking for corporate event design would be a long one, but we helped her get started on the right foot with

Conducting research to discover which keywords are the most important for a business to rank for can be a ton of fun for SEO nerds like us. The process typically involves making a list of keywords we think will be the most relevant, and then analyzing those keywords to see how difficult they would be to rank for, and how much traffic they might bring if we do rank for them. We brainstormed a handful of keywords such as corporate event planner, event designer, brand activation, marketing activation, tradeshow booth design and more. We also analyzed Rebecca’s SEO Competitors to see who was already ranking for her desired keywords and to reverse engineer what they had done to rank. Although we were able to gleam some insights into this, the most important detail we uncovered that nobody in her industry had done an excellent job of ranking for these keywords. However, after analyzing the keywords and competitors, we agreed that Event Design would be the best keyword opportunity to begin ranking quickly due to its low competition but high relevance. We gave rebecca a handful of ideas and examples for how to embed these keywords into her corporate event design webpage and she got to work writing some excellent content.

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REPLACE REPLACE REPLACE ranking for her desired keywords and to reverse engineer what they had done to rank. Although we were able to gleam some insights into this, the most important detail we uncovered that nobody in her industry had done an excellent job of ranking for these keywords.

However, after analyzing the keywords and competitors, we agreed that Event Design would be the best keyword opportunity to begin ranking quickly due to its low competition but high relevance. We gave rebecca a handful of ideas and examples for how to embed these keywords into her corporate event design webpage and she got to work writing some excellent content.