We know their team (and their offering) well so our initial Discovery process was via a simple call to discuss their SEO goals and any specific areas they’d be looking to increase their search visibility. Then we got started doing the SEO audit of their website which included these areas:

Website visibility in the search engines

We started with a benchmarking exercise looking at how many of their web pages were appearing in the search engines, which pages specifically were getting the most clicks and what users were searching for.

To put this information into context we also looked at how their website visibility compared to similar sites in their field.

Website structure and content hierarchy

How users navigate a website and having the pages organised in a logical way is an important part of SEO. When search engines are evaluating websites they use tiny programs, often referred to as crawlers, to go through all the pages and see how they link to each other.

When we redesigned the West One Music site in 2021, one of the key parts of the process was planning the website structure and where different content types would sit so the experience would make sense to users and to the search engine crawlers.

New pages have been added and updates have been made since the West One Music site was launched, and so structure was another key area of focus for the audit.

We used an SEO tool which mimics the activity of search engine crawlers going through the website and provides a detailed report of all the findings.

We analysed this report and one of the things we identified was a series of pages which had been published for over three months, but hadn’t been picked up by the search engines. As a result these pages did not appear in search results.

The SEO audit document gave recommendations for how to help the search engines see these pages as important and therefore worthy of including in the search results. As we had access to West One Music Group’s Google Search Console account we also put in a manual request for Google to recrawl these pages.

Page content

The West One Music Group team provided us with a sample list of pages they had optimised, and other content they would like to appear more frequently in the search engines.

We reviewed these pages against SEO best practice and found that they were following guidance, although there were some areas they could make further improvements to for search visibility – mainly around the images on their pages.

With so many web pages competing for visibility in the search engines, even relatively small changes like compressing files or adding missing alt text could make a difference.

Backlink analysis

A backlink is when another website links back to the site in question – in this case, to the West One Music Group site. Search engines look at the sites that link back as a way to validate the site’s authority on the web. The quality, quantity and relevance of each backlink is something the search engines take notice of.

Over time, well established websites usually build up backlinks naturally, and for most clients we work with this isn’t a focus area for SEO work. However acquiring backlinks can be a useful SEO tactic, and getting backlinks which point to different pages on a website can help those pages be more visible in the search engines.

We analysed the West One Music Group website’s backlinks and offered guidance on areas they could work on to build more backlinks in a sustainable way. We also advised them to exercise some caution when building backlinks for SEO as historically search engines have penalised sites which appear to acquire lots of new backlinks in a short space of time.

Technical testing and site performance

A website’s technical performance is another area that search engines use when deciding what to include in their search results. This includes checking how fast pages load, looking at the metadata (the hidden code that explains and gives extra context), reviewing file sizes, checking that pages are mobile friendly, and many other technical factors.

As part of the SEO audit we used two different tools to test the West One Music Group website’s technical performance, and gave our recommendations on areas where it would be worth making updates. Also, knowing this is an area where there are lots of acronyms (FCP, LCP, TBT, CLS etc.) we created a glossary of the most common terms to help put our findings into context.

Results so far

We completed the SEO audit in September 2023 and the West One Music Group team started working on the recommended actions in October/November 2023. Whilst it can take 3-6 months to start seeing improvements, we have already noted the following changes:

• A 26% increase in users to the site from all Organic Search in November 2023 compared to September 2023.
• A 19% increase in clicks specifically from the Google search engine in November 2023 compared to September 2023.
• An 8% increase in impressions (when the website appears in a search result) from the Google search engine in November 2023 compared to September 2023.

The West One Music Group team are continuing to work through the recommendations and we expect to see their search visibility improve further.