An SEO Evaluation Featuring FLOWERBX
At Classeo, giving back to the start-up & small business community is important to us. Especially during this COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses are finding it difficult to stay afloat. That’s why we’ve devised the SEO Evaluation Series as a way to do our part.
The SEO Evaluation Series is a series of posts that will each evaluate and analyse websites of one small business or start-up.
Due to there being over 200 SEO factors to consider in a thorough SEO audit, this series will focus on the homepage and will provide actionable SEO solutions.
No strings attached.
Think of it as a free, mini SEO service.
Without further ado, the first start-up brand to be featured in the SEO evaluation series is … FLOWERBX.
A quick background on FLOWERBX
An online flower delivery start-up, FLOWERBX is revolutionising the industry by cutting out the middleman. As a direct-to-consumer service, FLOWERBX delivers their products directly from the growers to your door.
Expect to receive the highest quality of flowers when your order from FLOWERBX. Along with the fact that they’re minimising wasted flowers by only fulfilling orders on-demand, FLOWERBX is certainly taking the industry by storm.
On-page SEO evaluation of FLOWERBX
As the name suggests, on-page SEO looks at optimising individual pages of a website.
On-page SEO mainly looks at the content of a webpage, such as keywords, images, page and URL structure, to name a few.
For flowerbx.com we will be taking at where they can easily improve.
The FLOWERBX homepage heading structure
It is a well known fact now that a page’s heading structure is important.
A well structured page allows users and search engine crawlers to read and understand a page.
Headings also define the importance and priority of different sections of your content.
In HTML code, subheadings are delivered by tags: H1, H2, H3, etc.
H1 or Heading 1 is the main heading, with the rest following in size and priority.
According to Google, having a H1 tag on a webpage helps Google understand a webpage.
In our experience, having a one main Heading 1 is a must.
For FLOWERBX’s homepage, utilising a H1 can be a quick win for them. Here’s how their page is currently structured:
It would make sense to have their tagline Extraordinary Flowers. Delivered wrapped in a H1.
The remaining heading structure would then be required to be lifted from a H6 tag to a H2 and H3.
Here’s a better structure:
Internal links on the FLOWERBX homepage
Internal links are hyperlinks on a page that point to another page on the same domain.
They are links that point to another page on the same website.
These are different to external links, which point to another website.
An internal link has several purposes, such as:
- Helping Google find, crawl and index a web page
- Making it easy for people to navigate around a website
- Influencing the importance of other pages.
If a page isn’t linked to from a website, then the search engine (Googlebot) cannot crawl it.
Think of a link like a bridge between two points (i.e. pages). Without the bridge, you cannot reach the other page.
Without reaching the other page, the search engine will not be able to index it, meaning to display it in the search results.
So, no matter how great the page is, it will be worthless.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
The Googlebot that crawls links has a limit. Eventually, it will have to move on to complete its job.
Therefore, placing hundreds and thousands of links on one page is not recommended.
Although there isn’t a perfect number of how many internal links a page should have, the top SEOs recommend around 150.
With that being said, let’s take a look at FLOWERBX’s homepage internal links.
A duplicate issue
Here are the numbers:
- 453 total links on the homepage
- 444 internal links on the homepage
- 347 duplicate links on the homepage
FLOWERBX’s homepage uses way more links than necessary.
More importantly, 77% of all the links on the homepage are duplicates.
This is bad for their SEO as duplicate links are spreading thin the influence given to pages via the Googlebot.
However, this is an easy fix.
The main issue that’s causing the increased duplicate links is the menu navigation.
The menu is being duplicated 4 times for different screen sizes.
This can be avoided by having one menu that’s responsive on different screen sizes.
There are around 90 links in the main desktop navigation. Removing the duplicates by making the menu responsive can save the homepage around 180 duplicate links.
Additionally, there are sections of the homepage, where one section is linking to a given page 3 times.
See image:
This occurs 6 times. Therefore, by wrapping the link tag around the whole section (or only using a button as a link) that’s another 12 links that can be removed.
Lastly, the headings of the main menu are are being used as # links. There are 40 of these occurrences.
These links are going to nowhere and can be removed.
Image Optimisation on FLOWERBX’s homepage
In the last part of this SEO evaluation for FLOWERBX, we will be sharing some advice on how they can optimise their usage of images.
FLOWERBX has done a great job in compressing their images as most of them are under 100kb in size. Especially, since visuals seem to be important to their brand and products. It’s how customers can gauge the quality and beauty of their flowers.
However, there are two ways where they can easily win on SEO.
ALT tags
Alternative tags, or ALT tags are descriptive texts that are added to each image.
Their purpose is to help Google and visually impared people understand what the image is displaying.
This can also help the image rank for Image SEO on Google’s Image search results.
On the FLOWERBX homepage, there are a total of 44 images and 42 ALT Tags missing.
This is an easy win.
Although, it’s worth mentioning that some images such as designs and icons, do not necessarily need ALT Tags.
Lazy loading
When a user lands on a web page, they first see the “above-the-fold content” before they scroll down.
Ideally, for a website to load faster it can avoid loading every image in the web page until the user scrolls down.
This is called Lazy Loading.
Lazy Loading is a technique that waits to load resources until they are required i.e. user scrolls down.
FLOWERBX can both optimise their images and speed up their homepage by using Lazy Loading.
The wrap up
The above SEO recommendations are fairly easy to implement and may require a developer’s help.
Although there are numerous other potential improvements, the advice shared here should have a positive impact on the FLOWERBX homepage.
Banner image credit to FLOWERBX.