Hedge House Furniture

Seo Audit and Optimization Strategy

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01

04

02

05

Table of contents

03

06

Keyword Strategy

Audit of current organic keywords and tactics to improve site’s SERP placement

Recommendations for updates to metadata to improve the site’s search listings

Metadata

Suggestions on how to optimize current content

Website Content

Recommendations and ideas for future content

Future Content

Internal Linking

Optimization of internal link building

Backlink Strategy

Current state of backlinks, their audit and suggestions on optimization

Hedge House creates handcrafted hardwood furniture that will last for generations. Furniture pieces are made from four different wood species, all locally sourced: walnut, white oak, cherry and maple.

Also company states that nearly all of their furniture pieces can be selected in one of these wood species to find the perfect piece to match client’s space, as well as they could be custom sized.

Company overview

Target Audience

Main Competitors

• Age: 40-55
• Married
• Annually household income: 120k-250k
• Background: live in wealthy neighbourhoods, recently buy a house or have a second one

• Hardwood Artisans hardwoodartisans.com
• Thos Moser

www.thosmoser.com

• Vintage Mill Werks

vintagemillwerks.com

• Vermont Wood Studios

vermontwoodsstudios.com

Hedge House Furniture

01 Keyword Strategy

Hedge House Furniture currently ranks for 503 organic keywords* and has 1st page SERP placement for 56 keywords, but most of them include brand name or product name that without previous brand awareness exposure may not be familiar to potential customer.

Keyword Suggestions

Long-tail

Short-Tail

• (Round/oval) wood coffee table (C, I)
• Wood bed frame (I, T)
• Walnut dining table (I, T)
• Solid wood furniture (C )
• Natural wood dining table ( I, C)
• Solid wood bedroom furniture ( C)
• Traditional furniture style (I)
• Handcrafted furniture company ( I, C)

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• Cherrywood dresser (N** )
• Craftsman furniture ( C )
• Walnut nightstand (I, T)
• Oak furniture ( C )
• Natural furniture ( C )
• Customizable furniture (I, T)
• Credenza wood ( I, C )
• Handmade furniture ( C)
• Craftsman table ( N, T)
• Wood benches (I, T)

Questions

By analyzing client’s website with competitors we clarified that HHF hasn’t yet ranked for such keywords as “handmade furniture”, “handcrafted furniture”, “handmade wood furniture” and “custom wooden furniture” or other variations, which was identified as a value proposition of the company. Also keywords can be expanded by including different types of wood, furniture pieces/types, color and can be really helpful for SEO to include them in product categories*.

• How to refinish wood furniture? (I)
• How to remove water stains from wood? (I)
• Can you paint over wood stain?(I)
• What is the difference between hardwood and solid wood furniture? (I)
• Which hardwood is best for furniture?(I)

Website Content

02

The current state of Hedge House Furniture website content is poor and missing a lot of text, that could lead to new keywords rankings, when utilizing it right.

As for now they mainly focused to include engaging photos (visual aspect) of their handcrafted furniture, which is important, while also have valuable, in-depth and engaging text content.

Also client’s website blog isn’t regularly updated. and has only five articles for the 3 years.

Content Optimization

1. The page should have couple paragraphs of the company. Concise history of creation, value proposition, mission and benefits of buying handmade wood furniture.
2. Include visual aspects of behind the scene work process or video.

1. Company has to be focused on strategically updating their blog with evergreen content. At least once a month, including related search keywords and suggested questions in titles and headlines(reference to slide 6).
2. Include block with related posts.

1. Cover image or hero section with clear attractive headline with main keyword (e.g. Make your home special with american handcrafted furniture) and CTA button.
2. Section with a paragraph or two of company unique value and mission.
3. Section with 2 columns with image and text, utilizing keywords for room category furniture (living, dining, bedroom, office).

Home page

About page

Blog page (Read)

Content Optimization

1. Place the image of US states map side by side with the text, so users can reach the engagement section of hardwood types.
2. Also CTA buttons could be included under each type of wood to shop by material.

Contact form may contain location (as well in the footer). It won’t be a store, but any physical location where furniture actually produces.

It could lead to rank for local search terms like “custom wooden furniture near me”.

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Include Mega menu for “Shop”.

Include 4 main room types with subcategories of furniture pieces for each room.

Side images with link shop by hardwood type and/or collections.

Reference

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Navigation

Materials

Contact

Content Optimization

1. Each category page should include featured image and introduction paragraph with short description of furniture piece or room for which it was created, utilizing suggested keywords.

1. Product headline should include related keyword, which prospects will use to find what they are interested in. (E.g. Walnut extendable dining table).

2. Include descriptive paragraphs, naturally utilizing main and additional keywords.

3. As well could be added additional section with “Related Products” or “Make a set with”.

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1. Add an alt text where missing and make it more descriptive by using long-tail keywords (e.g. white oak oval coffee table).

2. Make attention on image title tags as well, replace randomly titled images with related title.

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Images

Category pages

Products pages

Internal Linking optimization

03

During the site audit were identified some issues that directly related to internal linking structure that can cause unpleasant outcomes in the overall website grade by search engines, as well as ability to crawl them.

First, there are 9 pages on this site which have only one incoming internal link. All of these pages are product pages.

Second, 475 resources (images) are formatted as page link.

Third, 67 internal links on this site have non-descriptive anchor text (“here” and “more”).

Fourth, 47 orphaned pages are included in sitemaps. (An orphaned page is a webpage that is not linked internally).

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Internal Linking Optimization

1. Increase amount of internal links to these 9 product pages, which have only one link. As product pages important for ecommerce website, the best practice should be include anchor text with a link to these products in the related blog posts and put them in the “related products” section to make sure all product pages will have enough link juice.
2. 475 resources on the website are formatted with <a href> HTML element (page link). When following a page link, the returned page will not contain anything except an image. This may confuse search engines and will indicate that the site has poor architecture. To fix this, all of these sources should be replaced with an <img> tag with an alt attribute describing the content of the image, utilizing related keywords. (Reference to the slide 6).
3. Make sure all internal links should always contain descriptive anchor text, related to the page they linked to is about. Utilize the keywords, when possible.
4. It was determined 47 orphaned pages* which were included in the sitemap.This is considered to be a bad practice, as pages will be crawled by search engines and waste crawl budget. To fix this issue, organize crosslinking to valuable pages from “Materials” ( include section with related collections) and related blog posts. And remove those pages that doesn’t have any content** or has no value anymore.

Internal Linking Optimization

Common principles

• Make sure to organize internal linking from high-performing pages to low performing pages. For example, Hayward Bookcase is high performing product page with good amount of internal links and 8 linking domains should in its “related products” or “You may also like” section links to poor performing, but valuable product pages or (if has) related posts.
• Use crosslinks with descriptive anchor text (e.g. from blog post to related product pages and vice versa).

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04 Metadata overview and recommendations

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Current search listing

Optimized search listing

Technical elements overview

During the site audit was identified following:

• Average website speed is 1.8s to load.
• Sitemap includes 133 pages, however 112 pages were crawled and 97 of them were indexed by search engines that refer to problems of wasting crawl budget and conflict between site map, robot.txt and rep tags.
• 11% of pages without rel="canonical" tag, canonical to other page 9% and self-canonical 80%
• 100% of pages have no AMP link
• 8% of all pages have only 1 internal link. 60% of pages have 2-5 links. 6% of all pages have 6-15 links. 16% of all pages have 16-150 internal links. 47 orphaned pages were found. ( Reference to the slide 12 for solutions)

Besides these technical elements were discovered following errors and issues on the website.

1. 100 pages have more than one H1 tag
2. 100 pages on this site have low text/HTML ratio.*
3. 8 pages on this site have little content.**
4. 2 pages with duplicate title tags***.
5. 2 pages have duplicate meta descriptions**** .

Technical elements optimization

• Despite the fact that website average speed is even below 2s, there is a recommendation to use an efficient cache policy, as a long cache lifetime can speed up repeat visits to your page and make fewer HTTP requests.*
• To avoid conflict between robot.txt, sitemaps and REP tags, make sure to include in the sitemap only valuable pages that you want to be indexed (exclude all pages that you disallow to crawl and index in robot.txt and put noindex/nofollow REP tag). This way it won’t waste crawl budget and will help search engines to index and rank pages quicker and will provide a signal that overall site structure is good.
• Make sure each page include canonical tag with correct self URL, so it will prevent web crawlers from looking at multiple pages or flag a duplicate content if canocolization is done wrong.
• Include AMP code for better user experience and faster page load on mobile devices.

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Technical elements optimization

Fixing errors and issues

1. Make sure each page has only 1 H1 tag, so it won’t confuse search engines, when they crawl and index pages.
2. Review code file and text file. Consider to remove embedded scripts and styles.**
3. Consider to add more in-depth content to the valuable pages, so each page contain at least 200 meaningful words. Search engines prefer to provide as much relative information to users as possible, so pages with longer content tent to be placed higher in search results.***
4. Provide unique and concise title tags for each page, utilizing target keywords. Pages with duplicate titles have a lower chance of ranking well and are at risk of being banned.
5. Provide a unique and relevant metadata for each page. Duplicate meta descriptions mean a lost opportunity to use more relevant keywords, as well as make it difficult for search engines to differentiate between different webpages.

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Recommendations for future content

05

• Homepage (reference to slide 8)
• About Page (reference to slide 8)
• Customer Reviews page:

Create a testimonials page (as well as include “Customer Reviews” button to product pages).

• Evergreen content in the blog:
• How to care about Cherry (walnut/ oak/ maple) wood furniture.
• Which hardwood is best for home furniture?
• Best 5 oil finishes for wood furniture.
• Our top 5 best selling solid wood dining table.

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Backlink Recommendations

06

During the site audit was identified 393 linking domains with 2435 external do follow links and 421 no follow links.

However 40 domains have high spam score and 63 domains have medium spam score. These websites have low AS and were compared to sites with similar features and found to be penalized or banned by Google.

That’s why these links should be disavowed and removed - as links from these domains don’t have any value and only harm “website’s health”.

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Lost Backlinks Optimization

lumberjocks.com

bhg.com

houseandhome.com

02

03

01

Self created link - forum, 404 page not found. Replace with relevant product link.

https://hedgehousefurniture.com/products/ventura-nightstand

Content and page with the link wasn’t found. Reach out to site’s owner with suggested guest post about wood furniture care.

Page wasn’t found, ask for a link instead of lost one from “10+ Living Room Design Ideas You’ll Love” article with client’s image and link to home page and product page of coffee table or suggest to write a guest post.

Also was discovered lost backlinks from 3 Domains with low spam score, high DA and relevant topics to client’s niche.

Backlinks opportunities

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These are small part of the prospects were discovered by analyzing competitors backlinks. It seems to be achievable to target these domains as they have linking to other furniture companies. Despite the fact they won’t count as unique links for Hedge House Furniture, they won’t be unique for competitors anymore.

Design and trends

https://www.housebeautiful.com/design-inspiration/g30750815/chair-types-styles-designs/

https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/vita-collection

https://www.decoist.com/2013-06-25/decor-ideas-for-craftsman-style-homes/?chrome=1&A1c=1

Wood Furniture Care

https://www.hometalk.com/diy/paint/furniture/q-how-to-touch-up-cherry-wood-furniture-without-a-whole-redo-5910071

https://www.onegreenplanet.org/lifestyle/furniture-brands-that-dont-contribute-to-deforestation/

Hardwood Furniture

https://www.thespruce.com/best-made-in-america-furniture-1391263

https://www.homedit.com/where-to-buy-solid-wood-furniture/

https://www.homestratosphere.com/types-of-poplar-wood/

Unique backlinks opportunities

Target to reach out to Better Home & Gardens and Adorable Home*. Share images of a room design with the brand’s furniture and text copy of content that the blog owners can update their articles in exchange for link.

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Manually reach out to Hunker, Homesteady and Real Simple, mention that their content is informative and helpful and mention that client’s site also have some other tips about furniture care. Suggest to use a paragraph from your content with a link in “How to Care for Walnut Wood” and “How to Clean Wood Furniture to Make It Look Brand New” articles.

Design and Interior

Wood Furniture Care

Resources

Tools

• Semrush Guru
• Moz Pro
• Answer The Public
• GTMetrix
• Pingdom
• Canva Pro

Photos

• Hedge House Furniture website and instagram photos