Technical SEO Problems:

• www vs. non-www Issues: This website used a combination of HTTP and HTTPS URLs and mixed the www and non-www versions.
• Multilingual Implementation: This website has three languages, but the content and URLs had keywords for the wrong language. This confusion prevented pages from ranking in the Google SERP for the correct language search query.
• Internal Linking: The client didn’t have any contextual links, and not all areas where navigational links can be used have been used. Because of this status, 71% of all URLs have three or more click depths.
• Fragment URLs & Indexability Issues: Nearly 20% of the client’s website consisted of fragment URLs, and they had canonical tag issues.

As we analyzed the website technically, we noticed numerous technical SEO issues affecting each other, like canonicalization because of fragment URLs and wrong hreflang implementation.

For international or multilingual SEO projects, we have three key tasks:

• Dedicated URLs: We’ve applied language indicator URL directories as /en/, /de/ and /fr/. Which is called the subdirectory method for multilingual websites.
• Hreflang Tags: Hreflang tag helps us to make each page one language and Googlebot to figure out what page content’s language is.
• Translated Metadata: We should conduct separate keyword research for each language and use the right keywords in metadata fields.

We started with making URLs flat and including target keywords. Thus, we unified each URL’s language version and fixed all canonical and hreflang tag issues.

There was also mixed use of www and non-www URL versions on the website and they had been suffering from unsecure HTTP links on this website.

After completing the site-wide multilingual structure and www issue at the beginning, we moved on to an internal linking strategy.

We transformed blank navigational fields on the website and updated navigational items’ anchor texts with the right target keywords. Another relevant issue about internal linking was that the website had too many 3xx redirects and broken links, and we updated them.

Never Underestimate the Power of Schema Markup

At the end of this process, we created all relevant types of schema markup for this client. Multiple schema markups can boost your online business, and you should always check up-to-date schema markups that may be useful for your website, content, product, or services. Here you can find more details about schema markup for a bank or financial services:

This schema markup insertion also boosted visibility for our client’s financial services on Google SERP.

How Organic Traffic Changed in Last 7 Months?

As we fixed all technical issues, organic sessions increased by 724%, and all financial product/service pages got higher rankings on Google SERP.

In addition to these changes, the average session duration was increased by 11%, and pages/sessions increased by 19%.

In the annual performance analysis, it is seen that organic traffic increased by 533.4%.

For all of your questions, let’s jump on a quick call ✌