A six-week SEO, audience, and behavioural discovery engagement that turned a 302-page website into a prioritised redesign brief.
The Brief
Good Business Lab was preparing to redesign its website and had never formally invested in SEO or audience research. They wanted the new site built on evidence of how people search and behave, so before rebuilding anything they asked us to "understand what's really happening today." Someone on their team recommended us, and we started with a questionnaire written for GBL.
Underneath the brief was a bigger question: what does the site need to do so that funders, partners and practitioners can find GBL's work and understand it?
What we found
We crawled all 302 pages. 17 returned 404 errors, 233 had no meta description, 207 had no H1 heading, 19 internal links were broken and 241 images had no alt text. Search visibility came almost entirely from branded terms: people who already knew GBL could find it, but people searching for the topics GBL works on mostly could not.
Organic search was still one of the site's largest sources of visitors, which made it worth protecting through the redesign. Microsoft Clarity showed usability problems that affected visitors and search engines alike, and the backlink profile needed cleaning up.
What we did
Over six weeks we turned the audit into something GBL's team could act on:
Every technical issue sorted into critical, medium and low priority, so the team knew what to fix now and what could wait for the redesign
Branded and non-branded keyword analysis, and a review of competitors' pages, keywords and authority
Audience personas for GBL's stakeholders: what each is trying to do, what gets in the way, and what content they need
Usability findings from Microsoft Clarity, and an assessment of the backlink profile
A Phase 2 plan: fix the critical errors, rewrite metadata on priority pages, repair broken links, add alt text, target high-potential keywords and strengthen internal linking
What changed
GBL went into the redesign with a written brief: a ranked list of fixes, a clear picture of who the site is for, and a search plan sized to their redesign timeline and their team.
