As GBL prepared for a full website redesign, GBL realised they had never formally invested in SEO or audience discovery research and wanted to ensure the new site would be grounded in real audience behaviour and search data rather than assumptions. La Rouge was brought in on the recommendation of an internal team member, with a brief to “understand what’s really happening today” before they rebuilt anything.
The brief was to understand how GBL’s current site was performing, where it was leaking value, and how search, content, and user behaviour could guide both the new information architecture and future content strategy. Instead of “fix my SEO”, the real question was: What does our digital presence need to look like so the right funders, partners, and practitioners can actually find and understand our work?
La Rouge developed a multi-part discovery process that translated raw audit and analytics data into a practical roadmap for GBL’s team.
Full technical site audit: We conducted a site-wide audit of 302 crawled pages and identified critical issues affecting performance and crawlability, including 17 pages returning 404 errors, 233 pages missing meta descriptions, 207 pages missing H1 headings, 19 broken internal links, 241 images without alt attributes, and an overall site health score of 77%.
Rather than simply listing errors, we organized issues into critical, medium, and low-priority actions so GBL could understand what required immediate attention and what could be addressed during the redesign process.
We reviewed branded and non-branded keyword performance, noting that GBL’s search visibility was heavily concentrated around branded terms, while non-branded discovery remained a significant growth opportunity.
We looked at competitor pages, keywords, and page authority signals to identify how GBL could strengthen its own content positioning and close discoverability gaps.
We assessed backlink quantity, referring domains, anchor-text patterns, and toxicity signals, including a high overall toxic score that pointed to the need for closer off-page SEO management in future phases.
We created detailed audience personas that translated GBL’s mission into specific stakeholder mindsets, barriers, goals, and content needs, making the SEO work more relevant to actual decision-makers rather than abstract traffic numbers.
Through Microsoft Clarity and related analysis, we also surfaced usability and interaction issues that were relevant to both user experience and discoverability, adding another layer of insight to the redesign conversation.
This project was valuable not because it surfaced problems, but because it connected technical SEO, audience behaviour, content strategy, and website planning into a single decision-making framework.
For example, the audit revealed technical issues that could directly affect user experience and search visibility, while the analytics report showed that organic search was already a major acquisition channel worth protecting and strengthening. At the same time, the keyword and audience research highlighted an opportunity to move beyond branded discovery and create content that better matched the language and intent of external stakeholders searching for related topics.
A key part of the engagement was converting discovery into action. In the summary report, La Rouge outlined Phase 2 on-page optimization goals, including eliminating critical technical issues, optimizing priority page metadata, fixing broken links, improving text-to-HTML ratios, adding image alt text, identifying high-potential keywords, and building a stronger internal linking structure.
This gave GBL more than diagnosis; it gave them a realistic path forward that could be aligned with their redesign timeline and internal team capacity.
For La Rouge, this project reflects our strength in bringing together technical analysis, audience thinking, and strategic clarity, especially for organizations that need to make high-stakes digital decisions before investing in a new website or content direction.
