From audit to action: fixing 2,147 broken links and a 24 PageSpeed score
Zen Networks sells IT monitoring, cloud, data and mobile network services. Its website scored 24 out of 100 on PageSpeed and ranked mostly for its own name. I audited it, redesigned it in Elementor, fixed the technical SEO and set a content plan to bring in people searching for its services.
- Technical SEO audit
- Website redesign
- Page speed
- On-page SEO
- Content strategy
PageSpeed score
more first-page keywords, from 250 to 340
more organic traffic
broken internal links found in the audit
The problem
Slow, broken and only found by name
The site loaded slowly, failed Core Web Vitals and ranked on the first page of Google for only 250 keywords, mostly its own brand name. Most traffic landed on the homepage and left. The content had no clear focus, and social media was not pulling its weight.
Audit to action
Every problem, with its fix
The audit covered speed, plugins, on-page SEO and backlinks. Each finding got a fix.
What the audit found
October 2023
Swipe for more →
| Area | Found | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Core Web Vitals | Largest Contentful Paint 3.3s, layout shift 0.32 | Lazy loading, sized images and videos, faster server response |
| Heavy pages | Old image formats, 87 files with no cache policy | Images moved to WebP, LiteSpeed Cache and Cloudflare caching |
| Plugin bloat | Jetpack loading 30+ modules on every page | Jetpack removed, WP Rocket replaced with free LiteSpeed Cache |
| Broken structure | 2,147 broken internal links, 654 pages with 4XX errors | Bad links removed, dead pages restored or redirected |
| On-page errors | Missing alt text and H1s, long titles, hreflang issues | Titles, meta descriptions, alt text and headings fixed page by page |
| Backlinks | 19% toxic and 42% potentially toxic | Toxic links flagged for removal or disavow |
Page speed
From 24 to 91
Google PageSpeed score out of 100. After the work, single pages tested up to 99 on desktop and 88 on mobile.
The redesign
Before and after
A cluttered homepage
Long service lists, hard-to-read sliders and slides of different sizes.
Four clear services
Rebuilt in Elementor on a staging site: new header, footer and carousel graphics, four clear services, clean slides and fixed partner links.
Content and on-page SEO
Page by page, logged every week
- SEO titles and meta descriptions. Rewritten for every key page, with a focus keyphrase.
- Alt text and image titles. Added to every image, icon and partner logo.
- Internal links. Service pages linked to each other so visitors and Google could move through the site.
- Clean URLs. Broken /zn/zn links fixed across pages.
- Non-branded keywords. Research into the services people search for, to reach beyond the brand name.
- Content plan. Blog and social media topics built around those keywords.
Results in Search Console
More pages showing up on Google
Swipe for more →
Results
Faster, and found for more than its name
PageSpeed rose from 24 to 91, first-page keywords grew 36% from 250 to 340 and organic traffic rose 40%. Blog posts on tools like Zabbix and Ansible became some of the most visited pages on the site.
Speed is the first SEO fix. Nobody ranks a page that takes too long to load.
What I delivered
- SEO and technical audit
- Elementor redesign
- Page speed optimization
- Plugin cleanup
- On-page SEO updates
- Keyword research
- Blog and social content plan
- Google Analytics tracking
