Landed interesting project as a subcontractor for an agency that does ongoing work for a big corporate client with offices all over the world.

One part of the job is to improve the setup of WPML and work on Optimization and the other is to make (aesthetic) improvements to the company’s vast intranet site.

The public facing website was experiencing a sharp drop in SEO ranking on Google and other search engines for desired key phrases that used to perform quite well.

In my Optimization Assessment report I brought up various ways to improve the loading times of the site and following that the agency hired me to help them improve the client’s site over the next few months.

Both agency and client are very happy with the first results:

agency:
page load time down 24.0% in 12 weeks

agency:
I watch the […] search term very carefully, and it seems we’ve jumped up from position 8 to position 6 in the SERPs, so already seeing some great results from this overall.

client:
According to Google PageSpeed Insights the Japanese homepage had a score of 23 in Sept 2019, then after we hired you it went up to 50 in Dec 2019 and on Jan 17, 2020 it was already at 67 [on desktop]

Of course I know that actual loading times are even more important than scores, but higher scores is something that people can easily relate to. And together with the actual improvement in SERP, this project makes it very clear that Optimization is in fact directly related to how Google ranks a site!