ROTA are an innovative start-up and mobile application which helps those in the hospitality, catering and hotel industries find temporary staff for their needs. They also help those looking for hospitality jobs in London and other related part-time work in these industries acquire the perfect role. We are proud to be working closely with the great team at ROTA, helping them increase their positions online through clean, white hat search engine optimisation (SEO).
With an app as well as their website, there are some unique challenges. As is the case with other app-reliant businesses, getting users and customers to download and utilise the mobile application is paramount to the success of ROTA. Hence, as part of the strategy for the website, the app has remained at the forefront of our minds at all times and continues to do so.
Some of the Challenges
Upon starting our works with the team at ROTA, their website was not performing fast enough and was not responsive. This meant that many users upon landing upon the site were leaving before engaging with any aspect of the website. Moreover, those that reached the site and attempted to engage were often unable to do so at all times due to the slight lack in responsiveness. The website was also not optimised technically for SEO.
This manifested in the site ranking for some irrelevant keyword terms. It also did not satisfy some basic SEO best-practices and ranking criteria. This was as a result of a distinct lack of meta data (titles and descriptions) and content not being relevant enough to ensure accurate rankings. In addition, the backlink profile of the site (links pointing towards ROTA from other websites) was quite full of spammy and potentially toxic links, which were greatly holding back the performance and rankings of the entire website.
With regards to targeting and the strategy, there was previously only very sparse keyword and search term tracking set up. This means that as well as not performing as well as it should, the site’s progress was also not being tracked efficiently.
What We Are Doing
With a very aesthetically pleasing website, there was not much design-related work to be done on the ROTA website. However, we have been carrying out a number of other important tasks which are already paying dividends; getting the website up the rankings on Google and other search engines:
Website Performance – We removed a number of defunct functions and plugins from the website. This lead to almost immediate increases in website speed and responsiveness with various plugins having slowed down the site previously. We have also ensured wherever possible that a wide range of website files and media files have been sufficiently compressed to allow for much faster rendering and loading of the site
Website Crawlability – With numerous important factors missing from the site, the website was simply not being read properly by search engines. We therefore optimised the meta data, ensuring what Google reads and what users see in search engine results pages (SERPs) is fully optimised. As well as increasing positions online, this has also increased the click-throughs of users via search engines. We have also ensured that only relevant keywords and search terms are targeted and tracked to be able to accurately monitor progress over time
Links and Natural PR – Having previously been signed up to old-fashioned and spammy web directories as well as toxic ‘link farms,’ there was a great deal of negative link work which had been done upon the ROTA website in the past. Hence, we disavowed (disassociated) the spammy and toxic links, which numbered in the hundreds. We have also started to build ROTA a clean and natural backlink profile from strong and reputable sites. This is also working in ROTA’s favour as this acts as traditional PR in an online sphere, increasing the number of relevant users finding the ROTA brand through other naturally associated websites.
