SEO Audit & UX Optimization for a Heavy Equipment Rental Company

The project involved a full-scale SEO audit for a leading construction equipment rental company operating in a multilingual market (Switzerland). The primary objective was to identify technical barriers to indexing and provide a structural roadmap for redesigning key page templates to improve organic rankings and user engagement.

Technical SEO & Indexing Hygiene

• Sitemap & Robots.txt Overhaul: The audit revealed inconsistencies in the XML sitemap and robots.txt configurations that hindered efficient crawling.
• Redirect & Error Management: A significant number of unnecessary 301 redirects and 404 errors were identified and mapped for cleanup to preserve "link juice" and improve the crawl budget.
• Orphan Page Elimination: Several high-value pages (such as vacancy and service pages) were found to have no internal links. A strategy was developed to integrate these "orphan pages" back into the main site architecture.

On-Page & Template Optimization

A major part of the project was the creation of optimized mockups for core website templates:

• Product Category Templates: New layouts were proposed to better organize complex equipment inventories. Recommendations included optimizing metadata (Titles, H1s) and adding descriptive text blocks to satisfy search intent for broad queries like "excavator rental."
• Product Page Enhancements: Detailed guidelines were provided for individual product pages to ensure they included technical specifications, clear CTAs, and structured data for better SERP visibility.
• Internal Linking Logic: A systematic approach was designed for the newsfeed and blog categories to ensure they passed authority to commercial catalog pages via relevant anchor text.
• Hreflang Implementation: Given the site's operation in multiple languages (French, German, etc.), the audit addressed the correct implementation of rel="alternate" hreflang tags to prevent regional content cannibalization and ensure users landed on the correct language version.

Conclusion

The audit provided a holistic blueprint for both technical recovery and structural growth. By addressing deep-seated technical issues and providing clear UX/SEO mockups for development teams, the project laid the foundation for a more searchable and user-friendly rental platform. The project successfully concluded with a prioritized list of tasks that bridged the gap between technical SEO and conversion-driven design.