Case Study: How We Found 9 SEO Issues on a Yorkshire Swimming School's Website

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*Note: This audit was conducted with the website owner's knowledge for demonstration purposes.*

The Client

A baby and children's swimming school in West Yorkshire with 8 locations, an online shop, and 19 pool venues. The site runs on WordPress with WooCommerce and uses Yoast SEO.

On paper, they're doing a lot right: dedicated location pages, a blog with 34 posts, proper SSL, and a well-known local brand. But the numbers told a different story.

The Score: 43/100

Our audit revealed significant issues hiding beneath a site that looked perfectly fine to the naked eye.

The 9 Issues We Found

Issue 1: Extremely Slow Loading (Critical)

Largest Contentful Paint: 22.1 seconds. Google's threshold is 2.5 seconds.

This was the biggest single problem. The main competitor (Water Babies) loads in 6.1 seconds -- still not great, but 3.6x faster than our client.

The cause: unoptimised images and excessive JavaScript. 131 script and image references on the homepage alone. Only 9 of 46 images used lazy loading.

Issue 2: Zero Security Headers (Critical)

Not a single security header present out of the six we check. No HSTS, no X-Frame-Options, no Content-Security-Policy, nothing.

This is a 30-minute fix that costs nothing. It's the definition of a quick win.

Issue 3: No LocalBusiness Schema (Critical)

Despite having 8 location pages, none had LocalBusiness structured data. Google needs this to properly understand and display local businesses in the Map Pack.

For a swimming school where parents search "baby swimming lessons near me," this is a massive missed opportunity.

Issue 4: Domain Migration Costing Link Equity (High)

The site was originally on a shorter, more memorable domain. At some point, it was moved to a longer domain. The redirects are set up correctly (page-to-page 301s), but every backlink to the original domain loses 10-15% of its ranking power through the redirect.

The email address still uses the old domain, creating brand inconsistency.

Issue 5: High Cumulative Layout Shift (High)

CLS: 0.548. Should be below 0.1. Content visibly jumps around as the page loads, which frustrates users and signals poor page experience to Google.

Issue 6: 73% of Images Have No Alt Text (High)

266 out of 364 images across the site had empty alt text. Google can't understand these images, they won't appear in Google Image Search, and it's an accessibility violation.

Issue 7: Non-Crawlable Links (High)

Some navigation links use JavaScript instead of standard HTML anchor tags. Google may not be able to follow them, which means some pages might not be indexed properly.

Issue 8: Multiple H1 Tags (High)

Three pages had more than one H1 heading. One page (About Bob) had three H1 tags. Each page should have exactly one H1 that clearly states the page topic.

Issue 9: Missing Meta Description (High)

Google Lighthouse flagged at least one key page missing a meta description entirely. Meta descriptions appear in search results and influence click-through rates.

Competitor Comparison

| Metric | Our Client | Water Babies | Puddle Ducks | |--------|-----------|-------------|-------------| | Performance | 39/100 | 64/100 | 42/100 | | SEO | 85/100 | 92/100 | 92/100 | | Accessibility | 82/100 | 90/100 | 77/100 | | Best Practices | 100/100 | 77/100 | 69/100 | | LCP | 22.1s | 6.1s | 11.9s | | CLS | 0.548 | 0.001 | 0 |

Interesting finding: Our client scored 100/100 on Best Practices -- better than both competitors. This suggests the underlying code quality is solid. The performance issues are caused by unoptimised assets, not poor development.

The Action Plan

We prioritised 12 actions across three phases:

Quick wins (this week): Security headers, fix empty alt tags, fix multiple H1 tags, fix schema typo.

Medium-term (2-4 weeks): Add LocalBusiness schema to all 8 locations, optimise page speed (images, scripts, lazy loading), claim Google Business Profile, fix redirect chains.

Long-term (2-3 months): Evaluate domain migration, regular blog publishing, build author expertise signals, set up Bing Places and Apple Business Connect.

Expected Impact

If the client implements the top 8 recommendations, we'd expect their score to improve from 43/100 to approximately 65-75/100, putting them level with their main competitors.

The page speed fix alone -- optimising images and enabling lazy loading -- could improve the Performance score from 39 to 65+.

What This Shows

Even a well-established business with a good website can have significant hidden SEO issues. The site looked fine visually. It had a blog, location pages, and an SEO plugin installed. But underneath:

- The site was 8x slower than Google's threshold

73% of images were invisible to search engines

The most important local SEO element was completely missing

A domain change years ago was still silently costing rankings

These aren't unusual findings. We see similar patterns on most small business websites. The difference is whether you know about them and fix them.

*Curious what's hiding on your website? [Get your SEO audit](https://seorankmasters.com) -- from GBP 29.*