Technical SEO Audit of TruGreen [Landscaping]

There are many angles to doing an SEO audit of a website. It all depends on your goal and the narrative that you want to build for the person who is going to see the audit.

For example, suppose you are a freelancer and pitching a project for startups. In that case, you will mostly focus on how competitors have been successful and how the startup can achieve the same by mitigating issues and scaling the SEO effort.

You will look out for the low-hanging fruit and keep in mind the budget. Because the opportunities will be ample, you will need to prioritise the items that would have the maximum impact on the startup’s visibility

If you are in-house working for a mid-sized company, your audit would mostly include items that would achieve greater results by doing more with less and figuring out resource constraints.

For an enterprise, you have a potentially bigger budget (depending on how important SEO activities are perceived) but also would have longer timelines to resolve issues. In addition, in an enterprise setting, you need buy-ins from multiple stakeholders, then just 1 or 2 to get things done.

Irrespective of how you’re shaping your story, here is how you can conduct Technical SEO audits to inform your report. In this post, we’ll conduct a technical SEO audit of TruGreen.

Tech SEO Case Study Company in Focus: TruGreen

TruGreen is a mid-sized US company offering landscaping services to residential homes and commercial properties.

Lawn care and landscaping companies are heavily dependent on search marketing—paid, organic, and local—along with offline word of mouth. They typically start at the local level and build their brand by capturing market share within specific geographic areas.

They recently revamped their website, and with every migration to a new tech stack/revamp, there come optimization opportunities that we’ll focus on in one of these blogs.

TruGreen has 2 major domains on which they host their website – Trugreen.com and Trugreen.ca.

Why do you need this info?

Because of these insights, you’ll now prioritise structured data for local business visibility and issues that would cause search visibility issues. For example, you’ll want to prioritise local pages that drive the most revenue. You’ll also want to focus on rating and review schema, among others.

In addition, when you do manual checks and look around the error pages, you’ll know their significance, and it’ll help you prioritise certain subfolders more than others.

TruGreen having two separate domains for local relevance means both domains have to be crawled and audited, and checked for potential Hreflang issues.

I always recommend diving deep into industry and competitor research before starting any Tech SEO audit.

Executive Summary for TruGreen’s Technical SEO Audit

This technical audit of Trugreen.com and Trugreen.ca identified critical issues affecting the site search’s visibility, user experience, and overall performance. The audit flagged technical problems, many of which are impacting crawl efficiency, indexation and content quality.

The audit analyzed over 9769 URLs, out of which about ~1700 came out to be relevant for the search engine results page, ie, the pages that are HTML and indexable on search.

Key findings

Sharing the findings here for people with some SEO knowledge. You can add more context, such as the impact or benefit of solving the issue, in addition to this summary, for presenting to a stakeholder, devs, or management.

Business Impact

Search Visibility: The technical issues identified are likely reducing TruGreen’s search visibility and organic traffic, which can directly impact lead generation and revenue.​ For example, non-indexable URLs mean some revenue-driving URLs might be undiscoverable by search engines.

User Experience: Poor crawlability, redirect chains, and broken links create a frustrating user experience, which can lead to higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates.​

Brand Trust: Server errors and inconsistent URL structures can damage brand trust and credibility, making it harder to attract and retain customers.​

SEO Opportunities for TruGreen

User Structured Data (Schema Markup)

Adding structured data to the website helps search engines understand the content better. This means pages can show up in more places on search results, like featured snippets or AI overviews.

For TruGreen, this is especially helpful because it makes the business information, like services, locations, and customer reviews, clear to search engines. With 588 URLs lacking any structured data, implementing markup such as local business, ratings, and service provider schema can improve SERP real estate.

Use Hreflang Tags

Since TruGreen serves customers in both the US and Canada, it’s important to make sure the right version of the website appears to the right people. Hreflang tags tell search engines which pages should be shown to users in each country.

This prevents traffic from one country from ending up on the wrong version of the site. For example, people in Canada will see the Canadian pages, and people in the US will see the US pages.

Tip for SEOs: Start with reciprocal x-default and en-US/en-CA mappings for equivalent service and location pages.

Interesting Findings from the Tech SEO Audit of the TruGreen Website

Here are some interesting findings from the analysis of issues from the TruGreen Technical SEO audit:

1. 3XX Links (Usually 301, 302, or 308 links that can be replaced with the destination URL)

While looking at 3XX errors, I found some unusual patterns that came out more than just 3XX simple errors on the site.

Normal, how you’d go about fixing 3XX issues is to look at the source page of the 3XX URL and find the URL on that source page that is redirecting to a different destination. After finding the URL, the normal suggestion is to either replace the redirect URL with the destination directly or remove the link altogether if it’s not that relevant.

But if you look deeply, you’ll see some common patterns that’d look unusual in the case above.

In the case of TruGreen, just as suspected, I found 2 common patterns that would reduce a lot of source URL errors in one or two go.

Two versions of the same URLs exist

Though the canonicalization is correct, there are two versions of the same URL on the site. One without the trailing slash and one with it.

https://www.trugreen.ca/plans-and-services/leatherjacket
https://www.trugreen.ca/plans-and-services/leatherjacket/

https://www.trugreen.ca/plans-and-services/top-dressing
https://www.trugreen.ca/plans-and-services/top-dressing/

Though it is not a massive issue to use both variants, the best practice to avoid instances where you’d have a long list of redirect URLs placed on site increases, which is exactly what happened here.

On further checking, I found that the website’s HTML sitemap contains URLs for the second variant, though the canonical is set to the first variant.

Redirect URL in the footer is present

This is easiest to spot when you have the list of source pages and error URLs in one place. The two signals are:

• The same URL repeats as the redirected URL for multiple other URLs
• From the source URLs, you see common footer or header items, such as login, privacy policy pages

2. 4XX URLs

While analysing 404 URLs, I saw another pattern just like the 3XX Ones. There was one single URL that originated from multiple other pages, but it didn’t originate from the footer or header as before.

https://www.trugreen.com/node/38466

On closer look, I found this specific link in a Drupal component, which might have been created for creating a blog recommendation system, such as “related blogs” in WordPress.

While moving the site to live from prod, they might’ve missed migrating to pretty URLs or using the path alias system to redirect those internal URLs to actual blogs.

3. Hreflangs

Since TruGreen operates in two different geographies (the USA and Canada), they should use hrelfang tags to help search engines show the correct page to a person in the relevant geography. To identify if this is an issue, they should check for traffic bleed of their US pages to Canada and vice versa.

Even though search engines can identify and localise pages based on content and geography, adding hreflang helps them understand the relationship between similar pages and shows a specific page to an audience in a specific geography.

Tools used

• Screaming Frog
• SEO Meta in 1 Click extension
• Builtwith Technology Profiler
• Microsoft Edge Copilot
• Redirect Checker
• Schema Markup Validator

Crawl Configuration for TruGreen

Because TruGreen has 2 domains – Truegreen.com and Trugreen.ca, this meant using a different approach than normal to crawl and analyse both domains together.

I used “list mode” in Screaming Frog and turned off the limit crawl depth.

This would allow for a crawl of both domains simultaneously and we wouldn’t need to audit domains separately. All issues and information from the crawl would be available to us on a single screen.

I start by looking at the site architecture

The idea is to get to know more about the website and understand which areas will be critical for the audit.

The areas important for us to explore and audit would be www.trugreen.com, www.trugreen.ca and commercial.trugreen.com. If you look at other areas such as staging, QA2, landing, etc, they are non-indexable and out of scope for the tech SEO audit of TruGreen.

I checked www.trugreen.com// and found that these are blogs. Explored a few URLs by using “View in internal tab tree view”.

Then with looking at the overview tab

From the overview tab, I noticed a few things by exploring the items in the tab:

• Crawl was a total of 9769 URLs, with
• A lot of URLs (5046) were blocked by robots. On further analysis, I found that they were inconsequential to our audit. Which means errors flagged from crawling these URLs can be ignored in the audit.

• There are a total of 2581 Internal URLs that are HTML. These are more relevant to us from the total of 3225 internal URLs that include other page types such as JavaScript, CSS, images and others.
• Out of the total 6544 external URLs, 621 have HTML as content type and other external JavaScript includes URLs from Cloudflare CDN and a few other scripts required for optimizations.
• I could see there are 86 HTTP URLs, but they are 301 redirected to HTTPS ones. We’ll need to check whether these HTTP versions are mentioned anywhere on the site, so that we can get them updated to the destination URLs instead.

• Then I went ahead and checked a few other areas to determine what kind of issues will need to be documented, what their priority will be, and what can be ignored. Since the list is a long one, you can pick and choose the items that would be most important for your site.

Documenting Tech SEO Site Issues for TruGreen

I use my checklist for going over each tech SEO check and running them against the crawl results from Screaming Frog.

Copy and use this sheet for your own tech audits.

While I document each issue in a separate sheet, I add an overview of what’s wrong in the overview sheet, along with the number of impacted URLs or screenshots of the issue where needed.

An example of this is the structured data validation error I came across while doing the audit.

Because Screaming Frog sometimes shows a false positive while analyzing structured data markup on pages, I used validator.schema.org to further validate the checks:

This confirms that the markup on a few pages on the site has invalid code. For documentation purposes, I added the details in the overview sheet:

and also added the URLs in a separate sheet so that it can be fixed by the developer when needed.

I repeat this process for all other checks in my checklist to ensure every issue encountered during the audit is well documented.

Tips on shaping your narrative

How you share your report matters. The narrative should be tailored to your audience for stakeholder buy-in. The same audit can be slices into these three narratives without redoing the work, which stakeholders love.

• For new clients or pitching to companies
  • Focus on high-impact issues and highlight the problem, create agitation about the issue, and give a solution. Use the PAS framework.
  • Emphasize ROI and use the competitor angle to show the impact of issues on search visibility, conversions, and revenue.
  • Example deliverable: One slide executive summary and a few other slides with a topical story combined with insights from the audit.
• For companies where SEO is not a priority
  • Provide an executive summary that focuses on the benefits of solving the issues. Use simple language and avoid technical jargon
  • Highlight the business impact of visibility, more leads and increased revenue and highlight the potential benefits of SEO.
  • Provide actionable steps and remove as much friction as possible to let the company try out a few suggestions and see improvements.
  • Example deliverable: Insights from the technical audit and how it impacts the firm’s bottom line.
• For companies where SEO is a priority and you have stakeholder buy-in
  • Provide a detailed analysis of all issues found during the audit, including technical details, data and recommendations
  • Outline a clear POA with timelines, milestones and an escalation matrix
  • If possible, include an estimate of the costs associated with implementing the fixes and your recommendations.
  • Example deliverable: annotated dev ticket backlog.