Site Explorer

What widening the scope changed

Adding two subdomains and a second market took the ranking count from one to two. That is the honest headline. But it also surfaced something the narrower scope hid, and it is the most useful finding in this report.

Read this as an attribution table, not a content map. All the content sits on client-site; the rankings are simply still filed against the URLs it used to live at. The commercial site's zero is real either way - nothing on client-site ranks under its own URL in either market.

1. Every keyword these hosts rank for

All three hosts, both markets. Position, monthly volume, and the exact ranking URL.

Note the second row. A term drawing 1,600 monthly searches in the Netherlands, and there is already an article on it - parked at position 77 where nobody will ever see it. That is not a content gap. It is an asset nobody finished.

2. Position band summary

3. Top pages by estimated organic traffic

The brief asks for the top 20. There are two.

Combined estimated organic traffic across three hosts and two markets: 3.47 visits per month.

4. The three highest-upside opportunities

Ranked by expected gain - volume weighted by whether it can realistically be won, not volume alone.

1. 01

   Offshore development centre

   Existing article on legacy-blog - no equivalent page on client-site — Highest expected gain

   Target keyword: offshore development center - 880/mo UK, difficulty 0, CPC £7.26, competition index 7

   Current position: Not ranking in the UK. Position 77 in the Netherlands on the same term.

   Why it is stuck: The content exists, but as a "How to Work with Us" blog article rather than a service page - and it is still indexed under its old legacy-blog URL. The API classifies the search intent as navigational: people are looking for a provider, not an explainer. The article answers a question nobody asked while the commercial site says nothing on the subject.

   The spelling finding: This one matters. Google Ads clusters the two spellings at the same 880/mo, but they are not equally contested: "offshore development center" scores 0 for difficulty, "offshore development centre" scores 42. The American spelling is wide open. Lead with it, carry the British spelling as a variant.

   First change: Build client-site/services/offshore-development-centre as a proper service page and point the existing legacy-blog article at it. The Bangalore and Lisbon offices listed on the contact page are the proof this page needs, and no competitor page will have that.

   Confidence: High on volume and difficulty. The existing NL ranking is evidence Google already associates the client with the topic.

2. 02

   Dutch-language build and migrate

   No Dutch-language page exists on any host — Cheapest wins on the board

   Target keywords: - webapplicatie laten maken - 260/mo, difficulty 0, CPC €30.43 - app laten ontwikkelen - 170/mo, difficulty 6, CPC €22.76 - cloud migratie - 90/mo, difficulty 0

   Current position: Not ranking. There is no Dutch content to rank.

   Why it is stuck: The client runs an office in Roermond and sells localisation as a service, yet operates a monolingual English website. Two of these three terms score zero for difficulty while carrying real buying intent - "webapplicatie laten maken" translates roughly as "have a web application built", and advertisers pay €30 a click for it.

   First change: One Dutch service page covering web application development and cloud migration. Not a translation of the English page - the English page is 187 words with no heading, so translating it would just produce a thin page in a second language.

   Confidence: High on the data. Low confidence on delivery - this needs someone who writes Dutch commercially, which is a resourcing question rather than an SEO one.

3. 03

   Cloud, AWS and DevOps

   client-site/services/cloud-services - 333 words, H1 reads "The tech stuff" — Softer than it first looked

   Target keywords: - aws managed services - 320/mo, difficulty 7 - cloud migration services - 210/mo, difficulty 1 - devops consultancy - 140/mo, difficulty 0

   Current position: Not ranking on any.

   Why it is ranked third: The difficulty scores flatter this cluster. Checking the actual SERPs: "aws managed services" is five Amazon-owned results in the top ten - their product page, docs and FAQ - so the realistic ceiling is around position 4, where competitor-a (a large UK managed-cloud provider) currently sits. And "devops consultancy" scores 0 partly because the results are full of recruiters: Robert Walters, Indeed, Glassdoor, Companies House. A share of those 140 searches are jobseekers, not buyers.

   First change: Still worth doing, and the fix is unchanged: replace "The tech stuff" with AWS Managed Services & Cloud Migration and build the page into three named sections. Just expect less from it than the raw difficulty scores imply.

   Confidence: Medium. Volume and difficulty are solid; the SERP composition is the reason for the downgrade from where this cluster ranked in the first pass.

The 3 things I'd do first

1. 01

   Build an offshore development centre service page on client-site

   Create client-site/services/offshore-development-centre, targeting the American spelling "offshore development center" in the H1 and title - difficulty 0 against 880 monthly UK searches, versus difficulty 42 for the British spelling at the same volume.

   Then redirect or internally link the existing legacy-blog article into it. The Bangalore and Lisbon offices are the differentiator; most competitors on this term are resellers of someone else's capacity.

2. 02

   Collapse the three-hop redirect chain from the legacy subdomains

   The migration off the legacy-blog subdomains has already happened - that recommendation is retired. What remains is that every legacy article URL takes three separate 301 hops to reach its destination: strip trailing slash, swap host, rewrite path. Replace them with one rule mapping legacy-blog/{slug}/ straight to client-site/blog/{slug}.

   Then submit the client-site blog URLs in Search Console. Both of the client's rankings are still credited to URLs that no longer serve content, and that is where the consolidation is stalling.

3. 03

   Publish one Dutch service page

   Target webapplicatie laten maken - 260 monthly searches, difficulty 0, €30.43 a click. Written in Dutch, not translated from the 187-word English page.

   Beyond the traffic, there is a credibility argument: a company selling website localisation from a Roermond office, running an English-only site, is an awkward thing for a prospect to notice.