Google penalises website errors by reducing the site's listing rank and therefore crippling the traffic that gets driven to your site. With literally millions of issues tagged by the search engine across millions of pages, this was a daunting task for Telco collaboration giant, TM Forum.
With some insightful prioritisation and our rare mixture of creative and tech to be brought to bear on the problem, we reduced the number of issues by more than two thirds in less than three months.
The Challenge
TM Forum is a global industry association for telecommunications service providers and their suppliers. Their website is a vital resource for a highly technical audience—hosting thousands of pages of specifications, frameworks, APIs, and industry collaboration content.
The challenge was immense:
- Literally millions of SEO issues identified by Google across the site
- Thousands of pages of deeply technical content requiring specialist understanding
- Template errors compounding across the entire site structure
- Uncompressed assets slowing page load times
- Poor search ranking crippling traffic to critical industry resources
- The scale alone made this seem like an impossible task
The Skills Needed for the Project
Technical Copywriters and Editors
To understand the deeply technical subject matter and to craft more SEO-friendly content whilst still maintaining the exact purpose of the original. This isn't your average marketing copy—it's telecommunications specifications that industry professionals rely on.
Frontend Developers
To correct many, many template errors and other technical fixes such as asset compression. When errors are baked into templates, they multiply across thousands of pages—fixing them at source was essential.
SEO Strategists
To triage millions of issues and identify the highest-impact fixes. Not all SEO problems are equal—insightful prioritisation was key to achieving dramatic results in a short timeframe.
The Approach
We knew brute force wouldn't work. With millions of issues, trying to fix everything would take years. Instead, we applied smart prioritisation:
- Template-level fixes: Identifying errors that propagated across hundreds or thousands of pages, so a single fix could eliminate thousands of issues
- High-impact content: Focusing SEO copywriting efforts on the pages that drove the most traffic and conversions
- Technical quick wins: Asset compression, proper meta tags, and structural improvements that search engines weight heavily
- Process fixes: Helping the internal team understand how to prevent new issues from being created—because there's no point putting the fire out if someone is still throwing petrol-soaked wood on it
We helped with process as much as we helped with execution. Sustainable improvement meant empowering their team, not creating dependency on ours.
Results
ALL of the significant SEO metrics recorded their best month on record after the project began.
Micro have a great combination of creative and technical minds. They can help us with literally any problem.
Sue Davis, Head of Digital, TM Forum
Key Takeaways
Scale Requires Smart Prioritisation
Millions of issues sounds impossible. But by identifying high-leverage fixes—template errors, structural problems, high-traffic pages—we achieved dramatic results without trying to boil the ocean.
Technical Content Needs Technical Copywriters
You can't just hand telecommunications specifications to a generic SEO agency. Understanding the subject matter deeply was essential to improving content without breaking its meaning or usefulness to the technical audience.
Process Matters as Much as Execution
Fixing problems once is good. Preventing them from happening again is better. Training the client's team on SEO best practices meant the improvements would stick long after our engagement ended.
Creative and Technical Go Together
SEO success requires both: technical fixes that search engines reward, and creative content improvements that humans actually want to read. Our ability to do both made this project possible.
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