Sage — Technical SEO Audit & Benchmarking.
A technical SEO audit and benchmark report for Sage Group's global site, delivered via Neo@Ogilvy – one of the earliest enterprise technical audits in this portfolio, and a useful reminder that the fundamentals (crawlability, architecture, indexation) haven't changed nearly as much as the tools have.
The engagement paired a full technical audit with a benchmark report at group level, giving stakeholders a baseline to measure future technical work against rather than a one-off list of issues with no way to track progress.
Robots.txt and the XML sitemap were both already in good shape, so the audit's real value was catching what wasn't obvious: capitalised URL variants creating duplicate content across the "About Sage" and product sections, a custom 404 page that was quietly returning a 200 OK status instead of a proper 404 – meaning search engines were indexing it as a real page – and a PageSpeed score of 74/100 with specific, named resources flagged for compression and render-blocking fixes.
What this covered
- Crawl & Indexation Review Robots.txt and XML sitemap checked against actual crawl behaviour – both were already correctly configured, so the audit confirmed rather than assumed they weren't the problem.
- Duplicate Content from URL Capitalisation A crawl of the staging site surfaced capitalised duplicate URLs (e.g. /About-Sage/ alongside /about-sage/) splitting link equity between two versions of the same page.
- 404 Status Code Fix The custom 404 page was returning a 200 OK rather than a 404 status, meaning search engines were treating a "page not found" as a real, indexable page.
- Site Speed A PageSpeed Insights score of 74/100, with named, specific resources flagged for compression (up to 65% reduction) and render-blocking JS/CSS identified for deferral.
- Benchmark Reporting A group-level benchmark report, establishing a measurable baseline so future technical work could be tracked against a starting point rather than judged in isolation.
- Project Overview & Stakeholder Alignment A project overview deck framing the technical findings for stakeholders outside the SEO team, translating audit findings into a plan people could actually act on.