Client: an LED lighting manufacturer (street and industrial ranges, plus office ranges) Work: website audit, a check of the client's own competitor research, then a public-tender market study Period: site audit 2026-09-08 to 2026-09-17, market study 2026-09-21. Status: site audit delivered, market study prepared. No measured result yet.
Work done by our founder before the CitedGEO name launched in September 2026.
Situation
Sales were down and the company wanted an outside view of what might be holding them back. The brief: find everything that might be wrong. The client also had a competitor comparison table and wasn't sure it could be trusted.
What we did
We mirrored the site (216 pages) and crawled 703 URLs one at a time, without touching production. Markup went through an HTML parser, the analytics container was read line by line, and the competitor table's arithmetic was recomputed by script.
The client then asked a sharper question: who wins public tenders, and at what price. We answered it from the open national procurement registry. 35,727 tenders reviewed, 19,215 kept with a clean per-unit price, 24 competing suppliers profiled from their websites and open registries. Seven tenders were checked against the live registry and matched.
What we found
- The site barely asks for the order. The enquiry form sits in the code of all 216 pages, but only 26 have a button that opens one. The other 190 offer a phone number only.
- No usable analytics since mid-2023. The only tracker was Universal Analytics, which Google switched off on 2023-07-01.
- Machines can't read it well. Zero H1 tags and zero Schema.org blocks on the pages checked. All 312 sitemap dates are the same day in 2017. The blog (53 articles, about 26,000 words) is blocked in robots.txt. That hurts classic search and AI answers alike.
- Broken basics. Two service pages in the main menu return a 500 error, with 611 internal links pointing at them.
- The competitor table wasn't safe to use. No dates anywhere, 14 of 16 remaining links went to resellers, and one industrial column was built from a 46 W street fitting listed as 150 W.
- Tender competition is thin. 419 companies bid, and 581 of 1,022 lots drew a single bid. Frequent lowest bidders came in at a median 79% of the buyer's expected price. Only 10 of the 24 competitors had a working site with a catalogue, and none published photometric (IES) files. The client does publish them on most product pages, a real edge that, in our assessment, the site does little to surface to search engines or AI assistants.
What's next
First, confirm that site enquiries reach anyone at all. Then give the 190 pages a working enquiry path, fix the menu errors and restore analytics. Structured data, headings, a current sitemap and an indexable blog follow. Nothing has been re-measured yet, so there's no before/after to report.