SEO Teardown: Spoiler Alert
SEO Teardown: Spoiler Alert
Like watching the Jinx. Read to the end.
I’m going to pick apart the website, www.trykarat.com, from an SEO lens.
This one has a fun discovery at the end.
Who is Karat?
Karat is a financial services website that offers credit cards tailored for influencers and creators. It positions itself as a unique financial solution, catering to a niche market.
The home page states it clearly: “The Card for Content Creators”. The headline is great. You know exactly what the offering is and who their audience is.
Now, let’s dive into the SEO aspects of the site. I’m using the methodology I’ve written about in our SEO 101 series. For some of this analysis, I will use SEMRush as my site audit and keyword rank tool.
TryKarat.com SEO snapshot
Here are some typical metrics after a quick scan of the site:
344 indexed pages on Google
149 pages were crawled starting from the home page
Authority score of 31 (SEMRush)
# of Keywords ranking: 347
Estimated organic traffic: 2.5K monthly visits*
Backlinks: 4,000
Content and On-Page SEO Analysis
1. Thin Content
There aren’t a lot of pages on the website that lend opportunity for ranking for keywords.
Let’s start with the 149 pages crawled by a site audit:
118 of these pages are Help Center content (help.trykarat.com)
“Help” is a sub-domain of trykarat.com, and therefore acts as a different site — must be crawled and indexed separately, requires its own backlinks which do not benefit the “www” sub-domain, etc.
7 pages are duplicative on trykarat.com (without the “www”)
That leaves 24 pages that are on the “www” sub-domain: www.trykarat.com
1 is the home page, which you have to have
9 are “terms of use” and “privacy policy” type pages, some of which are labeled “old” or “v6”
4 are HTTP (unsecure) pages, redirecting to HTTPS (secure)
1 is a robots.txt page
1 is a sitemap.xml page
1 is the careers page
This leaves only 7 pages on the “www” sub-domain that have SEO value, where users may search relevant keywords and discover their site. That doesn’t allow the site to rank for many non-branded keywords.
— # of branded keywords: 70; drives 1.8K organic visits*
— # of non-branded keywords: 271; drives 117 organic visits*
2. Multiple H1 tags
Ideally, each page has only one H1 tag. More than one H1 tag can confuse Google as to what the page is trying to rank for.
Karat’s website has 4 pages with multiple H1 tags:
Home: 9 H1 tags
Careers (/careers): 11 H1 tags
Insights (/insights): 9 H1 tags
Podcast (/the-karat-podcast): 2 H1 tags
3. Missing tags
I talked about the help content being on a different sub-domain, and that the boost it can give to the “www” sub-domain is limited.
In general, help center content can be a good opportunity to answer FAQs and rank well for long-tail keywords that have low competition (for that sub-domain). Help center content also reduces the number of support calls and emails, and it can help address parts of the buyers journey, particularly for transaction and post-purchase support.
However, all the help content on help.trykarat.com is missing H1 tags and meta descriptions. Unfortunately, there may not be much that Karat can do here. Karat uses Intercom to host their help articles, which makes sense since they use Karat’s chat bot. But, Intercom doesn’t populate H1 tags or meta descriptions — only the Title tags. Intercom claims this is by design and that Title Tags are all that’s needed for SEO. In reality, it just makes it harder for Karat to compete on and rank well for the keywords targeted by those articles.
4. Keyword targeting
For the 7 pages on the main sub-domain, the Title, H1 and Meta Descriptions are OK. They exist. But I don’t believe there was any time spent on keyword research.
Example:
One of their product offerings is bookkeeping. The meta tags for this page are:
Title tag: “Karat Books”
H1 tag: “Books + Taxes”
Meta Description: “Need tax help? Karat Books is a white glove taxes and accounting service for your favorite YouTubers, TikTokers, and more. Custom packages available.”
The Title and H1 tags, both direct ranking factors, seem to be targeting the keyword, “Karat books” and “books”, respectively. Maybe Karat is trying to build the branded term, “Karat Books”, as the name of the service. What’s actually happening is that the keywords ranking for this page are…
…which means that Google’s interpretation is that this page is about tax books.
You can read more background on content and on-page SEO here.
User Experience
1. Mobile Friendliness
Mobile friendliness and mobile page performance are direct ranking factors for Google. A look at the home page using Google PageSpeed Insights shows poor performance on mobile:
The other pages, like Rewards, have equally poor mobile performance. PageSpeed Insights breaks down the reasons for the poor performance. One big and easily fixable reason is large image files.
Large Image File Sizes
Hero image is 1.1 MB
All other images on the page are >1 MB
Video is 34 MB
I get that visuals are important for their site, given their target audience. But there’s room to compress file sizes while maintaining high resolution. They should at least start using WebP which has better compression than JPEG (what they are currently using).
2. Navigation & Site Structure
Top Nav > Why Karat?
The site and navigation are very confusing to me. Most of the site lives on www.trykarat.com, but there is a singular page, Why Karat?, on Notion. There are several problems here:
Links in the top nav usually signify that the destination pages are important. Yet, they are sending the traffic to a different domain, Notion.so.
The link to Notion opens up in the same tab. Users must click the browser’s back button or scroll all the way to the bottom to find the link back to www.trykarat.com.
The anchor text is called “Why Karat?” But the Notion page is called “Karat in the News”
Anchor text should be descriptive of the destination page and align with those keywords. This is good for both UX and SEO.
The way it is now, it feels like they are making me (the user) read through the accolades to decipher on my own what the benefits of Karat are
The first news link (NYTimes) is broken
Top Nav > Products
When you click on Product in the top nav, a giant menu takes over the screen describing two sub-menu options: Card and Books.
First, I’m not a fan of these rich navigation drop-downs, but that might just be personal preference. I think it’s also overkill for just two menu options.
Second, there’s too much to read in the sub-menu, and it’s unclear where the CTAs are. I’m guessing that since some of the info (ie building FICO score and getting limits from social metrics) is already on the home page, they wanted to keep the Product > Card option related to Rewards. And maybe Rewards is what customers are most interested in based on their data? Still, confusing.
Third, I don’t care much for how they name their second sub-menu item: “Books”. The first thing I thought was, “oh cool, this is a credit card offering for (book) writers.” Writers are also creators, and I thought it was an interesting niche.
But actually, “Books” is supposed to mean bookkeeping as pointed out earlier.
By the way, on mobile, the menu looks like this:
What would you think as a new visitor coming to this website? Are you in the market for cards or books? The split between mobile and desktop visitors in the US is close to 50/50. Your website’s traffic split depends on your type of business. Always preview your website and content on mobile as well as desktop.
Top Nav > Resources
My main gripe with the Resources sub-menu is that clicking on “Get customer support” opens up an email draft. It bugs me, because the behavior adds to the inconsistency of the entire navigation. Some menu items open pages on the domain (as expected), some open pages on a new domain (not expected), and some open up an email client (not expected).
If not a contact page, then just keep the email link in the footer where it’s already at.
The formatting of this sub-menu is also inconsistent with with that of the Products sub-menu.
Footer Nav
The footer nav should house the links that are less important but necessary or good to have, like the privacy page or an about us page.
But here, they list a podcast that they seem to invest a lot of time into, with new hour-long episodes released every 1-2 weeks. Why not move that to Resources in the top nav? Btw, the website’s podcast page is also not up-to-date. There are now 80 episodes (on Apple, Spotify, etc), however, the website currently shows Episode 67 as the latest one.
There’s also an Insights page in the footer. It looks like they might be testing this, otherwise, I’d recommend moving that to the top nav if it engages prospective customers and captures more data for benchmarking.
Broken Link
On the Community page, the big “Get Started” button is broken.
Authority
1. Backlinks
The best thing this site has going for it is quality backlinks which is the key to improving domain authority. They’ve gotten great press and mentions from reputable sites like CNBC, Hubspot, Bankrate, and Shopify to name a few. Many of these sites are also highly relevant to their target audience. Creators might use Hubspot or Shopify to manage their own businesses, and the traffic from these sites could convert into customers for Karat.
2. Internal Links
On the flip side, they get a “D” for internal linking strategy.
Looking through the site search results, I found a treasure trove of content in their newsletter archives at news.trykarat.com (hosted on Beehiiv), where they post emails weekly. Not sure why they don’t link from their main site. It’s also not linked from their social media account.
When your content is not well-linked within your site (2-5 clicks from your home page and linked from other internal pages), it reduces the chances of your content ranking highly. If the content is not linked at all, it basically kills your chances, unless you’re sending direct traffic from other sources. Having good internal linking helps you pass link equity from well-trafficked and higher ranking pages to other pages that have less organic visibility.
Technical SEO Analysis
1. Site Structure
Some of this is already mentioned above, but the site structure could use work.
There are orphaned sections and pages of the site: the newsletter sub-domain “news” as well as a page called Karat Card Benefits.
2. Sitemap
The Sitemap is how a website tells Google where important pages and files are as well as how they are all related. Karat’s Sitemap has some interesting insights:
There’s actually a blog! But the latest article was from February 7, 2024. So they may have replaced it with their Newsletter.
There’s also some old agreements and terms that should be removed from the sitemap - that’s why we saw them in the audit.
But the really exciting thing I saw in the Sitemap is a preview of a possible redesign coming soon!
Karat Redesign Preview
New Home page
Here’s the new home page (called /home-new)
They changed the top nav, using improved product offering names: “Banking”, “Credit Card”, and” Taxes”
Insight is now also in the top nav - nice.
Headline renamed to “We Help Creators With Money” - presumably (and appropriately) updated to reflect expansion beyond just the credit card
Notice the footer has been updated, so that the Newsletter is now linked under Social
New Credit Card page
There’s also now a new page just for Credit Card (not just lumped in at the bottom of the home page)
This new layout is more organized and logical, grouping the benefits and rewards of the credit card onto one page
The card page also has its own FAQs, which can help target long-tail, top of funnel question content. This makes them less reliant on the help center sub-domain content.
Large Image Files Persist
BUT, all the pages still have very large image file sizes, resulting in slow mobile page speed performance.
Conclusion
Karat’s bread and butter is its social media presence, which makes sense since they target creators and influencers.
Karat Social Media Accounts
Instagram: 48.2K followers
TikTok: 102.7K followers
YouTube: 80.6K subscribers
Their website was an after-thought for a long time, but I’m glad to see they have plans for a redesign. They should just make sure to 301 redirect the old pages (like /rewards and /books) to the new pages (like /card and /[taxes]), to preserve the SEO they currently have.
In the future, they could try not publishing these pages or hiding them from the Sitemap and from search while they are still under construction :). In Webflow (which is what they use), Page Settings is where you would remove the page from the auto-generated Sitemap and hide the page from search results.
I look forward to seeing how trykarat.com’s SEO metrics improve after the redesign!
Until then…
— Kim and Jenn
PS: For more on SEO, check out our SEO 101 series
Part 1: Content
Part 2: UX
Part 3: Authority
Part 4: Technical SEO