Forgeline Motorsports: Complete SEO and Website Performance Breakdown

Forgeline Motorsports crafts the world’s top custom lightweight forged aluminum wheels, engineered for enthusiasts who demand the best in street and racing performance.

David Schardt (President at Forgeline Motorsports) contacted me for an SEO analysis that could improve their website’s ranking.

They have a pretty decent site in terms of general SEO power, with a DR 51 coming from a lot of forum links. The sum of the link power across all these backlinks drives this DR 51, which is one of many particular metrics. 

Forgeline has lost a lot recently, which I’m not necessarily concerned about. Of the 74,000, they just lost 16,000.

These are the ones they’ve lost, so we could go back to some of these guys and figure out why that is. 

Let’s look at the keywords Forgeline ranks on because that’s the most important part

There are a few hundred of them. 

Of course, they do custom wheels and forged wheels, which is pretty competitive. They’re ranking number one, and these are all relatively new. Something good is going on that’s helping them rank on these other terms, where they’re ranking number one, giving them 40 percent of the traffic. 

By the way, the number one spot is getting more and more traffic—keyword difficulty 66, 5,000 searches per month, and they’re getting 2,000, which would have been 24 cents a click each, but they’re getting it for free, which is great.

Then, there are other more generic terms, such as racing wheels and custom forged wheels, because they want to do the custom great green, which is an all-new SERP feature. This is when they can show up in different ways in search results, not the regular ten-blue links. I love seeing the knowledge panel. I love seeing videos, I love seeing Twitter, even ads where it makes sense. But they’re not getting a lot of these other pieces. I think social sharing, especially in the nature of what they do, would be fantastic.

I looked at some of Forgeline’s tags, and they’re missing the Facebook tag and some other pixels, which would be great if they wanted to run ads, especially for remarketing if someone is looking at a particular product.

That would be beneficial because people often forget, and remarketing is super powerful and costs almost nothing. The whole Dollar a Day strategy we teach is based on that. 

Forgeline top pages content analysis

I did a site colon search to ask Google, “What are the top pages on the site?”

So the image below shows Forgeline’s different wheels. It’s great that they have the name, but why not say something like “VR3P, Pipe” and then add “three-spoke custom wheel” or something similar for each of these?

That’s an easy opportunity. Google, of course, can rewrite the title and meta descriptions, but there’s a lot more they can do. These meta descriptions are just snippets that Google is pulling from these pages, but they could certainly make them a lot better than this. 

Think of this as ad copy that they can write within an organic listing, but it’s obviously not as good as it could be. Though the site is strong, the pages themselves don’t carry much power—zeros—because they only have one referring link and rank on just a few keywords. The easiest thing they could do is use a tool like Link Whisper or manually do it.

Forgeline should provide Google with a mix of content to display. They can see that this page doesn’t have any kind of power. The site itself has power, but the issue is that they don’t have referring pages, and they’re not linking between them. I’m not sure what they might link on—like aluminum wheels, six-spoke wheels, five-spoke wheels, or how they categorize wheels—but there are definitely opportunities to create links between relevant pages.

However, that’s not being done here. It would be easy to implement, and they could even use ChatGPT to generate content.

So, this is basically the equivalent of Google PAA. People also ask.

Let’s see what ChatGPT suggests. It might recommend asking questions like, “What type of car does this wheel fit?” or “What performance benefits does this wheel offer?” It will likely point out other aspects we should highlight. This is how you use ChatGPT—not necessarily to write the content, though you could—but to help identify what’s missing or needs improvement. 

There’s just not enough information on some pages, like the example below.

This is a top-level page, so they need to provide more details. For example, what are the differences between carbon-forged and aluminum wheels or whatever other materials they offer? They have these model numbers listed, but they don’t really convey much. Visually, someone can see that CF204 is a 5-spoke carbon wheel or a 10-spoke, but they need to include basic descriptions like that.

Another issue is that none of the Forgeline pages link to each other. On their top-level pages, they should link to the specific products they offer within each category and explain that they can be customized. But they also need to say more about what makes each product or category unique. Especially on these top-level pages, they’re missing out on opportunities to link between them, which would help distribute the link juice that’s coming to the whole site.

Let’s take a look at Forgeline’s top pages, focusing on how much link juice they’re getting

Forgeline ranks for the “one-piece wheel” and keywords such as “forged wheels.”

Forgeline’s competitors, such as “One Piece Forged,” also rank on the keyword “one piece wheel.” The reason the competitors are doing well might be because they have “One Piece” in the title multiple times. Google favors low-competition terms like this.

Forgeline could also consider using Google product ads, especially if their pricing is competitive on Google Shopping. But the real issue here is that we need to distribute our link juice more effectively.

Now, let’s discuss these parasitic links. NebHub and AdMark Online are linking site-wide, which is problematic. 

A parasitic link like this is harmful, not helpful. They’ve even done it twice, which is a major red flag. These links contribute to their DR (Domain Rating) of 53, but it’s based on parasitic links, and they don’t rank on many keywords because Google can see through this.

Forgeline also has some good opportunities for mid-funnel content like wheel repair tech tips, but the user experience lacks. For instance, if I have to click a plus sign to see more information, that’s not ideal. For example, people want to know about warranties, and there’s barely any information here.

As for emails, if they’re just mass mailing, then using Constant Contact or MailChimp is fine. But if they want to do more targeted, triggerable emails based on user behavior, they might need to consider a more robust solution.

It’s well-known in e-commerce that sliders don’t actually increase sales. People like them for their visual effects, but they don’t contribute to their main goal of boosting sales.

Let’s go to their site and check out their social sharing. I’ll use the CrowdTangle plugin. What do we have? A lot on Facebook.

They should thank all the people who share. They’re sharing their own thing. Detroit Speed shared years ago, but they can still revive these links—their own.

Forgeline website speed analysis

I bet Forgeline’s website is slow. Let’s check their PageSpeed Insights, Google’s tool, to see how they’re doing on mobile and desktop scores. I expect their mobile score to be around 25 and their desktop score to be around 50.

They’ve failed Core Web Vitals. It’s not a huge deal, but it means their website doesn’t load properly. Mobile is the most important score, of course. This is Google’s tool—this is not my opinion or idea of what’s good or bad.

Forgeline’s website is really slow, probably because of that slider at the beginning. It takes a long time for their site to load. Let’s see what Google has to say. Okay, so their mobile score is 33, and their desktop score is—60? Oh, that desktop score is the worst I’ve seen in a long time. Normally, desktops are better. 

Next steps

If Forgeline doesn’t have an internal team to manage its SEO, it should. It should not outsource this but have its own people. Ideally, those who face the customer do its SEO.

It needs to collect content, which drives its SEO: taking good care of its customers and making that visible to Google, especially repurposing it for YouTube and GMB. Even though it’s not a local service business, its GMB still helps.

Want to unlock your SEO potential? Visit AreYougoogleable.com now for a comprehensive SEO audit. It’s quick, effective, and essential—let’s go!