HR tech with people problems. Website people problems.
On the grill this week
HiBob
hibob.com
Roasted by
Yaron · Ben · Itay
S133:50
In this episode
The site banned Ben mid-roast: a 429 error for translating pages too enthusiastically, so he watched the rest of his own show from the bench.
We started out genuinely gushing, proper headers, sticky table of contents, eight languages, healthy growth, then found the international content barely ranks.
The author pages exist and say absolutely nothing. Tali and Ruth deserve better, and so does Google.
Competitor AIHR runs a similar number of pages and pulls roughly five times the traffic, which turned our applause into a strategy session.
The scoring turned into a fight: C+ versus B minus, while Ben refused to grade a website that had just banned him.
The roast scorecard
HiBob
hibob.com
C+Final grade
show avg · C+
FDCBA
On the grill:Internationalization & hreflangAuthor pages & attributionContent gaps & clustersReadability & designInternal linking & anchorsHeading hierarchy
Key findings
The non-English content is not performing: English pages rank in Germany while the roughly 100 German pages, mostly glossary translations, barely show up at all.
Author pages are empty shells. Bios and photos exist at the bottom of articles but the author links lead to pages with nothing on them.
In-content links are nearly invisible. Ben, who is color blind, could not see a single link until he hovered over the text, a real accessibility problem.
Recommended reading modules sit mid-article styled exactly like body text, marked up as H6s with no box or visual separation, so nobody notices them.
A content gap analysis surfaced about 600 keywords where multiple competitors rank in the top 10 and HiBob does not, and AIHR gets around five times the traffic from a similar page count.
Top action items
1Populate the author pages with bios, photos, and links, and connect them to the authors' LinkedIn profiles.
2Invest properly in the language markets: translate the content that wins in English and diagnose why the German pages are not ranking.
3Run a full competitor analysis starting with bottom of the funnel HR software keywords, then optimize the 600 gap keywords.
4Restyle in-content links and recommended reading blocks so readers can actually see them.
What we learned (steal these)
Multilingual SEO is more than translating your glossary. If your English pages outrank your German pages in Germany, the localization strategy is not working.
When a competitor gets five times your traffic from the same number of pages, study what they are doing before you publish anything new.
Strong fundamentals get you growing, but empty author pages and invisible links are the kind of basics that quietly cap how far you go.
Signed and grilled by
Yaron · Ben · Itay
SEO Bros · S1
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