317% organic traffic growth: case SEO for product delivery service Megazakaz

Service: comprehensive SEO promotion
Subject: delivery of goods from the U.S, Europe, and China
Region: Ukraine
Term of cooperation: September 2017 – June 2019

Niche

Megazakaz.com is a resource that provides intermediary services to purchase goods on foreign websites (USA, Europe, China) and their delivery to Ukraine. The website shows the goods on sale on ebay.com, which people can buy through the website’s cart. In addition, the visitor can request to deliver already purchased goods to Ukraine or contact support service through Jivosite or phone.

Goal

The main goal is to increase organic traffic.

Main Issue

The resource was losing positions in organic traffic due to the new website.

Traffic almost halved

Our tasks at the start

1. Audit and identify the main reasons for the traffic drop.
2. Eliminate the errors and stop the drop.
3. Make a plan for further promotion and development of the project.

Website errors after the audit

• All the directory pages of the new site contained a slash at the end of the URL, while the old site’s pages without the slash were indexed in search results.
• Incorrectly formed breadcrumbs for category pages in directories.
• A lot of trash pages in the output.
• Incorrect pagination in directories.
• A lot of pages were non-existent.
• Often there were no h1 headers and/or missing meta tags titles and descriptions.
• Many links led to non-existent pages and others.

Our actions in stages

Step 1: Work with trash pages

1. We changed how filtering works on the site: when choosing any parameters and their variations, all filtering results were formed through a get-parameter. Only the filter for brands remained static.
2. Fixed pagination for all pages where the URL contains “?page=1” and added a 301 redirect to the appropriate category.
3. Fixed the issue with registers in-page URLs. For example, each page of the store had several duplicates of the type:

https://megazakaz.com/shops/hugoboss
https://megazakaz.com/shops/HugoBoss
https://megazakaz.com/shops/HUGOBOSS
https://megazakaz.com/shops/HUGoBOSS

Step 2: Optimize meta tags

Because of the peculiarities of the API, there were many similar categories with the same name. Here’s what we did to make the meta tags unique:

1. Removed duplicate h1 headers for all categories.

2. Made templates for meta tags:

h1: {Category name} – [Subcategory name (penultimate)] (Germany)

3. To make unique meta tags for product cards, prescribed template adding a country.

Step 3: Improve page quality

1. SEO texts. We filled eBay USA and eBay Germany catalog category pages with quality content. We wrote about 50,000 characters of content every month.
2. We added a block with reviews on all the pages of the catalog. Buyers write live reviews on the site, the administration responds – the block is constantly updated.
3. Added descriptions, titles, and reviews to the store pages.
4. Catalog translations. We translated category names from English, German, and Polish into Russian in all the catalogs.
   In the screenshot, you can see the dynamics of traffic growth after the translation of the catalog eBay DE
5. Fixed the header tag generation template. We added the category name to the h1 generation template for product cards.

Step 4: Accelerate website indexing

1. Created blocks with links to internal pages of the site:
   • added a block with links to all the brands of a particular category on the product cards;
   • added a block with random links to products in the main category;
   • in the footer, created three static links from each parent category of the eBay US catalog;
   • on the pages of the stores displayed a module “Popular categories” in the catalog of eBay US and displayed static links to the categories of the 4-5 levels of nesting;
   • on the store pages created a block with a link to the category of the eBay US store.
2. Created separate XML maps for pages that were scanned but not indexed from Google Search Console reports.
3. Divided the HTML map of the site https://megazakaz.com/ebay/allcategory into pagination pages.
4. Minify the HTML code of the listing pages, which significantly affected the speed of indexing the site pages.
5. Optimized filtering code by removing links with a get-parameter. As a result, poor-quality pages are not indexed.

Step 5: External ranking factors

Poor-quality links were rejected through the Disavow Links tool.

We used the following types of links to build up the link mass:

1. We placed quality crowdsourced links on thematic forums and in the comments under YouTube videos every month.
2. Outreach. We selected quality news resources, wrote promotional material, and placed it directly.

Prescribed 301 redirect from the broken pages of the site, which external quality donors referenced to transfer link weight.

Step 6: Create a language version of the website

To create a language version of the website

• created the Ukrainian version of the site and catalog eBay US in a subfolder/ua;
• translated all meta tags, info pages, and all texts for the eBay US catalog into the Ukrainian language;
• created separate HTML and XML maps of the site;
• bought crowd-links to speed up the indexing of pages.

Results

1. Organic traffic growth was 317.6%:
2. 2.5 times more traffic in 2019 than in 2016:
3. Achieved a fivefold increase in the number of search phrases, according to Serpstat:
4. Improved the position of the site on the major frequency queries:  keyword phrase, position, and frequency.