Challenge
Vivastreet is one of the world’s top ten sites in the online classified ads industry, operating in 16 territories. It offers users a simple and sociable shopping and selling experience through its extensive choice of adverts. Users can buy and sell a range of services and products to the general public, from transport and massage services to property and cars. The Problem Vivastreet had historically enjoyed strong organic performance but saw a slowdown in growth over the course of several years, both in the UK and internationally. Due to the size and complexity of the international sites, we suspected that the cause was a combination of underlying technical SEO issues and changes to the wider search landscape.
Solution
To be certain that Google was crawling and indexing the sites correctly, we needed to ensure that they were technically sound through a comprehensive technical site audit that aimed to outline all areas for improvement. As all the sites utilised the same template, a lot of the recommendations were universally applicable. However, we also recognised the need to perform secondary analysis on each individual property to be certain there were no leftover errors. The extended technical audit included: XML sitemap diagnostics to make the site easier to crawl Penalty analysis to determine whether the site was being held back by an algorithmic action or a penalty Sub-domain migration analysis to highlight lingering issues from a website migration carried out prior to appointing us A thorough review of over half a million URLs, categories, and filters Detailed site structure analysis to identify redundant and duplicated URLs A review of hreflang setup to ensure correct implementation for appropriate geographic/linguistic audience targeting Structural analysis to make sure that the various properties remained untangled from each other
Results
We produced a comprehensive 180-page technical audit with over 155 action points to be implemented by their web development team. We also provided a detailed report on site structure outlining areas for improvement across thin categories, vanity categories, user intent, and more. Since commencing our partnership, their Sistrix organic visibility score has increased by approximately 286%, driving an additional 600,000 organic users per month to the site, with organic revenue increasing by 18% YOY, comparing October 2018-May 2019 to October 2017-May 2018.
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