It took many discovery and auditing efforts to determine what needed to be done to turn things around for AutohausAZ. When dealing with a new website with over 1,000,000 pages, even the smallest technical tweak to the backend could have severe implications to the overall functionality of the site.
The first challenge our team faced was to stop the bleeding the new site was experiencing, which had just over 1,100 keywords ranking in the top 3 positions of Google leading into July 2018. This number was historically lower than the keyword performance the client was accustomed to.
Rather than adding new pages, we strategically prohibited Google from crawling hundreds of thousands of indexed pages which offered little to no SEO value to the client’s primary objectives.
Although it took a few months to restructure the site, determine which pages were needed, and block those unnecessarily indexed, 1SEO was able to identify the pages with the most potential. 1SEO’s team elected to optimize the core vehicle makes (Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, VW, Porsche, Audi) pages, producing a more comfortable shopping experience for the users who visit those pages. We first focused our efforts on the vehicle makes that will generate the most revenue, so AutohausAZ and 1SEO collectively agreed to set our sights on the Mercedes Benz pages.
We also worked to improve user experience for both mobile and desktop users, utilizing tools such as HotJar “heatmaps” to see how users were physically interacting with particular pages. We found that users weren’t having the “traditional” eCommerce experience they were used to. The pages they were landing on had too much content and few actual products to interact with.
Our team used these heat maps to help guide us in terms of restructuring the core pages to mimic a more comfortable eCommerce experience, such as adding a popular product feed and shuffling the vast majority of content to the bottom of the site’s core pages.
Through 1SEO’s technical & user-experience audits of AutohausAZ.com, our team noticed that there was a tremendous amount of duplicate content on the client’s website, as well as a lack of optimized content throughout the category level pages.
Not only were the core pages busy, but there was no clear direction in terms of where the user should go next to make a purchase. The client’s only direction was completely reliant upon getting site visitors to use the search tool, so if a user didn’t take advantage of that on-page feature, whichever page they landed on was basically a dead end. We added more clear paths for the user to follow, improving their overall shopping experience.
To address these issues, 1SEO’s development team took a silo approach to pass along page power and send maximal link equity to the correct group of similar core web pages. For example, when a user visits a Mercedes page, the page power is only passed down to the other Mercedes pages, instead of diluting the equity across every page.
To gain valuable .edu/.gov backlinks, 1SEO’s team implemented an AutohausAZ Scholarship campaign which ran from September 2018 – March 2019 that provided financial awards to the top three entries from young adults looking to pursue secondary education. This not only created a unique opportunity for the client to engage with their audience, but it also allowed them to give back to those who were loyal to the AutohausAZ brand throughout their online struggles.
Given the on-page opportunity created by the scholarship page, the 1SEO team structured the essay prompts around “Mercedes Benz” and “BMW” components to drive more traffic to their respective pages.
In just one year since turning to 1SEO Digital Agency, AutohausAZ has seen tremendous growth not only in terms of generating organic traffic to the site, with a focus on Mercedes Benz pages, but in earning more purchases and revenue as well.
Our work increased their ranking keywords in the top 3 positions from 1,100 to over 1,800.
Mercedes Benz Pages: Year-over-year Results
Through organic traffic alone, AutohausAZ saw an increase of over 50% in revenue to core category pages.
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