Neostar is a car-rental marketplace launched by a leading car retailer company in Croatia. Their goal was to position Neostar as a leading car-rental website in the region and connect that to the wide array of services and products the overarching retailer company provides.
Client
Neostar
Expertise
Research
Strategy
Implementation
Operations
Year
2020 - 2021
Challenges
- Avoid index bloat due to a huge amount of new layered navigation pages potentially indexed on the search engines.
- The client’s e-commerce manager desired to control which faceted navigation pages they wanted to show on the search engines in the short and long term, based on the current & new long-tail keywords, without having to create new pages and handle everything manually.
- Existing plugins for the chosen CMS (NopCommerce) required heavy reliance on developer teams or simply lacked flexibility/requirements to cover important SEO aspects of faceted navigation (like cannibalization).
Solution
- We designed a specification for the developers to build a custom functionality/plugin for controlling faceted navigation for SEO, so that relevant facets could be added programmatically and implemented in a way that automatically solves all the potential issues like cannibalization.
- This means that by adding a certain facet combination within the plugin, it auto generates a lot of different pages, each of which targets a narrow keyword like “white bmws up to 25000 euros”.
- We defined a process for the client that enables them to find long-tail keyword clusters and to cover the on-page optimization for said clusters, in order to make use of the new functionality in the long-term.
Results
- Long-tail targeting The new functionality that was developed within the client's CMS specifically for targeting long-tail queries for organic traffic was used for an initial batch of detected long-tail keyword clusters.
- Rapid growth About 3-5 months after the website launched, the faceted navigation pages started to accumulate over 100 clicks per day and continued to generate an average of 26k monthly organic traffic, half of which were non-branded keywords over the following period.
- 13% These faceted navigation pages which were automatically generated by the said functionality were responsible for about 13% of the total amount of organic traffic (non-branded and branded keywords) over the same period.
- Future growth As the traffic grows, it opens up new possibilities for further fine-tuning and optimization down the line.