Nertis Agency
How Alibaba's sub Visable went from zero to 50k clicks monthly using programmatic SEO
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Image from LinkedIn page of Visable
Acquired by Alibaba Group in late 2023, Visable SA is the operator of Europe’s leading B2B marketplace featuring 2.8 million Europe’s companies.
Company bio
Visable is owner of wlw.de (it's German, Austrian and Swiss versions) and europages.de (as well as 25 other European sites), large European B2B e-commerce marketplaces.
Industry: e-Commerce, B2B.
The problem
The existing CRM system used on the stage of onboarding allowed merchants to choose their activity keywords from a preset list (the taxonomy), which created a serious restriction as to the number of keywords as well as to the quality of results.
The problem was the how to radically increase the number of Category pages being constrained by the customer keyword choices that linked product description pages to categories.
Image from Alibaba website
What We've Seen
Challenge
The high level concern was how to effectively increase the number of pages served to search engines without prejudicing their quality? In the eCommerce marketplace business model,
- the number of indexed URLs per merchant as well as
- the number of search terms per merchant
is a key metric of SEO strategy.
The work with the Alibaba Group team (who capitalized on their large eCommerce experience) was both fast but also challenging. Counting on the massive development capabilities and speed of execution, I needed to translate the SEO best practices and requirements into the new model of business processes.
Photo from Visable SA website
We knew that category pages were most effective. So, we needed merchants to upload and describe their products, whereas our job was to create as many pertinent category pages from these product pages (PDPs) as possible.
BOHDAN LYTVYN
Founder, Nertis
The approach
From the SEO point of view, in the business model of marketplaces there exists a distribution of core assignment that drastically decreases the cost of production of content (another core metric). Likewise, merchants are incentivised to create product descriptions, upload images, videos, etc. The marketplace does the tech SEO and quality assurance job: attribution of products to CPV (Category - Product - Value), help creating informative titles, assuring the absence of “thin” content, duplication, similarity of content, etc.
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Striking the perfect balance between merchants’ and marketplace’s job was the approach
This is how the idea of an SEO platform appeared.
What did I do?
Photo from LinkedIn page of Visable
The work included - on the first stage - developing a programmatic SEO tool that enabled keywords discovery, expansion as well as attribution of PDPs to multiple category pages. On a second stage, - the programmatic creation of landing pages, on-page elements as well as internal links management etc.
The Full List Of Functions Included
- module of keywords management with a keywords expansion feature
- landing pages creation feature,
- internal links management,
- on-page element management, as well as a
- solution for (external) link building and
- automated sitemaps management.
Scope of work
The Principal Assignment Included
- SEO research and business analysis
- Internal discussion reports to align both teams
- PRDs for SEO-related tasks
- Roadmaps and SEO checklists
- SEO education of internal stakeholders
- SOP (Standard Operating Procedures)
"A minimum acceptable scenario is when a marketplace is able to describe a product by a set of keywords even if a merchant fails to do so by himself/ herself."
BOHDAN LYTVYN
Founder, Nertis
Photo from Visable SA website
The central element of this platform - a keyword expansion - comprised the following elements:
Keywords collecting
The platform gathered keywords from several sources, including the company’s Google Search Console, internal search results or “What people were searching” as well as manual inputs.
Keywords seeding
The keywords collected were marked to include their "heritage" categories, landing page they belong to as well as their expansion potential.
These seeds are pushed for expansion in buckets, one bucket consists of:
- a principle keywords,
- expansion rules and
- resulting keywords.
Keywords expansion
Buckets Are Scheduled And Served To Google Keywords Planner API And SemRush API For Expansion, I.e. Creating a List Of New Keywords That Are Related To The Seed. For Certain Queries 3-in-1 Process Was Envisaged
- expansion,
- synonymisation and
- localisation of keywords.
Primary quality check
Removing stop words, keywords containing brand names, etc.
Enabling filters
Our Idea Was To Enable Keyword Management From Here
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- search by database and
- filtering by keyword type,
- Google trends,
- level of competition,
- relevance of results (scoring),
- number of products in the database against a specific keyword, etc.
SEO Results, stage 1
Number of quality keywords after expansion rose x20.
BOHDAN LYTVYN
Founder, Nertis
Keywords expansion: x20. One collected or sourced keyword would result in around 20 quality and relevant keywords. As a result of the primary stage of application of this tooling, the number of keywords on a website rose from 240,000 something keywords to 1.1 million keywords. To the date, the number has exceeded 21 million keywords.
SEO results, overall
The new type of pages went all the way from zero to 20% of total website traffic, i.e. to some 50 '000 of clicks from organic search monthly.
Results of application of keywords expansion with automatic creation of landing pages, including creating HTML tags, internal linking and more.
+50k clicks
in SEO traffic
Screenshot from Google Search Console
About Bohdan Lytvyn
Full background and approach — bohdanlytvyn.com
Bohdan Lytvyn
"WASTELESS GROWTH" BOOK AUTHOR
17 years in SEO and growth strategy. Former Senior SEO Manager at Alibaba's European subsidiary. Worked with B2B marketplaces, SaaS platforms, eCommerce businesses, and digital-first companies across Europe.
Based in Paris. Working in English and French.
I don't run an agency that assigns you to a junior team. I'm the person who does the diagnostic, designs the strategy, and delivers the work.
Nertis is a trade name of Monsieur Bohdan LYTVYN.
Address: 2 La Basse Charmoie, Fontaine-Simon, 28240, France
SIRET: 94910495400019
TVA: FR57949104954
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