1. Hypermarket of building materials.
I will not name the brand name, today we will do without names at all. You may have been there and even bought something.
So, the start of work is the beginning of 2016.
Quite standard work: collecting semantics, creating meta tags, shoveling the entire product catalog, developing filters, implementing micro-markup, tag generation templates in products, pages with filters, simultaneously sending TK to change the structure of the catalog in 1C and monitoring all work.
The customer’s programmers implemented everything quickly and without any special jambs.
The result of all these works was a constant increase in search traffic, and below is the peak value for November 2018.
OK, everything would be fine, but at the beginning of December, the executive director, who initially came to us, is fired. And as I understand it, they are fired for nothing, just a selfish interest.
After that comes the beginning of the end.
I don’t like these filters. We will do a different design. You don’t understand anything. We need a different font. It’s ugly. Competitors don’t do that. There are too many categories. I know better. You’re nobody here to advise me at all.
Mom’s friend’s daughter, Executive director
And so on.
As a result: they pulled a new design without consulting us, the generation of meta tags in products and filters fell off, about half of the previous work was lost, SEO work is accepted, but nothing is implemented, reasoned warnings are completely ignored, the catalog structure is broken.
A brilliant “Download price list” button appeared in the header, apparently, this button has some kind of sacred meaning and mystery inaccessible to mere mortals, like an SEO amulet, dooming traffic and sales growth without carrying out any internal work on the site.
Result by April 2019:
By August, traffic had dropped to 200 thousand search visits per month and continues to slowly creep down. Slowly, because the share of brand requests is quite heavy. But, unfortunately, this can no longer be shown, because access from Yandex.Metrica was taken away from us, blaming all the failures and failures.
Where without it, everything is classic 🙂
2. Online auto parts store for foreign cars.
The store has already arrived with good traffic. The problem is that it has started to stagnate.
A lot of work has begun with semantics and the product catalog. Various filters were thought out, meta tags and new catalog sections were introduced.
Problems with functionality immediately surfaced, which were packaged in TK and sent for implementation.
Traffic for April 2019:
As time went on, the technical improvements made appeared and disappeared on the site, which has an extremely negative effect on the final result.
Then the generation of tags in filters by brands and models of cars works, then it does not work.
Either the catalog filters work, or they don’t.
It was not uncommon for the site to be idle during the daytime with an error of 500.
Then the basket will fall off, then a piece of some code hangs in the catalog instead of a filter, then the properties will fall off, then everything will work again.
Result for August 2019:
The customer is adequate, and we are not like fools, but we can’t do anything. Traffic stagnation. Programmers are working on the insides of the site, you just need to wait.
Cases
1. Online watch store.
A large watch store once approached us with an interesting task: traffic from Google is three times more than traffic from Yandex.
Analyzing the project at the first stage of work, we noticed the following:
The previous contractor collected the full semantics for St. Petersburg and Moscow and implemented it.
They paired the semantics competently, with intersections, synonyms — and this is the whole stuffing.
But the meta tags were created on the principle of “blunder, and so it will do.”
Clustering of keys was, but incorrect, without taking into account the overall structure of the site and not detailed enough.
There is little traffic from Yandex, and there was a lot from Google.
After analyzing the link profile, it turned out that their links are alive, good and top-end, unlike competitors, which is why everything is nice in Google, and not very good in Yandex.
There were no significant technical errors on the site, because the customer’s cool programmers did everything in beauty initially.
There are no filters from Yandex.
Why is there much less traffic from Yandex than from Google?
That’s right, the structure of the site with a tie to semantics was not worked out.
That’s what I talk about all the time. Semantics is the foundation. On a bad foundation, you can continue to sculpt anything, only the results will be so-so. And the marketing budgets of this store are far from 30 thousand hours a month, but many times more, but even they did not really help.
Yandex didn’t like how meta tags are implemented? I didn’t like it. Here you have three times less traffic than with Google. Get it — sign it.
What have you done:
We grouped in detail and highlighted the properties of the product (conditionally frequency and non-frequency), tied the properties to categories. There are properties in the file with semantics — this is done in order to create categories for HF and fundamental (wristwatch — foundation, women’s wristwatch — foundation) queries.
Clusters of fundamental queries were implemented in sections and subsections of the site.
Clusters of RF requests to filters.
The trick is that the filter pages are static.
We sewed the semantics for the rest of the properties into a sidebar filter in the product catalog, which works dynamically for almost everyone, and the cool programmers of the customer were able to make static smart functionality.