This post is by Yasha Harari, Fiverr’s SEO expert.
How Fiverr’s SEO Strategy Evolved:
2014 was a year of many changes and upgrades for SEO around the internet. There were more than a dozen significant updates and changes in Google algorithms, and plenty more in other search engines like Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo.
One big change in nearly all of the search engines was the growth in importance of on-site SEO. In recent years, improved on-site optimization was being given more weight and value compared to the old off-site methods. These off-site ways include link networks, guest blogging, content marketing, and other techniques, which have worked wonders for a long time. 2014 was not their best year (even though they still worked well for many sites that used them). Instead, across the ecommerce industry (in B2B and B2C), we saw an increase in rankings and KPIs in sites and brands that were authoritative, optimized for humans as well as machines, and transparent (in as much as they can be).
On top of that, social signals began to shine. More than just a theoretical barometer of relevant noise for the search engines to detect, social network pings and their related metrics were now causing otherwise rank and file pages to load at or near the top of various SERPs. In fact, social signals were so prevalent that one major social fingerprint, known as Google Authorship, was quashed, due to its ease of misuse and false priming of sites by ne’er-do-wells.
Of course, mobile has mattered more and more for SEO (or ASO) over the past 12 months. Though it’s still in its early years and is far from killing the desktop or laptop, last year saw significant mobile SEO improvements in Google search.
Given these major changes, it may come as no surprise to you that over the past year, Fiverr’s SEO architecture and strategy underwent a major overhaul.
Our Approach
We started with the basics: Title, Description, High Quality Content, Navigation, Sitemap, Canonical & default/x-default.
We went ahead and adjusted Titles. This alone caused various crawlers to re-index the site with fresh updates.
We updated Descriptions for Categories, and edited various descriptive texts on key pages, which helped the search engine crawlers better understand the content of each page. This helped put various key categories in the organic spotlight again, and that helped those categories earn significantly improved links. In some cases, it naturally boosted the SERP ranks of several of these categories jump to #1 for highly competitive keywords and keyword phrases of one or two words.
Next, we massively reduced the links on the pages. We cut out hundreds of them and brought down the number of crawlable links per page (on as many pages as possible) to within the search-crawler friendly limit of less than 100 links per page. Overall, we cut out millions of internal links.
While this seems like a significant drop in links pointing to Fiverr, in fact, the dropped links are not “lost” and that this change has proven to be a good thing. These links are all still in Google, via sitemaps and the site’s organic crawlability.
It is also worth noting that the extra millions of links were all self-referencing and duplicate links that were causing an abuse of Googlebot whenever it crawled the site. This change of practice means Fiverr is now much more energy efficient, Gbot friendly, and reduces resource requests. And those are just some of the rewards for being greener and more eco-friendly with our optimization for search engines.
Of course, cutting out so many links meant, among other things, restructuring the site’s main footer, and moving various links to related section-links pages. This alone helped boost the site’s load time and scores, including rankings. These performance increases led to a higher conversion grade, since it greatly improved the user experience; people want faster loading pages with fewer links, not the other way around.
We then moved towards slightly more advanced elements of metadata.
On top of that, we began including various elements of microdata, namely the protocol from schema.org. We first applied them to a tiny corner of the marketplace, focused on helping to improve the bots’ understanding of the images on the pages in a relatively small category of the services catalog.
And then the engineers and developers went ahead and unleashed some of their genius. They did this by implementing a special system to comply with Google’s requirements for AJAX calls. Doing this again improved site speed further.
The Operations engineers then moved the entire site to HTTPS, which both secured the site better, and boosted the site’s rankings by a couple percentage points. And they maintained continuous monitoring of the site’s responsiveness. This boosted the site’s rankings even further, by greatly reducing crawl errors.
We also reviewed and did major updates the sitemap where necessary. Shortly after implementation, we were granted some kind of early access to enhanced sitemap links for Android users. This improved the user experience of Android users, by providing them links to content that was better suited to their device.
Content Quality
We then focused on the quality of content, both in the Fiverr marketplace’s service catalog, and on the Fiverr Blog.
The marketplace’s services (also knows as Gigs) underwent structural and visual changes that made the information on the page easier for humans to quickly comprehend and act upon. These changes also made it easier for the search engine crawlers to read and understand.
A smarter on-site search was then designed, tested, and implemented by our Product Management and Development experts. The results of that update were significant, as users now generally find what they are searching for much faster than before. And an improved User Experience is normally good for SEO.
The site’s cloud infrastructure for certain data deliveries was then upgraded, and now delivers pages approximately twice as fast as before.
We also worked on improving performance of the blog. We did this because the blog’s activity is a hub of important reach, use, and feedback from a highly engaged community of participants. The blog focuses on topics of interests to customers, sellers, entrepreneurs and technophiles. They certainly don’t hold back their opinions, and their comments are often exceptionally useful insights that might otherwise be hard to discover. So we edited the contents of select articles on the blog that would help generate better search results for people searching for related topics off-site.
And of course, we increased the internal coordination between teams. By synching more regularly with key staff, we were able to increase the alignment of various simultaneous projects being developed and implemented across different departments. This permitted our SEO efforts to gain more traction than they might otherwise have had. This was especially clear in work done between the SEO and Corporate Communications department, as well as SEO and the Social Media teams.
These and other changes which were implemented were all contributing factors in helping Fiverr’s leading Organic KPIs improve by double, sometimes triple, digit percentages within a very short period of time. In fact, we reached our initial annual goal within two months of launching the year’s strategy, and beat it again just a few months later, and kept it growing until the end of the year.
Rolling along at a nice pace at the start of 2015, our SEO momentum is picking up pace, and we look forward to a year of more change, growth, and strong results.
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