BLUERANK & MASCUS – BETTER TOGETHER

ABOUT MASCUS

Mascus aims to be the top-of-mind classifieds platform for both buyers, sellers and auctioneers of used heavy equipment in the following industries: construction, mining, agriculture, transportation, material handling, forestry and groundscare.

Company’s target audience includes Mascus customers (6,000) and prospects such as large OEMs with an international dealers’ network, local heavy machinery dealers and private end users. Some of them are also interested in detailed specifications, manuals and technical data of heavy machinery.

80% of the audience consists of men aged 25-54.

CHALLENGE

Every year, the SEO Mascus project becomes more and more demanding. At the beginning of the cooperation 12 years ago, Mascus was based in only 5 countries. Bluerank has started the ongoing platform optimization and created foundations for further organic EU expansion. Over time, we faced more challenges – the increased number of countries, new languages, bilingual countries, managing local teams and responding to Google Algorithm updates every year.

That has led us to 2018 and an advanced international cooperation with 8 EU SEO agencies, 54 countries globally (32 countries/28 teams in EU) and also 14,2M organic page views, 22,4M indexed URLs, and 427,000 classified ads duplicated over 32 domains to handle monthly in the EU region.

At the same time, the organic traffic growth has become flattened off.

KEY OBJECTIVES

1. INCREASE IN ORGANIC TRAFFIC (H2 YoY): +5-10%

2. INCREASE IN CONVERSION: Contact requests (H2 YoY): +10%

3. IMPROVING LOCAL TEAMS’ EFFICIENCY

STRATEGY

The strategy was based on thorough implementation of the following activities delivered to all 32 EU countries in 25 languages:

IMPLEMENTATION & CREATIVITY

SEO texts

Creating SEO-optimized texts for categories with the highest number of local ads and traffic growth potential. This part was developed both on Bluerank’s, local agencies’ and local teams’ side. KG Media was one of the agencies that, as part of the CEEDA cooperation, helped in content creation.

We utilized the language skills and local market knowledge of each team to create the best quality content. Bluerank held the role of the SEO manager and consultant, shaping SEO strategy and implementation.

Blog creation

Blog posts and industry reports were optimized for long-tail, industry-related keywords with the use of local trends and in-house database data.

Articles were written by the local teams and experts. Again, we were coordinating it for 25 local languages and 32 ccTLDs versions (40 texts monthly).

Crawl budget optimization

Crawl budget optimization: an average Mascus site has 700K indexed pages. If you multiply it by 32 ccTLD domains, it gives you 22,4M indexed pages to take care of! To improve Mascus’s crawl rates and remove duplications:

• Duplicated ads were canonicalized to the newest ones. We decreased the number of duplicated ads from 150M URLs to 13,7M.
• Ads that were 1 month+ older were deindexed using 410 HTTP response code.
• Faster servers were introduced.
• HTTPS protocol was implemented.
• Hreflangs were optimized.
• WAF (Web Application Firewall) was implemented to get rid of spam bots and boost server response time.
• Locator directory for heavy machinery companies (20% of all internal pages) and other thin content pages were deindexed.

Implementations resulted in delivering more quality traffic directly to ads pages (+27,5% in organic traffic), which led to higher conversion rates.

Getting ready for Mobile-First Index

Technical optimization to make sites as light as possible (JS minification, removing all heavy add-ons).

Desktop and mobile consistency – making sure the same or similar content (e.g. SEO texts) is visible on both device types.

AMP fine-tuning.

Google Analytics implementation

Introduction of the extended e-commerce module allowing detailed tracking of user interactions with the ads, for example abandoned conversion paths, or which ads are characterized by the highest CTR or represent a high purchase value despite low exposure.

RESULTS (KEY OBJECTIVE VS FINAL 2018 RESULT)

1. INCREASE IN ORGANIC TRAFFIC

(H2 YoY): +5-10%

FINAL GROWTH:

21% (+2,5M SESSIONS)

2. INCREASE IN CONVERSION:

Contact requests (H2 YoY): +10%

FINAL GROWTH:

+13,1% (+11,9K REQUESTS)

3. IMPROVE LOCAL TEAMS EFFICIENCY AND TASKS

COMPLETION (H2 YoY) KPIS BY:

Number of SEO texts and blog posts written: +10%.

FINAL GROWTH: +22%

Response rate and implementation time of technical recommendations with the use of JIRA ticketing system: +50%

FINAL GROWTH: +250%

Thanks to regular follow-ups, calls and convincing the Mascus CEO to have a dedicated IT person for SEO implementations, the response rate to tech issues went down from avg. 14 days to 4 days – 250% growth. Implementation time was cut from 40 days to 14 days – 186% growth.