Audi SEO Case Study

Client

Audi

The history of the brand goes back to the early days of the auto industry:

In 1899 the brilliant German engineer August Horch founded his first automobile plant and laid the foundation of the future concern.
In 1932 four automobile companies in Saxony (the famous four rings on the logotype — Horch, DKW, Wanderer and Audi) combined and formed the company Auto Union AG (“Auto Union”). In pre-war Germany it was the second largest one. This company is considered the predecessor of the current Audi AG concern.
In 1964 Audi became part of the Volkswagen Group.
In 1998 the brand officially came to Russia.

Nowadays Audi is one of the world leaders of the premium passenger cars manufacture:

More than 87 thousand people are employed there; 60 thousand of them work in Germany.
Cars of the brand are officially presented in more than 100 markets.
Audi has 19 industrial sites in 12 countries.

Among the priority activities of the concern is the development of new models and environmental technologies of the future.

audi.ru

Start of work:

03.2019

Country or region:

Russia

SEO
Vehicles and spare parts

Project Goals

Growth of positions in the TOP-10
Organic traffic growth
Growth in behavioral metrics and conversions

Difficulties
and Solutions

Global Platform

Audi websites operate on a single global platform in most countries of the world. Unfortunately, developing this platform, SEO requirements were not given enough attention. As a result, even commonplace search engine optimization techniques, such as editing titles in <title> tags, were not easy to implement. In the course of working with the importer’s site, we encountered many important problems: both with the technical features of the platform, which prevent the site from being indexed correctly, and with CMS limitations related to optimizing navigation and page content.

As the possibilities for optimizing the site were very limited due to the peculiarities of the platform, we focused on those elements of the site and pages that we could influence and worked with them. We were assisted by a local agency which implemented changes to the site.

Current Site Optimization

SEO-support of official dealers was a separate direction within the project. We tracked the visibility of dealers by region and gave targeted recommendations to individual dealers:

titles and meta tags optimization;
content optimization;
commercial factors improvement.

Two blocks of general recommendations for the dealer platform were also developed:

Technical recommendations. Site indexing management, navigation optimization, site loading speed optimization, recommendations for Schema.org markup implementation, etc.
UX and content recommendations. Separation of the importer’s content and the dealer’s content, the use of important tags for SEO, optimization of the internal links texts, composition recommendations, etc.

We have analyzed the dealers’ websites and we have provided examples of dealer websites typical mistakes in our recommendations.

Results Achieved

In spite of the limited opportunities, for the year of work we have managed to achieve a substantial improvement of the site rankings in organic search by targeted keywords:

The share of keywords in Yandex TOP-10 increased from 35% to 76%, in the TOP-3 – from 22% to 56%.
In Google TOP-10 – from 30% to 65%, in the TOP-3 – from 17% to 45%.

We thank VOLKSWAGEN Group Rus team for the opportunity to work with the legendary brand!