eBay SEO Case Study

Client

eBay

eBay is a world-famous online trading platform where you can buy goods on an auction basis. The company provides services to online stores and sellers for products sales. In addition to the auction format, it is possible to purchase goods the traditional way, at a fixed price.

eBay acts as a dealer when entering the sale and purchase contract between a seller and a buyer. Order payment and its consignment take place without eBay participation.

The site provides tools to increase sales, publishes instructions for sellers and a lot of useful information about running an online business both on the main website and in all popular social networks.

ru.ebay.com

Start of work:

06.2019

Country or region:

Russia

SEO
Marketplaces and classifieds

Project Goals

Organic traffic and registrations growth

Difficulties
and Solutions

URL Structure, Content Duplicates and Problems With Core Web Vitals

As part of the technical audit, we found the following issues:

20% of the site pages have URL with Russian transcription. We do not recommend using Cyrillic in URL. According to the standard, each Cyrillic letter must be encoded with 6 other characters, which makes the URL unreadable and too long.
Duplicate content: the same content was laid out on the different site pages.
Low LCP scores. Largest Contentful Paint is the time for rendering the largest content element on the first screen of the monitor. LCP is an important metric for visually perceived loading speed, taken into account by the Google Core Web Vitals algorithm and affects the site ranking.

We have developed recommendations to eliminate the identified issues. Despite the difficulties in implementing changes on a foreign platform, 50% of technical errors were eliminated.

Five Language Versions

The site offers five language versions: RU, EN, ES, IW and PT. We suggested our client to use a specialized tag which determines the document language and automatically selects in which language to show the content. The client implemented this recommendation, which allowed to link several language versions and increase relevance.

Publications in Yandex.Zen

In addition to posting new text content proximately on the site, we have identified an optional work priority: publishing articles in Yandex.Dzen. Client’s colleagues are engaged in writing and posting content, and we, in return, think over a list of topics, for example:

how to sell products internationally online;
what can be sold from Russia to Europe;
risks of online trading.

We have also prepared detailed tasks for writing articles, including the text structure, headings, and main keywords.

Results Achieved

The result of our work – 3,5 times more visits from organic search over 2 years, and of course, there is more to come. Thanks to the launch of work to fill the site with new content, as well as the channel development in Yandex.Dzen, we expect positive indicators dynamics in the future.

High project results have been achieved with the help of the client’s team: programmers, copywriters and other specialists, without their assistance we would not have been able to eliminate a number of technical errors and optimize the site. We would like to mention such qualities of the colleagues as professionalism, flexibility in decision making and open-mindedness.