ŠKODA SEO Case Study

Client

ŠKODA

ŠKODA is the largest passenger car manufacturer in the Czech Republic with over 127 years of history. It is one of the main locomotives of the economy of the Czech Republic. Since the early 1990s, it has been part of the German concern Volkswagen AG. Today ŠKODA is one of the most actively developing car brands both in the Russian market and in the world. ŠKODA vehicles are sold in more than 100 countries around the world.

About 95% of new ŠKODA cars sold in Russia are produced at plants in Kaluga and Nizhny Novgorod. A high degree of localization of production allows the brand to successfully compete with other foreign cars. Russia is a key market for ŠKODA, and the company is strengthening its position in our country year by year. In recent years, ŠKODA has consistently entered the TOP-10 car manufacturers in the Russian market in terms of car sales. Since 2009, more than 750,000 ŠKODA vehicles have left the assembly lines of Russian factories.

skoda-avto.ru

Start of work:

03.2018

Country or region:

Russia

SEO
Vehicles and spare parts

Project Goals

Maximization of brand traffic to the official website of the brand:

Maximization of the number of keywords with the ŠKODA brand and models, for which the official website of the brand is in the first places in Yandex and Google search results
Increase in organic search traffic and conversions

Difficulties
and Solutions

Importer Website Platform Change

The first obstacle we encountered was the website’s outdated platform, which was not only in the way of even basic SEO settings, but also created problems for the website to be indexed by search engines. For example, versions of pages for mobile devices were placed in the /mobile/ folder and were not indexed by Yandex.

The new global platform, which other markets were already moving to, also had several disadvantages in terms of SEO: suboptimal website structure, problems with content indexing due to JavaScript, low speed in Russia, etc.

The solution was to develop a local platform. iSEO took an active part in the development of SEO requirements for the platform, testing, preparation for migration and final check after the migration to the new platform. Although not all SEO recommendations were implemented, most of the problems of the previous platform were eliminated. Thanks to the coordinated actions of the iSEO teams and the platform developer, the site moved to a new “engine” without losing traffic.

Finding New Growth Points for Organic Traffic

Why promote the site for branded keywords at all? It should rank first for them anyway, right? But in practice, everything is far from being so simple. If we compare the volume of brand search demand to the amount of traffic that the importer’s website receives from search, we will see that these values differ 10+ times. Many search keywords simply do not have a relevant answer on the official website of the brand, and this is a typical situation for any automaker (not only for ŠKODA).

To attract as much brand traffic as possible, we worked in several directions:

Development of the structure of the section with the model range. For example, we divided the “Builds and prices” and “Specifications” for each model into 2 different pages, which allowed us to significantly improve positions for relevant keywords.
Creation of new entry points for organic traffic. In particular, the section “Model archive” was created to attract traffic for keywords related to discontinued models.
Optimization of all available sections of the website. Not limited to working only with the pages of the model range, we developed recommendations for other sections and subdomains of the website: a catalog of cars in stock, an original accessories store, pages of official dealers, the ŠKODA FAMILY content section, etc.

Dealer Network Migration to a New Platform

Following the change of the platform of the importer’s website, the Russian ŠKODA office decided to also upgrade the “engine” for the websites of official dealers. Migrating over 100 websites to a new platform is a massive task that required us to take a new approach to allocating resources to the project. To cope with such a volume of work, we connected almost all SEO specialists available in the company at that time to checks of dealer websites. Everyone did their bit in the project, which made it possible to complete the task in the shortest possible time.

Results Achieved

Although not all our proposals could be quickly implemented (development resources, unfortunately, are not endless), we managed to:

Successfully migrate both the importer’s and all the dealers’ websites to a new platform.
Increase organic traffic to the importer’s website by 71% in 3 years and increase the number of conversions on the importer’s website by 27% in 2 years.

We thank colleagues from ŠKODA for productive work!