How we did SEO for a drone dealer

Case: Preparing a site for the start of indexing

Client

Our client is the official seller of radio-controlled drone models in Russia. Its product range includes quadcopters, steadicams, spare parts and accessories. All products are completely legal, which means prices are fixed and it is difficult to compete on price.

Tasks

At the time of contacting, the site was completely new and visually attractive, but not optimized for search engines. Our task was to prepare the site for indexing, create a list of SEO recommendations and implement them to attract target users through search engines.

Working period

May–October (5 months)

Situation at the time of application

The site was developed without the participation of SEO specialists and marketers, which led to a number of problems.

The site structure does not take into account semantics

The site was created based on a product catalog, which seems logical, but does not take into account important SEO nuances. For example, accessories for a certain model did not have a separate page, which meant a loss of potential traffic. Also, the site could lose traffic to pages that should have been divided into separate categories:

• Category and tag pages. Potential buyers often search for products through general queries (for example, “buy a quadcopter”), which requires a separate landing page that combines all product options for that category.
• Topical queries such as “cheap quadcopter” or “quadcopter for beginners.” Tags can be used for such requests so as not to create many categories, but appropriate functionality must be provided for this.

Resolving these problems would be expensive and difficult, leading to poor relations with developers.

Lots of takes, poor weight distribution

• Creation of unnecessary service categories, which led to the formation of duplicate pages with identical products.
• The presence of subcategories from which it was difficult to return to the main section.
• Subcategories that confused users, sending them to another section of the site.

Technical problems

The site suffered from many technical flaws: URLs in the form of numbers, the inability to add headings on many pages, not implemented micro markup and other problems that required urgent correction.

Work progress

The work can be roughly divided into two stages: preparing the site for indexing and subsequent marketing efforts.

Stage 1. Optimization before opening the site for indexing

Main work at this stage:

• We performed a technical audit and made the necessary changes to the site structure.
• We collected complete semantics by topic, divided it into clusters and linked it to the site pages.
• We brought the site structure in line with user requests.
• We introduced human-readable URLs (HUR) and corrected the structure of page addresses.
• Changed page templates to support adding headings.
• Developed title, headings and texts for pages.
• Configured canonical, robots, pagination parameters.
• We introduced micro markup to improve visibility in search results.
• We made the transition to the secure https protocol.

At this stage, the most difficult thing was agreeing on changes with the developers, which required long negotiations. We had to move away from some recommendations to make the changes more realistic given time and budget constraints.

Stage 2. Marketing and usability

In terms of marketing, we have made the following changes:

• Added information about dealerships and product warranties.
• Indicate the store address, opening hours and delivery conditions.
• We posted information about drone insurance as a gift and the possibility of purchasing in installments.
• We clarified the information about the availability of goods in stock on the product pages.
• We added the ability to pre-order products that are out of stock.

Result

After implementing all the recommendations, the site began to show the first results within two weeks. In early July, it began to move up in search results, which made it possible to collect behavioral data for further optimization. By August, the site was receiving steady traffic, as evidenced by the graphs showing the increase in traffic for commercial queries.

However, in September, a new law was passed that significantly limited traffic to the site by requiring registration of certain models of drones. Despite this, optimization before indexing was the right decision: if the work was carried out on a “live” site, this could lead to significant drops in search results.

Ideally, SEO work should begin at the site development stage in order to avoid numerous rework, which would save time and resources.

If you have any questions or need advice on SEO, you can write to the SEO studio "SEO COMPUTER" by email: info@seo.computer.