Does SEO ever frustrate you?

There are so many things you need to keep track of; content, links, keywords, rankings, competitors… The list goes on.

It is an overwhelming adventure for most of us.

Not to mention the scary truth that Google could change the game whenever they want, and within a heartbeat your SEO ranking could disappear.

It’s happened before.

In 2014 Google released an update to its Panda algorithm that penalized low-quality sites or those with “thin content”.

One of the biggest brand casualties from this update was eBay, who saw an 80% decrease in organic traffic, and an estimated hit of almost $200 million in bottom line revenue.

Google’s Panda slammed eBay for poor SEO practices.

Image Source: Word Stream

What would happen if you lost 80% of your traffic? Would your business stay afloat?

For eBay, turning around this big hit to their SEO wasn’t going to be a quick fix. But the even bigger challenge was making sure it didn’t happen again, because search traffic was at the core of the success of their business.

How eBay stopped this from happening again and got back on track

The number one thing that made a difference for eBay was accessing actionable insights and data about their performance, and adapting their strategy accordingly.

“Search is an important driver of traffic which can translate into sales. So we need to have an accurate picture of how we are doing in search and how our natural search activity is working. How do we compare against others in our market and what are the latest developments in search? We need to be able to answer these questions.”

Maxime Rauer, Manager Natural Search at eBay.

But they faced the additional challenge of delivering a unified solution for SEO tracking and insights across global teams. This wasn’t a mom and pop store looking to get a bit of extra local search traffic – this was massive.

In the past eBay’s marketing team had relied on a set of separate tools across multiple regions to track this important data. They soon recognized that to avoid disasters like this in the future and improve their performance, they needed a consistent and unified view across the whole organization.

After running an in-depth product search including pilot trials and evaluations, eBay chose to go with the Searchmetrics Suite.

What is Searchmetrics?

The Searchmetrics Suite is an enterprise level product that automates many of the time-consuming aspects of SEO analysis, monitoring and reporting.

It helps you monitor keywords, evaluate links, compare domains or identify what your competitors are doing.

“We use Searchmetrics to monitor rankings for our chosen keywords in the various regions, and to benchmark against competitors.”

Maxime Rauer, Manager Natural Search from eBay.

Searchmetrics became like a low-cost insurance policy for the huge online retailer. Organic search traffic is the lifeblood of their business, so protecting that traffic was essential.

What happened next for eBay?

Almost a year after the initial Panda 4.0 updates, eBay started to see a positive turn around in their organic traffic numbers.

Their investment into performance monitoring, competitor analysis and data-driven insights proved to be the right one. Without an all-in-one software like Searchmetrics, it could’ve taken eBay much longer to see a turn around in results.

This data also provides piece of mind for the future, knowing that their finger is on the pulse when it comes to good SEO practices.

So why should you care?

One of the refreshing things about the Searchmetrics platform is it eliminates the overly complex side of SEO and helps you find the information you need to improve your performance.

If you run a global enterprise that needs organic traffic to survive, and are juggling the challenges and headaches of multiple teams, domains and geographies – Searchmetrics is worth a look.

How are you managing the risk associated with an online business and the reliance on organic search traffic?

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post for Searchmetrics. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

