CARS24.COM CASE STUDY

 

Cars24.com is one of India’s largest car classifieds platforms – an online portal to help people find a car near them.

Cars 24 – The Clients Situation

Cars24.com approached SEO Audits IO for an audit to evaluate their website technology, composition of nav and index. The audit was needed to help fuel organic growth and address traffic losses on the classifieds side of the website (offset with article traffic). 

The websites traffic was stable – however article content would yield a gain whilst transactional traffic was down – the offset meant levels were stable BUT clearly not good for the business model.

How We Helped

SEO Audits IO conducted a behemoth SEO audit for cars24.com – the audit was a comprehensive analysis and tear down of current organic performance, URL grouping performance analysis, query performance and page query insights analysis, content audit, link audit, user experience audit and more! 

 

    We helped by providing complete identification of issues and proposed resolution.

Addressing Click Losses

A key part of the audit requriement was to help click losses for traffic of purchase intent – the off set of traffic losses with articles doesn’t bring with it the same commercial value. So – the audit was a segmented teardown of their index, segmenting URLS into specific groups, identifying what parts of the index were losing queries and why – and generating a process for CARS24.com to follow to resolve the decline in queries and subsequently the loss of traffic.

Link Spam & Face Value Link Metrics

During any audit – we do a full tear down to identify links of value, links of contextual relevance and to weed out link spam / aggregated link spam, tiered links and other link tactics – not all cases of link spam will be client initiated – many can be unaware of agency / SEO tactics used to amplify “at the time organic performance” by short cutting link acquisition with tiered links and link juicing – we identified a fair amount of link spam used to inflate face value link metrics.

 Content Weighting & Accessibility

During the audit – looking at pages of transactional intent – we identified issues with link equity distribution and impedance in content accessibility that would ultimately go on to lower content weighting. During an NLP content audit we looked at TRUE link counts vs crawl link counts to see if the distribution was right and whether link equity would flow down to content on the domain. We also looked at content accesibility and the prioritisation of content by cluster.

Competing on Product

Coverage is an important ranking factor – applied in any number of ways – understanding how CARS24.COM performed against competitors in SERP was key – could they compete on product coverage? did they utilise all available enhancements for maximum SERP CTR? Was their landing page offering comprehensive enough? We identified everything in relation to where the client had gaps and what was needed from a strategic standpoint.

Dead Content Index

Accumulations of dead URLS over time can have an adverse impact on a domain – it was clear after running a filtered content correlation analysis and segmenting out URLS that were dead that there were various content issues that needed adressing – a lot of content was dead when it shouldn’t have been – poor accessibility as part of a single page application framework lead to lots of content never gaining traction – creating a drag down effect.

On Site & Core Web Vital Issues

There were various issues relating to the websites core web vitals – more with cumulative layout shift – using a CLS debugger we were able to identify the HTML elements that caused high levels of CLS on various pages throughout the website – there were also issues with excess code, unused javascript (localised) and more that were identified.
 

Search Console Coverage & Exclusion Issues

The volume of pages being crawled and not indexed had continued to climb – which was thanks to dynamic parameter driven URLS that allowed for randomised sequences to count as another URL that was crawled but not indexed – a lack of parent canonical fueled this also. There were also numerous other issues relating to website application that lead to a growth in crawled/discovered currently not indexed.

User Behaviour – A Telling Story?

Looking at user behaviour was key to understand how people traversed pages across the domain – looking for 1st to 4th interactions and understanding common / non common paths – seeing how people used functionality, filters and whether their engagement was impeded in any way – we set up various custom segments for new / visiting users who did and didn;t engage – along with many other combined behaviour segments. 

 

End Guidance for the Client

We provided end guidance as to why their SEO strategy was going nowhere and the best thing that could be done. We gave clear and concise information for the client to decide on.

Opera Beds – The Outcome

Opera Beds have been working on the resolutions highlighted by our audit process. They have since taken resource inhouse to build links, generate content and strengthen their overall organic profile.

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