User Navigation focused on Faceted SEO
About ModelManagement.com
ModelManagement.com is an innovative platform where brands, advertising agencies and professionals from the audiovisual sector (photographers, agencies, producers...) can publish projects to hire models and content creators worldwide. Andreas von Estorff, CEO and founder of the company, defends diversity, transparency, trust and security among users as the main values of the platform. The platform has more than 2 million users and has become the best technological solution, facilitating access and recruitment of models and content creators globally.
Challenge
In terms of organic brand visibility, ModelManagement.com was already a well-recognised player in its sector and enjoyed a leading position in its main European markets. The problem that was detected compared to other smaller competitors was the lack of SEO visibility for generic searches in its main business verticals.
On a technical level, the main challenge was to control the crawling and indexing of a website that had grown disproportionately in number of URLs due to internal User Generated Content practices with its more than 2 million users. Also, resolving issues of duplicate content and endless parameterisation of URLs represented an added difficulty.
Main Goals
- Optimise site's crawl budget by restricting crawling and indexing in specific areas
- Increasing SEO visibility for the company's main services
- Applying faceted SEO techniques within the company's main business verticals
- Correcting duplicate content errors with direct impact on indexing and user experience in Google SERPs
SEO approach & Steps taken
SEO Audit 360º
Due to the complexity and volume of URLs of the website (+2M), a Technical and Content SEO Audit was carried out, divided by specific business areas. After this first audit, the need to restrict the crawling of the website became apparent. We also worked on an SEO Roadmap of actions to be worked on together with both the internal Development teams and the Marketing & Content teams.
Crawl Budget optimization
Being a website with verticals where User Generated Content logics were applied, certain areas were detected where uncontrolled URL generation was hindering ModelManagement.com's performance in search engines. A series of specific actions were implemented to control URL generation and block Googlebot access to certain areas of the site.
Blog Migration
One of the points we worked on was the redesign of the marketplace's Blog. The key points were to maintain the SEO traffic of the main informational queries of the Blog and, at the same time, to generate a new Blog architecture aligned with the main informational search categories within the sector. In this sense, ModelManegement.com was the perfect candidate to support Google's new EEAT guidelines.
Transactional SEO & Local Search intent
Taking into account the international scope of the project, in order to optimise the URLs of transactional services, special emphasis was placed on local search patterns in the main markets in which the marketplace operated. Thus, a thorough SEO analysis of the search intent for specific services of ModelManagement.com was carried out: models, castings, photographers, producers, etc...
Faceted SEO definition
With the insights obtained from the analysis of the search intent by services, faceted SEO navigation logics were applied to the main business verticals of ModelManegement.com. The main challenges were to build the concatenation logics of the new SEO metadata and to generate rules to block crawling on URLs with no SEO value generated by our structure.
Content Enhancements
In order to support the new global service structure through faceted SEO, SEO copy was written in all 6 languages of ModelManagement.com in order to increase the global search engine visibility. At the same time, the canonicalisation of URLs and removal of duplicate content in the areas of User Generated Content were applied.
Incredible results for our International Content Strategy
Sebas managed our SEO project as an external freelance for 18 months, in which we implemented lots of improvements in Tech & content. I can highly recommend working with Sebastian as an SEO expert!
Results
+ 400
Business keywords in Top 10
Thanks to the optimisation through SEO navigation by facets, 400 new keywords corresponding to business services for the model marketplace were positioned.
+ 85%
SEO traffic on Castings URLs
After the implementation of URLs with navigation attributes using the search logics castings + {city} or {country}, an 85 % increase in SEO traffic to this core business vertical for ModelManagement was achieved.
+ 200%
growth in SEO Blog Traffic
Thanks to the migration to a new Blog and the organisation of this through Topic clusters with content differentiated by categories, it was possible to increase SEO traffic by +200% during the first year.
+ 325%
SEO increase on Professional's areas
Along with the launch of the new Professionals area on ModelManagement.com, we also worked on SEO optimisation by search facets, which resulted in a 325% increase in SEO traffic to the new business vertical.