Note: This post was originally on my personal blog: https://thomasharvey.me
First I want to start off by thanking everyone who left a comment on our first post, and asked us questions on the forums. It’s really helped us push on with the project and given us some great things to think about.
For those who don’t know what Zebo is, it’s a test between myself and Chris Chedgzoy, it’s a product search engine, returning results from a variety of stores.
We’ve had a great month through October. We started off slow and have built ourselves up to a decent base. We’ve had to tackle the following issues over the past month, some SEO others not.
- Google Crawl Rate
- Bing
- CTR
Google Crawl Rate:
One of the great things about Zebo, is the fact that we’re able to get results on pretty much every product that exists. That’s also our downside, because we have to make sure Google finds our pages, it means that we have a job on our hands here. So far we’ve got 600k+ pages in our sitemap to get crawled: We did a blog on Serpstat as to how we got those keywords: https://serpstat.com/blog/a-client-use-case-how-we-used-serpstat-to-rank-our-project/
We made sure to make the site load as quickly as possible and then setup a test. We turned it off and on, have a look at the crawl rate below:
Week overview:
As you can see, from these tests, site speed has a massive impact on crawl rates. This is how much we cut down before we loaded products.
Before:
After:
As a result, in a month of properly running the site, we’ve managed to get 226k pages indexed.
Bing:
Oh the fun that we’ve had with Bing, it’s been a rollercoaster ride. We’ve managed to hit this high peak after a whole month!
We’re still trying to figure out how to get Bing to crawl us more. It’s safe to say, they’re well behind the rest:
CTR:
As we’re going for a quality over quantity approach, we’ve got to try and make every impression in the serps count. So we looked at getting a new meta description, this backfired on us slightly it seems as a lot of our snippets have been cut off due to longer descriptions, losing us clicks.
Before:
See our collection of *Product* at Zebo, the best way to find what you need.
After:
See our [Product] collection at Zebo – the easiest way to find exactly what you need. Quickly search Zebo to find [Product] selections.
As you can see, it’s a rookie mistake:
Looking at changing it to a shorter version, currently testing:
See our [Product] collection at Zebo – the easiest way to find exactly what you need. Quickly search Zebo to find [Product] selections.
Using this page as a test: https://zebo.co.uk/q/budget_mp3_player
You can see from this image, it actually fits now:
Ending Notes:
Would love to answer any questions anybody has, I’m always interested in hearing people’s theories or any advice anybody has.
Also, Chris has done another version of this post which you can find here: https://blog.chedgzoy.com/zebo-update/