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Bluenile Detailed SEO Case Study

Bluenile Detailed SEO Case Study

I was going through bluenile.com and found the site has hit by google algorithms multiple times in 2019-2020 and was not showing any signs of recovering. so I created this deck to solve SEO issues that bluenile is facing. there are some basic issues and some are very serious, site actually hit by site diversity update due to keyword cannibalization issues. I think this slide of mine will definitely help bluenile.com and people who want to do an SEO audit for the same segment.

Kuldeep Sharma

March 01, 2021
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  1. Issues & Fixes • Identifying Top Competitors and Learnings. •

    Effects of Google Algorithms in 2019 on bluenile.com • Top 3 technical recommendations • Reason behind Sudden Spike in page indexing and crawl budget. • What would you do to gather more information if the drop in traffic had also coincided with a 200% increase in indexed pages from 100k pages to 300k? • International SEO. • Keyword Strategy.
  2. Competitor Analysis Competitors Total Traffic Common Keywords Ref. Domains Page

    indexed Keywords in Top 5 Bluenile 411K 9.79K 130K 33K Brilliant Earth 511K 39K 6.82K 24.8K 34K Kay's 1.6M 50K 7.58K 42K 72K Zales 951K 54K 8.17K 85.2K 55K Jared 693K 44K 4.87K 29.0K 39K Tool - Ahrefs & SEMRush
  3. Learnings from Competitors - Part 1 - “By shape, By

    Price” Brilliant Earth - Brilliant Earth have the feature called “Shop by Shape”, Bluenile also has this, it is placed under the menu bar resulting to go unnoticed sometimes. Kay.com We should create more pages with price filters and add the same on product listing pages. Like Ring’s under $500.
  4. Learnings from Competitors - Part 2 - “Hoverable Dropdown” Zales.com

    Zales.com has a hover option similar to all other eCommerce players, in fewer clicks users can reach their destination.
  5. Learnings from Competitors - Part 3 - “On Page Content”

    Similarly we can add more content to PLP’s and PDP’s. This is a screenshot of Zales Product Detail Page. Zales.com
  6. Additional SEO ideas • We can have independent LPs for

    celebrity rings, since we already have a custom ring builder. This feature can be used to generate pages like “Ariana grande engagement ring”. This will fetch Bluenile a very good amount of relevant traffic. • We have written paragraphs under meta description tag, i would love to write short 900 pixels content. • I have disabled the javascript and checked Zales and Bluenile product listing pages, Bluenile was showing a blank page while I was able to see Zales products (without images), it would be awesome if we can show few products with or without javascript. • Alt tag optimization is poorly done on product detail pages. Product names should be written under alt tag instead of words like “top view” or “angle side view”.
  7. 2019 - The Year of Google Algorithm Updates There were

    total number of 6 confirmed and unconfirmed updates rolled out in year 2019. Google Update Impact on Bluenile Feb 2019 Stable March 2019 15%-20% Traffic loss June 2019 Condition Improved but not much Sep 2019 Negative Oct 2019 Stable Dec 2019 Negative
  8. Detail Report on Google Update 2019 - Part 1 1.

    Feb 2019 - If you see in Feb 2019 Google rolled out update, webmasters named it it valentine's day update and it was unconfirmed from official sources but many websites around the world has seen traffic improved. As we see for Bluenile, there is traffic decline from Jan 2019 numbers to Feb 2019 Numbers, it's not big but there is a drop and this can be due to Feb update. 1. March 2019 - Now if come to March 2019, there is a another Big Core update Google rolled out and it was confirmed by official Google spokesperson. It was massive update but many webmasters believe that it was rollback for many sites who penalized in past Google updates. But here also our traffic is on decline mode. I strongly believe feb + march together gave us a set back which continued for another 2 more months April-May. 1. June 2019 - Here we come to June 2019 Core Update also known as limited E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Here we got some relief and the traffic in months from June-Aug 2019 is improved compared to previous months.
  9. Detailed Report on Google Update 2019 - Part 2 Expertise

    - Bluenile is an expert on what they are doing, niche is playing a key role. we are not jack of all trades , we are master of one and that is rings. We know our industry, we know the user intent or at least understand our user. Our content is best in class for people who are interested in Rings. And this is the reason our info. Pages are coming on top instead of category page as Google find those page more relevant. Authoritativeness - When the brand becomes synonym for their category, this happens. People know our brand as we are there in market from very long time. Brand anchors, Social media discussions and brand mentions are playing key role here. This also includes third party reviews, ratings etc. Here i feel Bluenile is doing great. Trustworthiness - The T stands for Trustworthiness, again our site is very trustworthy to users. I don’t think people have negative sentiments towards the brand. ORM is signal to Trustworthiness factor. I strongly believe this update was positive toward our brand and we did well till Sep 2019 and why we have not got enough profit from this update could be because of keyword cannibalization reason, as I mentioned earlier the site diversity update.
  10. Detailed Report on Google Update 2019 - Part 3 September

    2019 - Now in sep 2019 Google rolled out broad core update and Google notified webmaster before rolling out. This was broad update so its not penalize any website specifically but to improve their system, in other terms raising the bar. we have not seen any significant drop in month of Sep 2019. Oct 2019 - Google rolled out another update called BERT which has impacted rankings. After this update we can see we lost 50k-60K traffic. 10K keyword which were ranking on top 3 positions lost the game, initially it has affected only US english speakers but in dec 2019 Google rolled out this update worldwide and it has affected almost all languages. I strongly believe that we as multilingual website hit badly because of poor implementation of internationalisation. Conclusion - During 2019 from Jan to Dec, we lost 200K traffic monthly which is very big number. And 2019 is indeed a bad year but 2020 was also bad in terms of losing traffic. Because of Jan 2020 and May 2020 Updates or Covid-19 also affect businesses worldwide.
  11. Technical Recommendation - Part 1 HrefLang Tag Implementation Why it's

    important - • It gives our content a boost. • Its make sure that correct country page appears for right keyword. • We can handle duplicate content issues with help of this tag. • In other word it’s pagination for different language page, page A connected to Page B and vice versa. So my first Technical recommendation starts with implementation of Hreflang tag.
  12. Technical Recommendation - Part 2 Fixing the Page Speed a.k.a

    Core web vitals - Why it's important • It Improves the user experience and better UX is better SEO. • Google is planning to include Core web vitals in May 2021 update as a official ranking signal. Brand Mobile Score Desktop Score Bluenile Category Page 15 34 Kay's Category Page 15 28 Brilliant earth's Category Page 35 75 Jared's Category Page 34 64 Zales Category Page(AMP) 40 83 Tool - Pagespeed Insights
  13. Technical Recommendation - Part 3 3. On Page Fixes -

    While Hreflang tag and site speed takes time, i would love to do below tasks to make organic traffic do vertical charlie - • A/B Tests for Title • Fixing keyword cannibalization as this is highly important and gave tough time in past. • A/B Tests for Meta Description • A/B Tests of Heading tags • URL optimization if required (i don’t want to touch this part unless it's really important. • Sitemap Issues if any (proper tagging of hreflang pages into sitemap) • Content Optimization for top category pages. • And whatever it takes to bring site to top 2 positions of Google for all keywords. • Working on internal linking structure
  14. High Crawl/Index Rate vs Traffic Drop - Part 1 I

    have faced this issue in the past and I strongly believe the reason are same - The Tool - Bluenile has tool called “Build your own ring”, in Google there are 50K pages indexed with same word. See the below screenshots -
  15. High Crawl/Index Rate vs Traffic Drop - Part 2 As

    you see in last slide how many pages this tool has created. These pages are user generated, which are crawled and indexed by Google. These pages have noindex, follow tag. noindex is good but follow tag will waste the crawl budget, as they are linked to highly crawled and indexed pages, perhaps the reason for faster crawling and indexing. Other possible reason- Product and customer id and other parameters passed in URL. PFB the screenshot -
  16. Internationalisation Site is fully multilingual on the front end side

    but on the other site SEO elements are missing, hreflang tag is missing on main pages and vice-versa. I have already shared most of the info. on the hreflang tag in slide no. 13. That would be my first priority. There is a redirect error we need to solve, whenever I try to check the homepage for status code, it redirects 302 to different country pages. For this I strongly believe we should display https://www.Bluenile.com home page of its version for the en-US at the root domain and give users an option to select the preferred country and language. As Google said “Avoid automatic redirection based on the user's perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.”
  17. HrefLang Tags for Site HrefLang Tag for XML Sitemap -

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <url> <loc>https://www.bluenile.com/</loc> <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com" hreflang="x-default" /> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-mx" href="https://www.bluenile.com/mx/" /> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https://www.bluenile.com/fr/" /> </url> <url> <loc>https://www.bluenile.com/mx/</loc> <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com" hreflang="x-default" /> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-mx" href="https://www.bluenile.com/mx/" /> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https://www.bluenile.com/fr/" /> </url> <url> <loc>https://www.bluenile.com/fr/</loc> <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com" hreflang="x-default" /> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-mx" href="https://www.bluenile.com/mx/" /> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https://www.bluenile.com/fr/" /> </url> </urlset> HrefLang Tag for HTML Header - <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com" hreflang="x-default" /> <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com/mx/" hreflang="es-mx" /> <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com/fr/" hreflang="fr-fr" />
  18. Keyword Strategy - “Engagement” Keywords US MSV Global MSV engagement

    rings 255000 469000 vintage engagement rings 17000 25000 engagement rings for women 16000 21000 moissanite engagement rings 16000 17000 unique engagement rings 14000 19000 sapphire engagement rings 14000 21000 diamond engagement rings 11000 18000 emerald engagement rings 9300 13000 rose gold engagement rings 9000 13000 cheap engagement rings 7300 11000 emerald cut engagement rings 6900 9300 custom engagement rings 6800 8800 mens engagement rings 6500 13000 simple engagement rings 6100 8600 ruby engagement rings 5400 7800 oval engagement rings 5400 8200 antique engagement rings 5000 7400 engagement rings for men 4500 9100 halo engagement rings 4500 7500 black diamond engagement rings 4400 5700 https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/emerald-cut https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/gemstone https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/halo https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/solitaire https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/gold/rose-gold https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/for-men https://www.Bluenile.com/wedding-rings/mens-wedding-rings https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/marquise-cut https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/cushion-cut https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/top-engagement-rings https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/sapphire-sidest one https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/simple https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/princess-cut https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/radiant-cut https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/oval-cut This is what initial keyword strategy looks like with important keywords and targeted LP’s. Tool - Ahrefs