⬆️ Winners in the Search Innovation category
Eurasia is the chain of Japanese and European restaurants in Kyiv and neighboring cities. The chain has more than 20 restaurants.
Increase non-brand traffic in the priority direction.
The priority direction is sushi. This direction can be divided into 3 parts:
The assessment criterion of our work by the client is the growth of ranking as an intermediate metric in the short term, followed by the growth of traffic.
Region: Kyiv and neighboring cities
Start of work: June 14, 2022
Project features: Traffic on the project varies significantly depending on the situation in the country. For instance, traffic drops significantly during the large-scale shelling of Ukraine.
Language: Ukrainian, Russian (focus on the Russian version)
Search Engine: Google
From the very start of working on the project, we regularly encountered critical issues that slowed down the promotion process, and sometimes almost completely disrupted it. The issues we encountered were as follows:
Software engineers on the project are not ours, but client's. According to them, CMS is hard to refine and it takes much more time. This may slow down the process of placing MT, texts, and creating new pages, which should be created a lot, in order to cover all key queries we are interested in.
The priority of tasks is on the side of software engineers. Software engineers were often busy with other tasks not related to SEO, which also slowed down the process of creating new pages and technical revisions.
Chain letter. In February 2023, when some pages had already been developed and the website had a good ranking, our team received a "chain letter" from the CL:
Hello, sorry for writing on my day off, we had a trouble yesterday, disk was damaged on the hosting and the site data is now for July 2022 🙁
We will have to collect information in the next business day on what and where to post and restore.
So, as you understand, we're rolling back to the very beginning.
All edits, texts, and MTs are gone.
I will ask CL to post the MTs and texts shortly.
ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING WE DID ON THE WEBSITE FOR HALF A YEAR HAS DISAPPEARED!
The most difficult thing in this situation - the lack of backup from hosting (hosting was not the best and we immediately asked to change it).The team promptly determined the works that should be restored as soon as possible, before Google saw the problem. The priority was given to:
Within a week or so, software engineers managed to restore almost all of the critical edits, and we sent the website for reindexing. We managed to avoid a significant drawdown of positions, but for some queries, we were not able to return the previous positions.
However, despite global, critical issues and long delays in making edits and creating pages, we managed to perform well.
Large chains of self-service and sushi delivery restaurants are ranked in the top 10 in this niche for the majority of queries. Most of the restaurants operate not only in Kyiv, but have also expanded their chain to other Ukrainian cities. All projects are engaged in SEO promotion, expanding the structure of the website, and elaborating on filtering.
Our experts conducted a comparative analysis of the basic metrics of the promoted website with its competitors. Data was taken from Ahrefs.com.
| Target | Domain Rating | Domains | Total Backlinks | Total Keywords | Total Traffic |
| evrasia.in.ua/ |
28 |
536 |
23883 |
4114 |
119631 |
| sushiya.ua/ |
53 |
491 |
4707 |
6162 |
70343 |
| mafia.ua/ |
42 |
918 |
34694 |
9272 |
182169 |
| sushiwok.ua/ |
22 |
231 |
7413 |
6606 |
182154 |
| sushi-point.com.ua/ |
34 |
358 |
1455 |
4401 |
42995 |
| bagatolososia.kiev.ua/ |
19 |
141 |
506 |
597 |
4135 |
| www.tarantino-family.com/ |
43 |
404 |
4663 |
8067 |
73708 |
| ninjasushi.com.ua/ |
39 |
303 |
4924 |
4250 |
71035 |
| kyiv.sushi-master.ua/ |
44 |
640 |
2778 |
5467 |
103929 |
| 966.ua/ |
30 |
1270 |
116086 |
3204 |
115534 |
As you can see, the number of donors is at a fairly optimal level compared to competitors, yet the quality of the (DR) is lower.
As you can see, evrasia.in.ua has a lot of organic traffic, however, most of the traffic is brand traffic. Looking at the frequency of branded queries, we can see this.
This is the reason why the task in the promotion sounded like "Increase of non-brand traffic in the priority direction".
Based on the analysis, we have planned the work in two areas:
To find the points of growth and expand the structure of the website we:
All these methods help to maximize the quality of the website structure, practically in any niche. We have identified the following key points of growth for evrasia.in.ua:
From a technical point of view, the website was very poorly implemented. There have been issues with duplications, as well as elementary linking between the pages promoted.
Technical audit of the website included 41 points. Errors were found in 20 of them. All errors were assigned a technical specification for correction.
| Program implementation | Inspection result | Priority | Contractor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | IP website analysis | correct | high | software engineer |
| 2. | Checking the website for viruses, malicious scripts and blacklisting | correct | medium | software engineer |
| 3 | Domain history analysis | ОК | ||
| 4 | Checking for the elements that may negatively impact the user's interaction with the website | ОК | ||
| 5. | Checking whether SEO-Friendly URLs (CNC) are available and correctly formed | ОК | ||
| 6. | Checking for the gluing of mirrors and complete duplications | correct | high | software engineer |
| 7. | Checking for complete duplication of the content | correct | high | software engineer |
| 8. | Checking for the pages with or without duplicated content in the index | correct | high | software engineer |
| 9. | Ensuring the 404 page is working correctly | ОК | ||
| 10 | Checking the page code for HTML and CSS errors | ОК | medium | software engineer |
| 11. | Checking an SSL certificate or errors in its settings | correct | high | software engineer |
| 12. | Checking for hidden or spam links to external resources | ОК | ||
| 13. | Ensure the robots.txt file is set up correctly | correct | high | software engineer |
| 14. | Connect GWT | ОК | ||
| 15. | Connect GA | ОК | ||
| 16. | Checking Sitemap.xml | correct | high | software engineer |
| 17. | Checking CSS and JS availability | ОК | ||
| 18. | Checking microformats | correct | high | software engineer |
| 19. | Checking social media buttons | ОК | ||
| 20. | Checking website loading speed | correct | high | software engineer |
| 21. | Checking for the availability and optimization of the multilingualism | correct | high | software engineer |
| 22. | Checking for the availability of the mobile version of the website | ОК | ||
| 23. | Checking for the adaptivity of the website on different devices | ОК | ||
| 24. | Checking for the correct output of the text content | ОК | ||
| 25. | Checking for the availability of elements (commercial factors) on the pages required for ranking in this subject | correct | high | software engineer |
| 26. | Checking for the partial duplication of the content | correct | high | software engineer |
| 27. | Eliminate the removal of irrelevant and out-of-stock items | ОК | ||
| 28. | Checking for the content in the code of pages that is not displayed on the pages of the site | correct | high | software engineer |
| 29. | Checking the visibility of content and site elements with JavaScript disabled | ОК | ||
| 30. | Checking the website for compliance with the guidelines for assessors | correct | high | software engineer |
| Content | Inspection result | Priority | Contractor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 31. | Checking for affiliates | ОК | high | software engineer |
| 32. | Checking location settings in GWT | ОК | ||
| 33. | Checking the correctness of meta tags formation | correct | high | content manager |
| 34. | Checking the availability/uniqueness of the website content | correct | high | content manager |
| 35. | Checking the optimization of text content | correct | high | content manager |
| 36. | Checking the availability of content formatting | ОК |
| Structure and linking | Inspection result | Priority | Contractor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 37. | Checking the availability of "bread crumbs" menu | ОК | ||
| 38. | Checking for re-linking on the site | correct | medium | software engineer |
| 39. | Checking for indexable, optimized filter pages | ОК | ||
| 40. | Broken links on the website | correct | medium | software engineer |
| 41. | Image optimization | ОК |
Having determined the points of growth, we started to collect the semantic core in Ukrainian and Russian languages. For the most part, semantics consists of more than 1000 search queries in 120 semantic groups (1 page = 1 semantic group in most cases)
Once our specialists collected the semantic core, they checked the position of the site across all SC to have a better understanding of which pages we need to write the texts on, and on which to rewrite the existing ones. Technical assignments on writing texts for the website pages have been compiled. In total, around 100 texts were written for the Ukrainian and Russian versions of the site.
Part of the pages we plan to create are still in the works on the side of KL software engineers. The implementation of our tasks on creating pages with the new design proved to be quite labor-intensive on this CMS.
The first step when working on the link mass of any project is to analyze the current link mass. We carried out an audit and created the list of low-quality donors that could negatively impact the site. The entire list was rejected by Google Search Console.
The second stage of working on the link mass is building up quality links to the website. We used several methods to achieve this:
Despite the fact that some of the pages we have not yet created, the project has already shown very good results. As the frequency of queries in Russian version of the website is much higher than in Ukrainian, it was decided to place more emphasis on the Russian version. According to the positions below, it is clear that Ukrainian version of the site is slightly lagging behind the Russian version.
We got very fast results for this page simply by correctly optimizing Title and H1.
Despite high competition, a relatively weak link profile and the difficulties described above, our team managed to show good, and on some pages, very fast results.
For example, it took only one week to raise the "Sushi Promo" group from the top 10 to the top 2 (see the screen above). The page "Rolls" from the top 50+ hit the top 1-3 only a month and a half after the start of work.
We achieved such results due to high-quality content, proper optimization and good selection of donors for link building.
Project Manager: Kateryna Tymoshenko
Optimizer: Yurii Oshchapovskyi
Linker: Yevhen Fedchenko
