How the global marketing leader drives conversion and site health growth for ŠKODA and Fuso Canter

After launching a new website for the Spanish market, ŠKODA was looking to continue their SEO work. When the auto manufacturer came to Annalect for SEO services, the KPIs proposed for the project were: number of car configuration views, number of contact forms, and organic traffic growth. Another major focus was the performance of ŠKODA’s competitors and its analysis.

Another automotive client of Annalect, Fuso Canter, had one specific objective at the start of their collaboration: site health improvement. To tackle both goals, the Annalect team turned to SEMrush.

When starting to work with ŠKODA, Annalect first focused on the website’s health. SEMrush Site Audit uncovered a variety of problems: internal errors, pages that couldn’t be crawled, pages with slow loading speed and high bounce rate; some pages didn’t have the https certificate.

“We divided the problems by priority and addressed the critical ones first to give the ŠKODA website a boost in search engines,” says Esther Giménez, Senior SEO & UX Consultant at Annalect. “At the beginning, the fixing process was really slow. Then I realized I could link Google Analytics and Search Console to SEMrush and send the tasks from the tool directly to Trello. This action reduced the time I was spending on this task substantially.”

Annalect uses the SEMrush Backlink Audit tool for ŠKODA’s toxic link analysis: they export links for disavow and check if Google disavows them the following month.

The next step in the project was defining the keyword core and raising it in the SERP. While working on this, Esther analyzed search intent and user behavior to redefine the company’s keywords. ŠKODA was doing great with their branded keywords, so Annalect’s main strategy was trying to rescue the non-branded keywords below the 30th position and bring them to the first three pages.

Esther looked for long-tail keywords, questions and voice search strategies in the SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool: “It gives me great content ideas like ‘best SUV to buy in 2020’; I include this question and all its variations in the voice search guidelines for ŠKODA.”

Esther tracks the performance of the chosen keywords in the Position Tracking tool every week and exports the daily data to make an automated graph.

The Keyword Gap tool helps Annalect find keyword opportunities with high volume and relatively low difficulty, based on what ŠKODA’s competitors are ranking for. The logic works both ways: the agency discovers new competitors by defining a set of trending keywords and analyzing best-ranking domains.

For a more in-depth look at each of the competitors, Esther looks up their key metrics in the SEMrush Traffic Analytics tool: “The overview section gives me the fluctuation in the number of visits, unique visitors, pages per visit, average visit duration, and their bounce rate. These five metrics give the information on competitors’ user behavior my clients are looking for. The first three metrics refer to traffic, and the other two reflect the improvement in engagement. That’s one way I compare the activity of ŠKODA’s competitors.”

Each month, once all information is gathered, Esther prepares SEMrush reports for her clients: “I regularly use the SEMrush Organic Search Positions report. I add all the competitors for a certain period of time, sort it by volume of searches, and include 100 results. It shows CPC, growth, previous position, SERP features. That’s an important part of my monthly report.”

Annalect also prepares a SEMrush Site Audit report for ŠKODA that includes exactly what actions were taken during the month, the new site health score, which kinds of errors and warnings the website had that month, and which of them were resolved. The Backlink Audit report informs ŠKODA of the current toxic link score, follow/nofollow links and traffic share by platform.

Annalect has worked on Fuso Canter’s site health improvement since mid-February 2020. According to Esther, the website didn’t have too many problems, mainly with slow page loading speed and mobile UX.

The Annalect team ran SEMrush Site Audit and fixed internal errors like mixed content, 5xx server errors, robots.txt and sitemap file errors. At the moment, Fuso’s project is showing zero errors. In just 2 months, Fuso’s site health score has increased by over 10 points.

With the help of the SEMrush Brand Monitoring tool, Annelect discovered that Fuso Canter has had many mentions in articles on third-party sites with no links. Their next task is to start link reclamation using the automated email option in the Link Building tool.