Marketing case study about how we solved technical problems on Auto-Impex website and at the same time increased traffic by 860% thanks to a well thought out SEO strategy.
Auto-Impex

Sieť predajných a komplexných servisných služieb pre osobné, úžitkové a nákladné vozidlá s viac ako 30 ročnou históriou. Zabezpečuje autorizovaný predaj vozidiel, náhradných dielov a servis značiek Nissan, GT-R, Fiat, MG a Iveco pre Bratislavu, Trnavu a Spišskú novú Ves.
About Project
The client approached us based on problems after a site migration that caused a massive loss of traffic from organic search. In addition to this, he of course wanted to leverage the organic potential of the new site in Google search and gain traffic to help sell new vehicles and related services.
At the beginning, we did initial analytics, namely Keyword Analysis (AKW) and site audit (site audit, the output of which are SEO errors and opportunities). These analyses are also important as two of the three mainstays that give us a picture of the client's target audience and the state of the client's website (the third is the competition). We conducted the site audit even though the previous agency had also done one. We needed our own perspective on the status, which was very worthwhile because we figured out other fundamental flaws.
It was clear from the first look at the site that the post-migration redirects were not implemented correctly. This could not be fixed even after an audit and deployment in cooperation with an agency that had already solved this problem before us.
On the project, we have solved the migration issues and are further addressing the complex SEO based on our strategy. We focused on non-branded words (so that the results don't give the wrong impression that we are getting the traffic that is gained from brand activities in SEO), where there was a 550% increase in traffic after a year and 9 months. We also achieved a 250% increase in traffic compared to the same period before the problematic site migration, when traffic was lost. In February 2024, the increase in traffic was already about 860%.
The difference in clicks for all keywords from organic Google compared to the periods when we took over the project and before the migration problem.
The difference in clicks of only non-branded keywords compared to the periods when we took over the project and before the migration problem.
SEO strategy with basic progress milestones
However, our audit revealed much more, so we have developed an SEO strategy with key milestones that we are working on in the long term.
We have defined long-term goals, namely:
- First and foremost, resolve the drop in traffic after the site migration
- Then increase traffic:
- to relevant non-branded queries (brands, models, stock, info-demands)
- to local queries (services, car dealerships, location + brand/type)
For a client that has a longer history and a stronger brand (i.e. their brand is searched for), it is necessary to separate branded and non-branded traffic so that the results do not give the wrong impression (the main potential of a strong brand is usually from other marketing channels, not from organic search) and to set the goals in such a way that they replicate the client's business goals, which can be supported by SEO.
Also, when traffic drops after an unregulated site migration, branded queries usually don't suffer the biggest loss. This is because they respond to the homepage, which does not change after the migration.
It is crucial for us if we see that the client understands the things we do.
At one of the first meetings after the Keyword Analysis was done, we already found out from the follow-up questions that the Auto-Impex management is forward-thinking and they also quickly understood that a well-done Keyword Analysis is useful for business.
The most important issues
Every client would like to find something on their website that, with little effort, will have a big benefit on traffic and subsequent sales. On auto-impex.sk we have found such opportunities. The client was aware of the errors that were expressed, which consisted of url changes and subsequent failure to redirect the original url during the migration, but it was a problem to implement their correction. There we used our technical knowledge and experience and gradually communicated with the web supplier a method of redirection that guaranteed the correction of the existing situation.
The client was unaware of the mistakes in the implementation of the background-image, despite the audit already done by the previous agency. The problem with the images was quite a big issue.
Unredirected old url, but also generating new ones
The problem of missing or insufficient post-migration redirection was also more challenging than it seemed at first glance. In addition to the fact that it was not at all easy to solve the technical side of redirects at the beginning of the collaboration, 404 pages were also created not only by the migration, but also by the different processes involved in publishing and then deleting pages. For example, some were created when automatically publishing stock vehicles from the internal CRM feed in a way that every time the feed ran, a part of the vehicles were deleted and uploaded again with a new url.
In addition to redirecting url addresses after migration, it was necessary to address not only the consequence, but also the cause of the problem, so we communicated with the client about processes, with programmers about solutions that minimize the creation of new unwanted 404. 99% of the problems were eliminated, some are still being worked on, but we are continuously checking and fixing them.
Images as background, a major SEO problem
In addition to commonly occurring bugs and missing redirection after migration, the programmers decided to implement a large part of the images as background.
Despite the fact that this is a really fundamental problem for SEO (images can't use alt descriptions and google hardly sees them) this problem was not detected by the audit of the original agency. In cases like this, it is important that the audit is not only done by tools (which don't detect this type of problem), but also by manual tracking, and whoever is doing the audit needs to have enough knowledge to be able to detect these things. After a technical change to the "img" html tag, we also added alt-descriptions to the images, individually different for each image. Images are an essential element for success in optimization, along with videos, and other contextual elements they help a lot in ranking in that most important, text search.
But if we want to look at the difference in a straightforward way, after a year we see a more than 7-fold increase in impressions and an 8-times increase in clicks on images.
Indicative picture of the evolution of the increase in clicks on images from 09-2022 (the oldest period for which the GSC provides us with data if we don't have it archived)
Further work based on SEO audit and SEO strategy
SEO audit is part of almost every process we do, they are specific problems or opportunities that need to be addressed.
Auditing makes our work easier and more efficient because:
- in addition to the commonly found and described problems, we also define solutions,
- we suggest who will work on these tasks (dev, client, copy, we, etc.),
- and the priority, which is the basis for further division and evaluation of the work.
- Finally, we write down the deadline for the work, which is useful for subsequent analysis.
We set the strategy as longer term milestones, where the first step is to resolve the top priority from the SEO audit. We followed content types (new car, articles, services, etc...), which ensures prioritization on business concerns, but also better focus on SEO analytics.
In our case, the execution itself involves a number of minor and major interventions, where we determine how to proceed according to priority (which includes importance but also difficulty). I will rather summarize the more important ones that have had the greatest contribution to our success.
Content
Every business owner, marketer, webmaster or even copywriter does everything possible to make their website interesting for the user and to have all the information the user needs. It is no different with auto-impex.sk. So the question is, how can an SEO specialist help such a website?
Very similarly to other websites that are full of content, auto-impex.sk is already one step further, but often it may not be enough. The competition in organic search is not only direct competition (competing companies selling similar products), but anyone who can outrank the site in the SERP (search engine results page). In this case, it's the powerful publishers-type portals and online car dealerships. It takes more than just having a lot of content and being better than the direct competition to get a car dealer on the first page or first positions. It has to contend with the types of portals that focus heavily on SEO, as this is the best traffic generator for content creators and online bazaars.
Preparation is already under Audit
As part of the audit, we developed a DATASET OVERVIEW to show us the potential of the content types. The main benefit of such a dataset is that we can filter content types or other attributes pulled from the Google Search Console API, data pulled using Screaming Frog, or from another source.
A content type is a page type with the same structure (in this case: article, new vehicle, stock vehicle, category, tag, home page, etc...).
Thanks to the division into content types, we can better give suggestions to programmers, but also detect incorrect content structure for type-identical pages, and thus we can work in bulk on a group of pages in this way.
The big importance of this approach is that we learn the indexation, traffic, or impressions for a given content type.
Simply put, by using DATASET we were able to set up future work quite quickly and very well, prioritize, decide how to deal with whole groups of pages before we would deal with individual subpages, which can be time consuming and not very efficient.
Editing existing content
For most projects, there is great potential in adapting existing content. Because we continually test on all projects which edits are most effective, this is low-hanging fruit for us (and the client). If we know which types of content have the potential for rapid growth, then within a relatively short period of time we can often improve the visibility and traffic of a site at the beginning of a collaboration.
Content, content types and their importance
When we focus on optimizing existing content, in addition to filling in meta-data, we format, add different types of media according to content type, bullet points with links, relevant alt-descriptions to images, internal linking.
Within this process we work with existing content, but we also suggest to the client what to add to the site. If necessary, we create other formats ourselves (from existing content) that have the potential to improve positions. However, if we were to edit all the content at once in the highest quality, it would be very inefficient and the client would wait a very long time for the benefit, and in some cases might not even see it.
That's why we use different ways to split content. Somewhere there is duplication, somewhere there is weak content, or a lot of competition. Some pages are designed to internally support other, more important landing pages and collect longtail terms, others reinforce trust or provide information that doesn't have much relevance in SEO, and then there are our most important landing pages, which should rank for the most generic terms in search.
So we need to divide the work and priorities efficiently. We look at:
- Types of content that have a specific structure, relevance to the client and therefore relevance in the business strategy.
- Pages with potential, according to the keyword searches they respond to and the chance to rank for them.
- The business objectives of a given page and therefore the business potential of a given page (e.g. what car, service does the client want to sell more of).
Content type is therefore one of the most important ways for us to separate the important from the less important. So we follow the content types first.
Content type "New vehicles"
This type of content is the most important for us, because for the client these are sales landing pages, at the same time they are pages that have the potential to occupy good positions. We decided to focus on the New Vehicles content type and, together with the brands, we made them the most important landing pages that would respond to the most searched terms.
What it looked like at the beginning
As with most car dealers, a substantial part of the content was just written off from the importer (the importer of the vehicles to Slovenia) and slightly modified without a deeper strategy. The problem we saw (besides the duplicate text) was that the importer is in charge of a completely different phase of the purchase than the dealer, from whom the client also expects more expertise. Also, sometimes it seems that the importer's texts are just copied from English countries, where there may be a completely different campaign going on, and so the terms that are taken may not make complete sense here (because they are explained in the other country's campaign, but there is a different campaign going on here).
There was also a problem in the sub-models (e.g. "Nissan Qashqai" > "Nissan Qashqai e-Power"), where there was always just copied text from the base model and some extra paragraph. Such texts are considered duplicates by the search engine and besides the fact that it is not interested in including the pages in the index or displays them in very uninteresting positions in the search, it also lowers the rating of the whole domain.
Solution:
- In the first phase, we performed basic optimization to make the site responsive in Google, which will bring more traffic (and thus visibility and attribution) to the client and additional useful data to us in the form of keywords from Google Search Console.
- We then created a template for adding a new vehicle based on keyword analysis, available data and information. Using this template we can do multiple things at once:
- The content contains the topics that the client (user) is looking for. There is then no need to forcefully push keywords into the content. They will appear there organically because the copywriter is dealing with the topic in which those words are used.
- We define the media and formats (image, screen, video, graph, table, embed from social networks) that are searched for (we can determine this by analyzing SERPs) and that fit the content type.
- Content is written and added faster, no need to invent your own structure.
- When browsing the web, the user knows what to expect in a given type of content. For example, they know that in a new car they will also find dimensions, information about engines, example tests, or a basic price, etc.
- In terms of structure, we also defined the so-called model and sub-model because we needed to resolve whether or not, for example, "Nissan Qashqai" and "Nissan Qashqai e-Power" would have the same content. Obviously, the client needs to have these pages on the site and so it is the SEO's job how to deal with this so that these pages benefit the user and don't lower the SEO rating in the search engine. So we have also created a template for the sub-model in which these issues are addressed.
- When it came time in our strategy to write new content for "New Vehicles" for the content team, we did an extra workshop where we summarized the reasons for rewriting the texts (backed by analytics), what SEARCH intent is, how it affects us and how to approach rewriting texts. The essentials of what buying phase (I'm sure you're familiar with the "See Think Do Care" framework) the user is in and what to offer them at this stage, and how to separate our texts from e.g. the importer's texts, which without this insight could be seemingly identical in content.
Articles
What it looked like at the beginning
At the beginning of the collaboration, the articles served multiple purposes. They were used as landing-pages for various events, news, announcements, reviews, or an effort to make articles that would respond to keywords. So at first glance it looked perfectly fine, perhaps just assign keywords to it and it would work.
The articles, however, were not as responsive to organic search as we would have expected. So we tried other practices. For example, to detect duplicates, we use the plagium tool to show us if content is duplicated. We have found that a lot of content is added to articles in a way that something is written off from a new car, an older article (e.g. in the case of seasonal or even other events), or from another part of the site, or from an importer, and thus the content is "recycled" in a way that duplicates it, which of course is not a positive signal for the search engine.
Already the DATASET SURVEY also showed us that the tags that are assigned to the articles have very low impressions and Google is not very interested in indexing them, which indicates a problem with weak content.

Solution:
Auto-Impex has its own content team. During the aforementioned workshop, we also addressed information on how to further work with content to maximize the quality of newly added content and avoid duplicates.
We have modified existing articles to increase their quality but also SEO impact, re-linked them according to the internal linking strategy and even changed some of them slightly according to what users are looking for.
Apart from normal content editing, we had to sort the tags (which are often added individually to each article in wordpress, creating a lot of one-article tags, which are not useful most of the time). According to the strategy and Keyword Analysis, we knew which types of keywords we wanted to cover with tags and which ones we didn't.
We deleted and redirected 75% of the tags, the rest we edited, assigned to articles and the result after about a year speaks of 3 times higher traffic and 4.5 higher impressions in the year-on-year period.
Internal linking
One of the most important SEO opportunities today is to have a good structure on the site that is well interlinked. However, this is often given less emphasis than it deserves. In order to create a good structure and interlink it, it is good to have a strategy in place.
The web is in fact a network of websites that are interlinked. This is what search engines are based on, and they have built their creation and ranking of sites on this fact. In SEO, therefore, there is a lot of talk about external linking, which is managed by so-called linkbuilding. However, internal linking is often forgotten or not given much emphasis, which is a mistake.
For some things, we use our own wheel (e.g. the DATASET SURVEY), but where there is already a solution, it is of course more efficient to use a framework that someone has already defined and we have verified that it works.
We therefore use SEO Topic Clusters for internal linking. Also important in this strategy are the content types (which we actively work with) that define the importance of groups of interlinked pages.
What it looked like at the beginning
The Auto-Impex part of the site is already linked to its basic structure, such as the vehicle brand links to its models and the services or servicing have their own common pages that contain menus for all services and servicing.
In addition to the aforementioned "New Vehicle" and "Article" content types, Auto-Impex also features other content types, such as vehicle make, services, service, stock vehicles, the aforementioned tags, and categories. Also, e.g. articles can be divided into sub-types in terms of different structure: vehicle test, video review, or news or event, and each of the mentioned article types has a different structure. As I write above, even a new vehicle has a content sub-type (vehicle sub-model). Using these content types, we have defined a basic internal linking strategy, according to which it is already easier to interlink specific pages with each other.
If an SEO specialist has the opportunity to be there when a new website is designed, they can suggest exactly these things so that the structure of the site is built according to logical strategy and data, not feelings.
It is very related to internal linking, because with a good site structure you just need to use e.g. breadcrumb, menu, or proper categorization and part of internal linking is done. This is also how it is done for larger sites where it is not possible to create links manually.
We found our opportunity in two approaches:
- Technical interlinking of related content: we suggested to programmers to directly interlink subpages contextually with each other. For example, relevant stock vehicles were added to the brand, new vehicle, article pages, relevant articles were added to the stock vehicle detail pages, and so on.
- Linking in the text: Linking in the text of a page is important for several reasons. The text of the page is considered by the search engine to be the MC (main content), which is more important than the other parts of the subpage. Also, we can use interlinking more freely in the text (and thus use a strategy) compared to the technical possibilities, and the search engine also uses the surrounding content to better define the context. Thus, we have used interlinking in the text for links in order to implement the SEO Topic Clusters strategy.
Thank you for your attention
Of course, there is much more to the web than is mentioned in this article. Here are the essential ones and the ones we can mention.
I believe that the case-study showed well how to achieve quality on projects and gave inspiration how to work strategically and efficiently. Our goal is to make the web a place that users want to find in addition to Google. To do this, we need to approach the project strategically and therefore combine quality, efficiency and deliver the best possible result within the client's capabilities and benefit to their potential customers.