| SEO | – 4 min read – | September 23, 2016 |
client use case
How We Used Serpstat To Rank Our Project
Analyzing competitors to gather keywords, create URLs and build a sitemap.
About us:
Let's start with an introduction. My name is Thomas Harvey and my companion is Chris Chedgzoy. We've been involved with SEO for quite a while and know our way around the subject.Both, me and Chris are moderators on SEO Chat forums, if you have any questions about SEO just head there and forum members, including us, will be more than happy to help.
The Project We Worked On (zebo.co.uk)
Recently we launched a platform that takes a load of feeds from around the web and allows users to search for products inside our platform. Chris built it from scratch and we already have over 1.5 million products in our database, and that's without counting the products from eBay, that are also included in our search. Oh, and connection to Amazon is in in works at the moment.Our website is called Zebo, feel free to give it a go and share your feedback with us.
Using Serpstat To Collect Data
The problem we're currently facing is that we have no navigation system. So whilst we could show results for any query, we had no way of getting them indexed. To solve this problem we decided to see how similar services worked on it. Here's a snippet of our competitor's data that we found with Serpstat:
Our competitor is indexed and ranking for 42,463 results in the UK. We exported this data to work with it further.
In the spreadsheet we can see the positions and keywords. We took all of their keywords and added them it to our query search. We also used a find and replace function to replace spaces with underscores. So the keywords column would now be filled with everite_watch or graffiti_bedding. Then used the queries on our domain to get the following URLs:
Creating Sitemap
Next step was creating a sitemap. I used Screaming Frog for this. It takes the list of all URLs and checks them for errors, to see if any of the URLs are out of place and etc. Here's a small sample I created to show you what it should look like.
In this example we have 99 URLs and every single one of them is working. We then simply upload the sitemap (or append it to our sitemap_index.xml) then tell search engines to crawl the sitemap again.
A quick recap of what we did:
- Found our competitors with Serpstat by analyzing our domain
- Took competitors top keywords
- Appended keywords to our domain
- Created sitemap
- Uploaded and fetched the sitemap.
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