Company's background
A to Z Car Rental is a well known car rental brand of Dubai famous for it’s extensive fleet and budget friendly services. The company approached Garage Advert and expressed it’s concerns related to technical SEO issues on company’s main site. The company was having an attractive website and strong market presence but, site was struggling to achieve organic audience.
Their main goals were:
- Resolve critical indexing issues that was preventing their main service pages from appearing in Google search results, especially for high-volume keywords.
- Addressing technical SEO challenges, such as errors affecting crawlability and website structure to ensure a better user experience.
Challenges
- The major pages was present in sitemap but the pages were not getting indexed.
- Google Search Console was showing the error related to conical tags and improper use of no index tag.
- Pages with thin content were wasting the crawl budget which was slowing down the indexing process.
Garage Advert's Approach Towards Success
Resolution of Technical issues
Identification of issues was important so, we used Google Search Console and Screaming Frog to find which pages are excluded from indexing and why. After identifying the pages we removed the no-index tags that was assigned unintentionally. Next step was to upload the the clean and fresh version of sitemap with only relevant and high priority URL’s in GSC.
After removing the no-index tags the next step was to set up proper canonical on affected pages. We got the list of pages with conflicting canonicalization, we implemented proper canonical tags to ensure that Google index our preferred version of the pages.
As the site was facing issues related to crawl budget, we removed unnecessary pages with thin content and improve the quality of content. We used robot.txt file and exclude the inappropriate pages. Our technical SEO experts kept monitoring the crawl stats and server logs to actively check the results.
Clearing Out a Major Undetected Issue related to Indexing
After rectifying all the errors, we submitted the fresh version of sitemap. Everyone was relaxed because almost all the required changes has been made but, then comes the major twist. The sitemap that we uploaded was never read by google crawlers despite being successfully uploaded. We tried every possible solution to resolve the issue behind the problem, we checked the robot.txt, checked the validity of sitemap, checked for 403 and 404 errors but everything was looking good.
After spending couple of days in finding the root cause, we got the culprit behind this mess. The site was using caching plugins that was not compatible so, we removed the plugin, cleared the server cache. Once the caching conflict was resolved, Google successfully read the sitemap and the client’s new pages started appearing in search results which improved their indexing rate and visibility.
Additional Services We Offered For Free
- We trained the client’s team on how to use Google Search Console effectively to monitor sitemap status, indexing errors and performance metrics.
- Added schema markup to increase the service visibility in search results with rich snippet.
- Provided detailed internal linking strategy for better internal linking.
What We Achieved?
- 90% Increase in Page indexing All critical service pages were successfully indexed and started appearing in Google search results.
- 40% Traffic Increased: The traffic for high intent keywords was increase by 40%.
- Rich Snippet Appearances: With structured data, the website achieved rich snippets in search results, leading to a 20% increase in CTR (Click-Through Rate).
A to Z Car Rental's Performance After Getting into Digital World
Conclusion
Team Garage Advert successfully resolved the issues related to no-index tag, canonical tags and sitemap which was preventing Google from reading the sitemap and indexing the website. We fix these problems and provide additional support like optimizing the robots.txt file, cleaning up the sitemap and improving internal linking that successfully resolved the indexing issues.
As a result, the indexing process becomes fast and it increased the organic traffic and visibility in search results. This case study shows how resolving technical SEO issues and offering extra value can lead to real, long-term improvements for an automotive businesses.