Fyndiq is known as the largest online marketplace for bargains within the Nordics.
Every year, Fyndiq helps thousands of merchants sell millions of products to consumers online across Denmark, Finland, Norway & Sweden at fantastic prices.
Our brief was to turnaround a declining organic trend in the Swedish market and help accelerate the organic growth across the newly launched websites in Denmark, Finland & Norway using synergies from the Swedish market.
Accolades
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The Results
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The Collaboration
A key driver to the success is how closely we work with Fyndiq’s internal teams.
Once a week, one of our consultants will work from Fyndiq’s office for the day, which allows us to schedule and attend key meetings to get updates on upcoming developments and answer any questions much faster.
In addition, we have a shared slack channel, so we can keep each other updated on activities, alongside a prioritized ticketing system which allows us to see when expected changes will be going live through the development team.
Overall we try and be as efficient in communication as possible, ensuring all the key members of the team understand why we are making recommendations and how everything is progressing / performing via our live data studio reporting dashboards.
If I didn’t know, I would have guessed that the people from Nucleus are from our own company. The effort, commitment and passion they put into their work makes a huge difference! We've never seen a “one size fit’s all” approach, which shows they really take the time to understand our business.
Fyndiq
Nucleus is innovative & exceptionally skilled when it comes to technical SEO, this is one of the reasons why we chose to work with them. Not only are they good at what they do, they also know how to share their insights in a way that everyone will understand.
Fyndiq
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The Challenges
Fyndiq had a few unique challenges due to the nature of their website / industry that we needed to understand before putting together our initial strategy.
- Merchants – The products are all controlled by merchants, so it is difficult to keep control of stock levels, delivery times, pricing, categorisation, product names, descriptions, images etc.
- Crawling – The Swedish website ranges between 3-5 million pages per month. Due to this we needed an enterprise crawling solution to fully understand the scale of the problems we were finding and how they were progressing once fixes were being implemented.
- Internationalization – We had limited resources at both client and agency level to support the new markets, so we needed to get creative with solutions to help scale performance across Denmark, Finland & Norway by leveraging the most established market, Sweden.
The Strategy
Once we understood Fyndiq’s business model, KPI’s, existing performance and current challenges we were able to put together an initial strategy that focused on three key phases:
- Phase 1: Removing Technical Inhibitors
- Phase 2: Leveraging & Syncing Markets
- Phase 3: Developing Growth Opportunities
Phase 1: Removing Technical Inhibitors
We began auditing and found a number of high priority SEO elements that needed to be fixed to make the website more accessible and efficient for search engines to crawl, index and rank.
Luckily Fyndiq has a talented in-house development & product management team that we were able to regularly workshop with to find scalable solutions to the problems that were discovered. Below are a select few key projects we noticed had the biggest impact on overall visibility since we started working together.
Crawlable Pagination
The Issue – Fyndiq had a “load more” javascript button across their category pages. This worked fine for users, but the way it was setup unfortunately meant Google could not follow / activate the button to load in more products to display additional products, which caused millions of orphaned (not linked to) products on the website, leading to zero internal page authority being passed into deep pages on the website & not being crawling as frequently by Google.
The Fix – To resolve this we worked with Fyndiq to implement a pagination solution & ensure it followed Google’s best practice guidelines of having self referencing canonical tag on each paginated series. By implementing this, it allowed all products to be discovered / crawled easier & more regularly by Googlebot and pass link equity to deeper product pages across the website.
Dynamic XML & HTML Sitemaps
The Issue – Fyndiq did not have an HTML sitemap, which meant some categories were 4+ levels away from the homepage. The existing XML sitemaps did not automatically update frequently enough and was hosted on a subdomain. Overall not many best practice guidelines were being followed.
The Fix – We worked with the development team to ensure all best practices were being adhered to and together we launched a dynamic index sitemap file that refreshes daily https://fyndiq.se/sitemap.xml
Then we also got Fyndiq to add in a HTML sitemap and link to this in the footer. It helped pass authority to all categories on the website and reduce the crawl path for search engines to discover them: https://fyndiq.se/sitemap/
Automatically Handling Thin Categories
The Issue – As products come in and out of stock, it affects the number of products listed within categories. We discovered hundreds of brand & category pages that contained zero products across Fyndiq. Having thin or empty category pages is not ideal for both the SEO and UX & is a low quality signal to search engines and can be classed as “soft 404s”.
There is no magical minimum number of products to have in a category. However, if the top competitors are selling 100 products and Fyndiq is only selling 1 or 2 products, chances are the category page will not be as strong to compete competitively.
The Fix – We recommended the development team work on an automated solution to add a no-index, follow meta tag on the category page when it displays 0 products, which then gets removed when products are populated back into the category. We then monitored this and consolidated / removed categories that frequently had zero products on a monthly basis.
Server Side Rendering Product Reviews
The Issue – Fyndiq has unique product reviews across their products, which is great for SEO because it provides extra unique content that differentiates the landing page from competitors who sell similar products.
However, the review widget was implemented using a trust pilot widget and Google could not read the individual reviews because it was behind a JavaScript script that only generates the code once you clicked “see more reviews”. We double checked by searching in the rendered HTML code for the first reviews and it could not be found.
The Fix – We recommend Fyndiq embed the reviews within the actual HTML of the page, so Google could pick up the content on the initial page load without the need of JavaScript. Doing this is a lot more reliable & faster for Google to process all the important content on the page.
Improving PageSpeed / Core Web Vitals
The Issue – Google loves fast websites They refreshed their “core web vital” metrics in 2021 to focus on user experience of web pages and have even stated that pagespeed is a small ranking factor.
When we started Fyndiq only had around 10% of “Good” pages and one of the worst when comparing against key competitors, so improvement was definitely needed.
The Fix – We highlighted some top-level problems that the development team could look into and they were able to restructure requests to become independent of one another, allowing the page to load a lot efficiently.
Once the team rolled out the changes, over 90% of pages passed Google core web vital metrics. This resulted in a slight improvement in rankings for more competitive terms, but more importantly we noticed Google was able to crawl more pages at a much faster rate.
Fyndiq went from being one of the worst performing websites when comparing against competitors to the best in terms of page speed / passing core web vitals.
Phase 2: Leveraging & Syncing Markets
Fyndiq has been an established industry leader in Sweden for a number of years, but in Q4 of 2021 they launched their Nordic expansion, launching three separate websites across Denmark, Finland & Norway.
All of these markets have the same category tree structure with the only differences being the number of products, the content & the language (obviously).
Mass Category Translation
The Issue – The Swedish version of the website had a lot of content built up over the years across the categories, a total of 3,289 in fact. However, none of this content was translated onto the relevant alternate version across Denmark, Finland & Norway.
The Fix – Using google translate, a custom app script & some spreadsheet magic, we were able to mass translate the optimized Swedish category texts & metadata into Danish, Finnish, Norwegian with the correct HTML formatted code. This was then uploaded onto the relevant market websites.
In total, this allowed us to create content for 9,867 categories (2,310,857 words) & reduced the amount of metadata duplication by around 70%.
This is by no means a perfect solution, but this was a quick way to leverage all the hard work that’s been done across Sweden into the other markets & we have natives to double check and make amends.
We worked out, if someone was to do this manually – writing the content & uploading – it would have taken one person 3.2 YEARS (based on a 8 hour work day, 365 days a year)
This also allowed us to create a process to ensure all market category pages are updated / synced together for future & even support the development team create a tool in the CMS that allowed us to import & export categories easily, which was not possible before.
Hreflang Implementation
The Issue – Fyndiq has 4 different websites with the same category structure but in different languages. There were some problems with the Swedish website showing up in different Nordic countries search engines when it shouldn’t have.
Fortunately, Google has a solution to this called “hreflang” – If you have multiple versions of a page for different languages or regions, you can tell Google about these different variations. Doing so will help Google Search point users to the most appropriate version of your page by language or region.
The Fix – We recommended Fyndiq to go with a hardcoded solution for this rather than a sitemap solution as categories will stay relatively unchanged. See below for an example of this code present on the Swedish website:
It was important that all variants reference each other, so the same code can be found across Denmark, Finland & Norway, so Google understands which URLs to show across the different countries.
We did this across all categories to begin with, but will soon be rolling it out across the products that match between the different markets.
Nordic Expansion Results
After the above activities were implemented, we have been seeing continuous week over week growth in the new target markets.
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Phase 3: Developing Growth Opportunities
Once we were happy with how the first two phases were progressing, we moved onto finding additional growth opportunities. In total, we have identified 4 ongoing growth initiatives we are running on a monthly basis.
- Category Content Creation – We gathered all of the categories, identified any without content, then prioritized them based on product count, ranking keywords, traffic potential based on avg. ranking positions & organic impressions. We are now creating category content on a monthly basis, then auto translating it into the other markets.
- Category Tree Expansion – We have completed relevant keyword research & competitor analysis to find new category opportunities.
- Interlinking Improvements – We have identified a few areas where we can implement some internal links across products, categories & brand pages to increase the relevancy between pages.
- Content Hub Production – We have identified a number of informational / inspirational content we can create to support the categories with the most traffic opportunity. Doing this will build up Fyndiq’s topical authority on the subject, making everything rank a bit better within SERPs.
The Future
Together with the Fyndiq team, we’ve made some impressive improvements in a short amount of time, but we are just getting started!
There is an almost unlimited amount of opportunities to explore & expand upon. We have a number of upcoming developments that will help resolve some other known problems & create new opportunities to rank.
We will continue to implement, test & learn and help Fyndiq grow even further in organic search as we continue working together.