• Data Science
  • SEO

Using AI to Optimise internal Links for a Multi-Million Page Site

About the client

Our client is a big player in the travel industry, with more than 100 million people using their app and website monthly to help with their travel plans.

Despite their strong position, they do have a number of competitors and are in an industry that requires continuous optimisation of their digital offerings. We approached this project by testing changes across a small subset of pages. With excellent results, we were engaged to complete updates across the entire site.

Challenge

From little things big things grow

Working on a site with millions of pages means small, incremental changes are very important and even small percentage increases can have enormous impacts on the bottom line. The website was already in great shape when we started but continuous optimisation will ensure it stays that way.

Internal linking in the too-hard basket

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Complex SEO projects like internal linking at scale often take too long to be implemented by internal teams. Projects involving millions of pages can take in-house teams a year or more from inception to delivery when requiring a mix of technical SEO, data, engineering and analytics.

In Marketing We Trust’s expert team of SEO specialists, data scientists and engineers are able to bolster internal teams and mobilise quickly to get projects completed.

Measuring business impact, not SEO signals

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Data wasn’t captured in a way that activity could be measured easily making it difficult to determine results of in-house performance. Showing real business impact from our work was crucial.

Solution

Getting buy-in by showing tangible results in one quarter

Large-scale SEO projects can have a significant impact but can be hard to define without solid data and a documented scientific approach.

We created a robust business case backed by statistical methods to show the impact of our work. Our team of expert Enterprise SEOs defined and implemented rapid prototyping in less than 10 weeks from the initial kick-off date.

Knowledge is power for in-house teams

We created a roadmap for knowledge transfer so that our client could take back control of the project. This means that the ongoing improvements continue well after In Marketing We Trust is done. Their senior marketing team is now able to pitch for larger SEO projects with confidence in their data and forecasts.

What we did

Increasing commercial value with a test & learn approach
There are many steps to an internal linking project of this scale, including:

Crawling the website

Identifying URLs that need attention

Performing page value platform scores

Creating an opportunity scorecard

Prioritising pages by commercial impact

Using In Marketing We Trust’s own AI tool to determine where links should point

Final review with our expert data and engineering team

After the first update, recrawl the site and monitor results

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We define the value of each page first and foremost on whether it’s making money for the business, as well as search volume, relevance, and more. Our opportunity scorecard allows us to focus our efforts where they’ll make the greatest impact.

Results

Small improvements across big
websites = Extra revenue

With multi-million page sites, especially with many competitors, large double-digit results are simply not going to happen at scale.

We were able to show a 3% increase in rankings and improved traffic by 5% on sample pages used to get accurate performance measurements. With consistent performance, we were able to accurately forecast 245,000 additional site visits. This results in an incremental revenue increase of $120,000 annually.

In addition, we were able to reduce the project time from almost a year when run internally to just 10 weeks when run by In Marketing We Trust. This substantially freed up internal resources for other projects. With the reduced turnaround time we achieved return on investment in under 6 months.

3%

increase in rankings

5%

increase in traffic

245,000

additional site visits

Testimonials