Developer Center Rearchitects Site for Greater Search Visibility

The Situation

Due to the vast size of the developer documentation site, this client expressed interest in not only getting more exposure in search engines to increase exposure to new developers but also prioritizing certain APIs over others. This was a complex issue as the client didn’t want to hide certain APIs that were instrumental to many existing customer implementations despite the fact that most of the APIs had very similar content. This created an issue of potential duplicate content–the API information created over 5 different columns of content, speaking about different APIs, confusing the engines.

To make matters worse, the client had accidentally non-indexed the entire developer documentation site for almost 30 days before they fixed it which tanked rankings sitewide.

At the same time, the brand was suffering from a steep decrease in brand awareness, hindering overall search volume.

Our Approach

Convertiv implemented an operations-enabled growth framework to help the company improve its search visibility, volume, and quality.

First, Convertiv performed an assessment on the developer documentation site and cross-referenced other similar sites across technology brands. Knowing big changes had to be made to compete in the space, Convertiv looked for ways to reshape the website so that information was more accessible to search engines while also leveraging the company’s authority as a leader in its marketplace. Additionally, Convertiv needed to identify new areas of content and growth as the company was facing a major drop in brand queries, which was weighing search traffic down almost 30% monthly.

Convertiv needed to not only fix what was wrong but also go on the offensive and generate new traffic from new queries. That’s when a keyword research exercise that included client scoring and grading mixed with competitive data and SEO expertise developed a short list of attainable keywords to hyper-focus on. Rather than trying to tackle every page and every possible keyword we could get, Convertiv prioritized fixes around keywords that could impact traffic over time and keywords that we would ultimately be easier to rank for.

Our Recommendations

Due to how crawlers access information, Convertiv determined it was best that all API content, regardless of its value to the company, fall under one folder (/docs/) rather than having their own personal parent folders. To search engines, this showed a high volume of credible information on APIs rather than segregated information on multiple APIs. With so many webhooks per API, Google couldn’t prioritize content, so carving out a new section called “slash platform,” which placed a focus on higher-level topics, broader API content helped serve up the information in a content hub to remove duplicate content.

This broader API hub, rather than individual pages tied to each API, helped deprioritize lesser APIs with weaker meta tags and improved overall SEO. Converiv also included internal links pointing to the more popular and relevant APIs. and combated a negative dip in brand searches by bolstering content hubs with centralized content for non-branded terms.

The Results

Convertiv’s aggressive approach to making changes to page structure, based on a root cause analysis of the underlying SEO issues, resulted in a more operational approach than what would likely be a less impactful on-page SEO modification approach.

The results spoke for themselves, with the company seeing an 80% improvement in brand traffic despite a 30% or 40% decrease in homepage traffic (signifying the drop in brand awareness and branded searches). Overall, developer SEO pages were up 120%, including 30% YoY.