Growing Spanish Traffic from 0 to 70k a Month
I was the SEO manager at edX from 2018-2021. One of my core accomplishments was increasing the traffic to the site from Spanish searchers, which opened up edX to a whole new set of learners.
What Was Done
Robots.txt Fix
In my first week at edX, I discovered a technical issue with Google and Bing regarding crawling the Spanish content. I was able to fix that, which got the content indexed
Canonical Tag Fixes
After fixing the robots.txt issue, I noticed a problem with the canonical tags, so I fixed that
HREFLANG Issues
After fixing the canonical tag problem, I noticed that English Queries were triggering the Spanish pages due to an incorrect HREFLANG setup, so I fixed that
Fixed Broken Links
I used Screaming Frog and discovered that there were hundreds of incorrect internal links pointing to Spanish pages, so I fixed that
HTML Sitemap / XML Sitemap Fix
There were 404 errors in the sitemap pointing to wrong Spanish pages, so I fixed that
Content Refresh / Page Creation
After the technical issues were fixed, I worked with the Spanish manager on optimizing the content using Clearscope