I was going through bluenile.com and found the site has hit by google algorithms multiple times in 2019-2020 and was not showing any signs of recovering. so I created this deck to solve SEO issues that bluenile is facing. there are some basic issues and some are very serious, site actually hit by site diversity update due to keyword cannibalization issues. I think this slide of mine will definitely help bluenile.com and people who want to do an SEO audit for the same segment.

1. Bluenile.com SEO
Prepared by Kuldeep Sharma
Linkedin -
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kuldeepseohead/

2. Issues & Fixes
● Identifying Top Competitors and Learnings.
● Effects of Google Algorithms in 2019 on bluenile.com
● Top 3 technical recommendations
● Reason behind Sudden Spike in page indexing and crawl budget.
● What would you do to gather more information if the drop in traffic had also coincided with a 200%
increase in indexed pages from 100k pages to 300k?
● International SEO.
● Keyword Strategy.

3. Competitor Analysis
Competitors Total Traffic Common Keywords Ref. Domains Page indexed Keywords in Top 5
Bluenile 411K 9.79K 130K 33K
Brilliant Earth 511K 39K 6.82K 24.8K 34K
Kay's 1.6M 50K 7.58K 42K 72K
Zales 951K 54K 8.17K 85.2K 55K
Jared 693K 44K 4.87K 29.0K 39K
Tool - Ahrefs & SEMRush

4. Learnings from Competitors - Part 1 - “By shape, By Price”
Brilliant Earth -
Brilliant Earth have the feature called “Shop by Shape”, Bluenile also has this, it is placed under the menu bar resulting to
go unnoticed sometimes.
Kay.com
We should create more pages with price filters
and add the same on product listing pages. Like
Ring’s under $500.

5. Learnings from Competitors - Part 2 - “Hoverable Dropdown”
Zales.com
Zales.com has a hover option similar to all other eCommerce players, in fewer clicks users can reach their destination.

6. Learnings from Competitors - Part 3 - “On Page Content”
Similarly we can add
more content to PLP’s
and PDP’s. This is a
screenshot of Zales
Product Detail Page.
Zales.com

7. Additional SEO ideas
● We can have independent LPs for celebrity rings, since we already have a custom ring builder. This
feature can be used to generate pages like “Ariana grande engagement ring”. This will fetch
Bluenile a very good amount of relevant traffic.
● We have written paragraphs under meta description tag, i would love to write short 900 pixels
content.
● I have disabled the javascript and checked Zales and Bluenile product listing pages, Bluenile was
showing a blank page while I was able to see Zales products (without images), it would be
awesome if we can show few products with or without javascript.
● Alt tag optimization is poorly done on product detail pages. Product names should be written
under alt tag instead of words like “top view” or “angle side view”.

8. 2019 - The Year of Google Algorithm Updates
There were total number of 6 confirmed and unconfirmed updates rolled out in
year 2019.
Google Update Impact on Bluenile
Feb 2019 Stable
March 2019 15%-20% Traffic loss
June 2019 Condition Improved but not much
Sep 2019 Negative
Oct 2019 Stable
Dec 2019 Negative

9. Bluenile Organic Traffic 2019
G G
G G G
G
Tool - Ahrefs

10. Detail Report on Google Update 2019 - Part 1
1. Feb 2019 - If you see in Feb 2019 Google rolled out update, webmasters named it it valentine's day update and it
was unconfirmed from official sources but many websites around the world has seen traffic improved. As we see for
Bluenile, there is traffic decline from Jan 2019 numbers to Feb 2019 Numbers, it's not big but there is a drop and
this can be due to Feb update.
1. March 2019 - Now if come to March 2019, there is a another Big Core update Google rolled out and it was
confirmed by official Google spokesperson. It was massive update but many webmasters believe that it was rollback
for many sites who penalized in past Google updates. But here also our traffic is on decline mode. I strongly believe
feb + march together gave us a set back which continued for another 2 more months April-May.
1. June 2019 - Here we come to June 2019 Core Update also known as limited E-A-T, which stands for Expertise,
Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Here we got some relief and the traffic in months from June-Aug 2019 is
improved compared to previous months.

11. Detailed Report on Google Update 2019 - Part 2
Expertise - Bluenile is an expert on what they are doing, niche is playing a key role. we are not jack of all trades ,
we are master of one and that is rings. We know our industry, we know the user intent or at least understand our
user. Our content is best in class for people who are interested in Rings. And this is the reason our info. Pages are coming
on top instead of category page as Google find those page more relevant.
Authoritativeness - When the brand becomes synonym for their category, this happens. People know our brand as we
are there in market from very long time. Brand anchors, Social media discussions and brand mentions are playing key
role here. This also includes third party reviews, ratings etc. Here i feel Bluenile is doing great.
Trustworthiness - The T stands for Trustworthiness, again our site is very trustworthy to users. I don’t think people
have negative sentiments towards the brand. ORM is signal to Trustworthiness factor.
I strongly believe this update was positive toward our brand and we did well till Sep 2019 and why we have not got enough
profit from this update could be because of keyword cannibalization reason, as I mentioned earlier the site diversity
update.

12. Detailed Report on Google Update 2019 - Part 3
September 2019 - Now in sep 2019 Google rolled out broad core update and Google notified webmaster before rolling
out. This was broad update so its not penalize any website specifically but to improve their system, in other terms raising
the bar. we have not seen any significant drop in month of Sep 2019.
Oct 2019 - Google rolled out another update called BERT which has impacted rankings. After this update we can see
we lost 50k-60K traffic. 10K keyword which were ranking on top 3 positions lost the game, initially it has affected only US
english speakers but in dec 2019 Google rolled out this update worldwide and it has affected almost all languages. I
strongly believe that we as multilingual website hit badly because of poor implementation of internationalisation.
Conclusion - During 2019 from Jan to Dec, we lost 200K traffic monthly which is very big number. And 2019 is
indeed a bad year but 2020 was also bad in terms of losing traffic. Because of Jan 2020 and May 2020 Updates or Covid-19
also affect businesses worldwide.

13. Technical Recommendation - Part 1
HrefLang Tag Implementation
Why it's important -
● It gives our content a boost.
● Its make sure that correct country page appears for right keyword.
● We can handle duplicate content issues with help of this tag.
● In other word it’s pagination for different language page, page A connected to Page B and vice
versa.
So my first Technical recommendation starts with implementation of Hreflang tag.

14. Technical Recommendation - Part 2
Fixing the Page Speed a.k.a Core web vitals -
Why it's important
● It Improves the user experience and better UX is better SEO.
● Google is planning to include Core web vitals in May 2021 update as a official ranking signal.
Brand Mobile Score Desktop Score
Bluenile Category Page 15 34
Kay's Category Page 15 28
Brilliant earth's Category Page 35 75
Jared's Category Page 34 64
Zales Category Page(AMP) 40 83
Tool - Pagespeed Insights

15. Technical Recommendation - Part 3
3. On Page Fixes - While Hreflang tag and site speed takes time, i would love to do below tasks to make organic traffic do vertical charlie -
● A/B Tests for Title
● Fixing keyword cannibalization as this is highly important and gave tough time in past.
● A/B Tests for Meta Description
● A/B Tests of Heading tags
● URL optimization if required (i don’t want to touch this part unless it's really important.
● Sitemap Issues if any (proper tagging of hreflang pages into sitemap)
● Content Optimization for top category pages.
● And whatever it takes to bring site to top 2 positions of Google for all keywords.
● Working on internal linking structure

16. High Crawl/Index Rate vs Traffic Drop - Part 1
I have faced this issue in the past and I strongly believe the reason are same -
The Tool - Bluenile has tool called “Build your own ring”, in Google there are 50K pages indexed with same word.
See the below screenshots -

17. High Crawl/Index Rate vs Traffic Drop - Part 2
As you see in last slide how many pages this tool has created. These pages are user generated, which are crawled and
indexed by Google.
These pages have noindex, follow tag. noindex is good but follow tag will waste the crawl budget, as they are linked to
highly crawled and indexed pages, perhaps the reason for faster crawling and indexing.
Other possible reason-
Product and customer id and other parameters passed in URL. PFB the screenshot -

18. Internationalisation
Site is fully multilingual on the front end side but on the other site SEO elements are missing, hreflang tag is missing on
main pages and vice-versa.
I have already shared most of the info. on the hreflang tag in slide no. 13. That would be my first priority.
There is a redirect error we need to solve, whenever I try to check the homepage for status code, it redirects 302 to
different country pages. For this I strongly believe we should display https://www.Bluenile.com home page of its version
for the en-US at the root domain and give users an option to select the preferred country and language. As Google said
“Avoid automatic redirection based on the user's perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and
search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.”

19. HrefLang Tags for Site
HrefLang Tag for XML Sitemap -
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<url>
<loc>https://www.bluenile.com/</loc>
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com" hreflang="x-default" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-mx" href="https://www.bluenile.com/mx/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https://www.bluenile.com/fr/" />
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.bluenile.com/mx/</loc>
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com" hreflang="x-default" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-mx" href="https://www.bluenile.com/mx/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https://www.bluenile.com/fr/" />
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.bluenile.com/fr/</loc>
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com" hreflang="x-default" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-mx" href="https://www.bluenile.com/mx/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https://www.bluenile.com/fr/" />
</url>
</urlset>
HrefLang Tag for HTML Header -
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com" hreflang="x-default" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com/mx/" hreflang="es-mx" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.bluenile.com/fr/" hreflang="fr-fr" />

20. Keyword Strategy - “Engagement”
Keywords US MSV Global MSV
engagement rings 255000 469000
vintage engagement rings 17000 25000
engagement rings for women 16000 21000
moissanite engagement rings 16000 17000
unique engagement rings 14000 19000
sapphire engagement rings 14000 21000
diamond engagement rings 11000 18000
emerald engagement rings 9300 13000
rose gold engagement rings 9000 13000
cheap engagement rings 7300 11000
emerald cut engagement rings 6900 9300
custom engagement rings 6800 8800
mens engagement rings 6500 13000
simple engagement rings 6100 8600
ruby engagement rings 5400 7800
oval engagement rings 5400 8200
antique engagement rings 5000 7400
engagement rings for men 4500 9100
halo engagement rings 4500 7500
black diamond engagement rings 4400 5700
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/emerald-cut
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/gemstone
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/halo
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/solitaire
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/gold/rose-gold
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/for-men
https://www.Bluenile.com/wedding-rings/mens-wedding-rings
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/marquise-cut
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/cushion-cut
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/top-engagement-rings
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/sapphire-sidest
one
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/simple
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/princess-cut
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/radiant-cut
https://www.Bluenile.com/engagement-rings/styles/oval-cut
This is what initial keyword strategy looks like
with important keywords and targeted LP’s.
Tool - Ahrefs

21. Thank You