The Challenge
A leading electronics retailer in the MENA region had spent 12 months with a previous agency trying to solve a critical visibility crisis. Despite having massive inventory, their indexation was capped at ~39,000 URLs. The problem was a fractured architecture that split their authority into three competing buckets: the English root domain (~13k indexed), an English duplicate subdirectory /en-en/ (~13k indexed), and the Arabic version /ar/ (~13k indexed). Googlebot was confused—treating the /en-en/ subdirectory as a separate site, cannibalizing the root domain, while the Arabic version fought for crawl budget against two English duplicates.
The Approach
- Identified that the /en-en/ subdirectory was a legacy artifact serving no user purpose but diluting 50% of English signals. Removed it entirely and implemented 301 redirects for all 13,000 URLs to their root counterparts.
- Implemented granular Language + Category sitemaps (e.g., sitemap-en-laptops.xml, sitemap-ar-laptops.xml) to force targeted re-crawling and pinpoint specific indexation gaps—revealing that while English pages recovered, specific Arabic categories remained blocked by legacy render issues.
- Bypassed marketing management and pitched directly to the CTO and CEO, reframing the technical problem as "Inventory Efficiency": "We are paying to host 100% of our inventory, but Google is only selling 30% of it. This fix unlocks the other 70%."
- Secured immediate engineering resource allocation by demonstrating the business case in executive-friendly terms, treating the fix as a migration requiring dedicated development capacity.
The Results
- Expanded indexed pages from ~39,000 (fractured) to 225,000 (unified)—a 5.8X increase
- Achieved 900% revenue growth within 6 months of implementation
- Transformed crawl efficiency from low (duplicate loops) to high (clean signals)
- Solved a complex international SEO conflict that a previous agency couldn't fix in 12 months