Context
A multilingual education platform had thousands of indexed pages but almost zero impressions. The issue wasn’t copy — it was the chaotic way signals reached Google.
Threats
- Googlebot wasted crawl budget on duplicate parameterized pages.
- Dynamic routes lacked canonical logic, confusing search engines.
- Critical assets were blocked by misconfigured caching + robots rules.
- Internal link equity died because pages were orphaned inside components.
Approach
- Redesigned IA using semantic clusters and component-level JSON-LD so every lesson, event, and course declared its relationship to parent topics.
- Moved rendering server-side (Next.js + edge caching) to expose real metadata instantly and support hreflang pairs.
- Built a link-flow visualizer (GraphQL + D3) that shows dead ends so writers fix content architecture, not just copy.
- Automated SEO checks in CI (Lighthouse CI + Screaming Frog headless) and blocked deploys when canonical/hreflang drifted.
- Used Search Console API + BigQuery to monitor crawl stats; anomalies pinged Slack.
Outcome
Crawl efficiency improved 54% in a month, time-to-index dropped from 18 to 6 days, and impressions grew 112% without publishing new blogs. The business finally treated SEO as a systems problem instead of a content chore.
Lessons Learned
When IA, rendering, and ops operate in sync, ranking becomes a byproduct. Search wants clarity, not cleverness.