Organic Rise for Stat.vin: From 183K to 500K+ Monthly Traffic

In an era of growing demand for importing cars from American insurance auctions, understanding a vehicle’s history has become a key factor in purchase decisions.

Stat.vin addresses this need by offering services to track bids on specific car models and access detailed information about their condition at the time of sale (e.g., damage, airbag deployment history, mileage).

The high competition in the automotive information market led Stat.vin to partner with Luxeo. The goal was clear: enhance search engine visibility and attract targeted users. And we succeeded! Over the course of active collaboration, the site’s organic traffic skyrocketed by an impressive 177.6%. Curious about how we achieved this milestone? Read on for all the details!

Brief Overview of the Client

Stat.vin is a service that consolidates data from numerous platforms, including Copart.com, IAAI.com, Auto.ria.com, and others. Its continuously updated database contains tens of millions of records, providing users with comprehensive information about the history of vehicles listed for sale.

The service also offers a wide range of features for analyzing auction data, including:

• bidding history;
• prices;
• photos;
• mileage;
• sales statistics.

Additionally, Stat.vin provides information about sellers, sales of similar vehicles over the past two months, and the option to order a detailed Stat Report.

Key Project Results

Over 16 months of fruitful collaboration with Luxeo, the Stat.vin service demonstrated impressive and sustainable growth in key metrics, strengthening its market position:

Through a balanced combination of technical optimization, content marketing, and strategic link building, supported by market analytics, Stat.vin not only achieved but significantly exceeded its initial goals, laying the foundation for long-term growth and brand strengthening.

Client’s Challenge

Despite having an extensive database and unique functionality, Stat.vin was unable to fully realize its potential and attract a sufficient number of target users. The reasons were as follows:

• Insufficient lead generation.
• Limited useful traffic.
• Weak brand recognition.
• Strong competition among numerous similar services.

All these factors limited the reach of the target audience and hindered business scaling. However, for our team, nothing is impossible. Each of the challenges mentioned above was transformed into a goal.

To overcome these obstacles, achieve the objectives, and implement ambitious growth plans, Stat.vin required an effective SEO strategy. Below, we are eager to share how we structured the promotion processes.

Our Approach

We understood that for Stat.vin, with its massive data volume and competitive niche, standard SEO methods would not suffice. Therefore, we didn’t just promote the website — we created an entire growth ecosystem, where each element was carefully planned and results-oriented.

Our multifaceted approach primarily focused on several aspects:

1. Technical audit. Analyzing the website is essential for any project, as it identifies key issues and sets strategic priorities at the very beginning of the promotion. Following the audit, special attention was given to resolving issues such as duplicate content, coding errors, and slow loading speed.
2. Content strategy. At this stage, we analyzed the semantic core during the initial phase, developed a content marketing strategy, and implemented spinning technology to ensure the uniqueness of textual content when working with a large number of similar pages.
3. Targeted link building. We designed and executed a strategy for building a high-quality link profile, focusing on donors from automotive-related resources. Placing backlinks on forums, review platforms, and similar sites also positively contributed to creating a robust link base.

To ensure effective promotion of this project, a specialized in-house team was assembled, including:

• Project manager. 
• SEO specialist.
• Link builder
• Team lead

The project manager served as the key liaison with the client, not only overseeing the promotion process, but also facilitating effective communication between the client and the developers.

We’ll share more about the interesting challenges we encountered at different stages of promotion in the following sections.

Technical Website Audit

“Details make the difference” — a golden rule, especially relevant for SEO. Stat.vin already had a functioning website, but its traffic did not align with the client’s ambitions. Therefore, we started with a thorough technical audit to identify all bottlenecks hindering effective promotion in search engines.

The result of this diagnosis was a detailed technical task list for website improvements. Below, we highlight some key issues we encountered and the solutions we implemented.

Duplicate Pages

The website had numerous duplicate pages, including URLs with and without “/index.php” as well as with and without a trailing slash. Search engines dislike duplicate content because it reduces the site’s uniqueness and harms its ranking.

• Solution. Implementing 301 redirects to direct users from technical duplicates to target pages.

Insufficient Content Uniqueness

A significant drawback was the low uniqueness of content on landing pages. Instead of original texts, template-based variants with placeholders were used, which made the site appear generic and negatively impacted its overall search engine ranking.

• Solution. Understanding that manually creating unique texts for every Stat.vin page was impractical, we opted for an alternative approach. We developed technical specifications (TS) for creating spun content. To improve performance, we recommended using unique spin templates distributed randomly across pages.

Duplicate Meta Tags and Headers

We identified duplicate “title,” “description,” and “h1” tags, which negatively impacted the indexing and ranking of the resource in search engines by complicating the assessment of each page’s relevance. To address this issue, it was necessary to design and implement mechanisms for the automatic generation of unique meta tags and headers across the website.

• Solution. Our SEO specialists developed templates for generating meta tags and “h1” headers for various page types, including those with VIN numbers and technical pages.

Examples of templates for generating “Title,” “Descriptions,” and “H1” tags for VIN pages

Consolidated table with templates for utility pages

HTML and CSS Errors

Errors in the website’s HTML code negatively affect the ability of search engine bots to efficiently discover and index content. These were identified during the audit of the Stat.vin website.

Examples of HTML code errors on the Stat.vin website

Search engines strictly follow HTML standards, and even minor violations, such as missing closing tags or incorrect layout, can significantly affect how search algorithms perceive the site. Therefore, the issue had to be resolved immediately.

• Solution. To ensure your site interacts with web crawlers and is effectively indexed, we have provided comprehensive recommendations for fixing your HTML and CSS code. According to them, adjustments were made and detected errors in the HTML layout were eliminated, and CSS errors were corrected.

Pages with 4xx Status

During the technical audit, we also identified internal URLs that returned 4xx error codes. The presence of such “dead-end” pages not only worsens the user experience but also complicates access to content by search engines.

• Solution. We analyzed all internal links and compiled a list of all internal URLs with 4xx error codes. Based on this list, the client’s development team resolved the issue. As a result, the user experience improved, and SEO effectiveness increased since search bots could now crawl the entire site without any barriers.

Presence of Open External Links

Additionally, the website had outgoing links to third-party resources without the “nofollow” attribute. This led to undesirable redistribution of link equity, weakening Stat.vin’s own resource, which also negatively impacted SEO performance.

• Solution. Following Google’s recommendations, we advised adding the “nofollow” attribute to all external links leading to non-authoritative resources. This ensures that link equity is preserved and directed to the site’s internal sections.

Selective Language Localization of the Website

As a multilingual resource, Stat.vin faced the issue of incorrect language version settings. The rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” attributes, which are necessary for proper indexing and ranking in different regions, were not set in all language versions.

Versions where the attributes are present	Versions where the attributes are missing
English (en).Russian (ru). Arabic (ar).	Georgian (ge). Spanish (es).Portuguese (pt).

Example of incorrect language attribute settings

Based on this, full promotion in Georgia, Spain, and Portugal was impossible.

• Solution. To resolve this issue, we created a technical specification (TS) to add the missing hreflang attributes for all language versions of the website. Additionally, we included the locales of priority regions in the hreflang attributes, allowing Google to provide search results in the user’s language and improving rankings in target GEOs.

Core Web Vitals

There was also the common issue of low page load speeds, which negatively affected the Core Web Vitals scores.

Unsatisfactory Core Web Vitals scores on mobile devices

With such metrics, competing in the online space today is unrealistic. Modern users will not wait more than 2 seconds for a page to load. As a result, visitors form a negative impression, they are dissatisfied, and the likelihood of them returning to the website is low.

Moreover, search engines, especially Google, take page load speed into account when ranking, so a slow website loses positions in search results.

• Solution. We analyzed the data provided by the services, particularly Core Web Vitals, and compiled a list of recommendations. The goal was to maximize the scores (especially “Performance”) and move them into the green zone. 

Subsequently, the client-side developers implemented the changes. However, due to some technical limitations, the desired values have not been reached yet. The developers are currently continuing to optimize the infrastructure and improve the load speed.

Backend Challenges

In addition to all of this, we encountered another technical issue related to the website’s backend. An unexpected challenge for the Stat.vin project was the fierce competition in the niche, which led to several difficulties:

• An excessive amount of link spam
• DDoS attacks on the website
• Competitors scraping the website

We had to actively combat all of this by applying fast and optimal solutions.

• Solution. Most of these issues were handled by the developers, however, our SEO specialists were responsible for systematically tracking the backlink profile and cleaning it from spam by rejecting links using the Disavow tool.

Content Component

After the technical audit, we focused on the content, which plays a key role in successful SEO. Below, we will describe our approach to competitor analysis, semantic core collection, on-page optimization, and the integration of a blog to increase traffic.

Competitor Analysis

In the context of comprehensive promotion, it is important to pay special attention to competitor activity analysis. Our detailed research included two main points:

1. Identifying major websites with similar functionality for key search queries.
2. Conducting a comparative analysis of their backlink profiles.

Table with competitor data for our client

Thus, we gained a clear understanding of Stat.vin’s current position in the market and were able to identify directions for further development.

In particular, the analysis showed that the website significantly lags behind market leaders in terms of traffic and the quality of the backlink profile. At the same time, web analytics data understated the actual traffic shown by Google Search Console due to the predominance of low-frequency queries. We concluded that there is significant growth potential, provided there is active link building (but more on that later).

As a result, we focused on:

• improving the website’s DR (Domain Rating);
• acquiring high-quality backlinks;
• using various types of resources for link building, including forums and profiles.

By studying competitors’ strategies, we identified the most effective ways to build a backlink profile and developed an optimal action plan to achieve the best results.

Semantic Core Collection

Collecting the semantic core was critical for understanding user queries and optimizing pages.

In Stat.vin, where the primary element of promotion is unique VIN codes (vehicle identifiers), we faced a challenge: these keywords are difficult to track due to their low and unpredictable frequency. Therefore, we decided to create a basic set of general keywords for each language version of the website.

Example of the semantic core in English for the US

Despite this, VIN codes remained at the center of our strategy. We actively tracked them in Google Search Console, which allowed us to promptly adapt the strategy and focus on the most priority elements.

On-page Optimization

Our task was to optimize a large number of similar pages, which required non-standard solutions.

1. To ensure content uniqueness, we applied spintax, using several templates developed based on a detailed technical assignment for the copywriter.

Example of spintax technical assignment for copywriters

This allowed us to generate unique texts for each page, which is critically important for SEO.

2. To improve internal linking and indexing, we also implemented hub pages:

• Popular cars of the day
• Popular cars of the week
• Popular cars of the month
• Popular cars of the year

These pages are linked internally to the most visited car pages, and to track view statistics, we used the Google Search Console API.

Optimization of Crawling Algorithms and Improvement of Page Indexing Quality

The specifics of the Stat.vin project involved attracting traffic through low-frequency queries. Therefore, ensuring the most complete indexing of its pages was critically important. The more pages with potentially relevant content indexed by search engines, the higher the chance of attracting target users.

To achieve this goal, we conducted a comprehensive set of tasks to optimize the crawling budget, which included:

• analyzing server logs
• adjusting internal links
• and many other details, which are our professional development.

Excluded some pages that do not affect CTR and conversion, thus increasing the effectiveness of indexing key and profitable pages

As a result of these actions, we managed to increase the number of indexed pages more than three times, which significantly improved the site’s visibility in search results and provided a steady flow of organic traffic. Currently, the indexing level of the site’s pages is maintained at a high level.

Creating a Blog

Based on our experience, we understood that maintaining a blog is a powerful tool for attracting targeted traffic and quality leads. Competitor analysis confirmed that many of them actively use blogs in their strategy.

For maximum effectiveness, we created a full-fledged blog on the Stat.vin website, including three types of pages:

1. A general page containing all articles.
2. An article page with the publication date, editing date (if applicable), and a link to the author.
3. An author page containing information about the author, their photo, links to social media, and a list of other articles.

As a result of implementing the blog, we recorded a steady growth in informational traffic to the site.

Traffic dynamics on the blog page

Moreover, the blog has a positive impact on EEAT factors (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and highlights the authors’ expertise in the automotive field.

Expanding the structure

Once again, we referred to the results of competitor analysis. Even then, we identified opportunities to expand the structure of the Stat.vin website in order to attract additional traffic. The most promising solution was the implementation of the VIN Decoder section.

After its integration, there was a significant increase in the volume of near-target traffic, which continues to show steady growth:

Traffic of the VIN Decoder section

At first glance, one might think that near-target traffic is not that important, but it is precisely this traffic that significantly expands the website’s audience, attracting potential customers and increasing overall brand awareness.

Targeted Link Building

Unlike technical audits and content, which mostly work within the site, link building is an external factor that directly affects authority in the eyes of search engines.

While developing a backlink strategy, we faced a particular difficulty: the inability to predict traffic for specific VIN numbers and, consequently, the lack of ability to place links to these pages. To solve this issue, we created hub pages for car brands and models, which became our main target pages for building the link profile.

Key points of the strategy include:

As a result, our link-building strategy not only helped increase domain authority but also improved brand recognition, attracting new users to the website.

Results

The result of our professional approach and effective collaboration with the Stat.vin team was an impressive growth in key performance indicators, clearly demonstrating the success of our work.

Traffic dynamics during the promotion period

The collaboration has now concluded, but our solutions continue to work. Therefore, it is possible that the current performance metrics are also showing positive dynamics, surpassing the results we described above.

Conclusion

As a result of the fruitful cooperation between Stat.vin and Luxeo, our team enthusiastically contributed to the development of the project, pursuing the ambitious goal of maximizing targeted organic traffic and transactions on the website. We successfully:

• Solved technical issues.
• Implemented an effective link-building strategy.
• Expanded the website structure.
• Improved page loading speed.
• Set up the website’s multilingual functionality.

What’s more, we don’t plan to stop at what we’ve achieved. That’s why we continue to regularly analyze search engine results and monitor competitor activities to find new growth opportunities.

Were you impressed by our results? Want to see a similar boost for your website? Our experience and knowledge will help you achieve this. Contact a Luxeo manager for a consultation.