Lastmile Retail and T-Mobile used Indexing Insight to identify a critical indexing issue that helped increase SEO traffic to their Spanish website by +1,165%.
T-Mobile is one of the largest wireless network operators Globally, serving millions of customers around the world. As a major consumer brand with a significant digital presence, organic search plays a critical role in driving traffic, awareness, and conversions across their international websites.
T-Mobile’s SEO team needs to monitor millions of pages across multiple languages for the United States to make sure that they can appear in Google Search. The team works with Lastmile Retail, an enterprise local marketing and SEO technology platform, to help debug complex technical SEO issues on the website.
One critical area where Lastmile Retail was helping the T-Mobile team was the shop pages on the Spanish (ES) language subdomain of the website.
Lastmile Retail identified an issue on the Spanish subdomain: thousands of important store pages on the Spanish (ES) subdomain were not getting indexed in Google.
The usual SEO tools were not providing answers, so the team turned to Indexing Insight to help debug the complex indexing issue.
During the monitoring of important pages, Lastmile Retail identified a critical indexing issue with the Spanish-language (ES) version of the T-Mobile site.
Indexing Insight flagged that Google was being blocked from crawling the Spanish store pages due to a 403 error caused by blocking Googlebot. This meant these pages were deindexed by Google.
Armed with actionable indexing data from Indexing Insight, Lastmile Retail was able to alert the T-Mobile team to the 403 crawl block and work with them to resolve the issue promptly.
The impact was immediate and significant.
Following the fix, the Spanish international website saw a 1,165% increase in clicks and a 573% increase in impressions. A dramatic turnaround that demonstrated just how much organic opportunity had been left on the table.
When the SEO team looked back across 12 months of historical data, it became apparent that there may have been additional undetected issues. The assumption being a general lack of visibility into the performance of the ES version of the site.
However, access to Google indexing data at scale helped shatter that assumption.
The indexing data also surfaced an interesting discovery: approximately one-third of the recovered traffic was coming from Puerto Rico.
While the Spanish subdomain's traffic volume remains lower than the primary domain, the results make clear that there is a meaningful audience actively seeking a Spanish-language experience. And T-Mobile can help answer that demand.
The team at T-Mobile and Lastmile Retail have learned the value of Indexing Insight's Google index monitoring data and combines it with other SEO analytics data to build a business case.
For enterprise teams managing large, multi-language web estates, staying on top of indexing is not just an SEO best practice, it is a direct driver of revenue.
“Indexing Insight is a fantastic tool. It allows you to constantly see your website's trending index coverage rate in Google Search. The not indexed reports show you the reasons why money driving pages aren't indexed.”
Shawn Huber, SEO Programme Director, Lastmile Retail
Adam Gent
SEO Product Manager and Technical SEO. I’m currently an independent consultant who works with organisations to plan, scope and execute SEO projects that drive results.
