Overview
Audited search architecture across two global education-marketplace sites, analysing more than 385,000 discovered URLs to expose and quantify platform-level barriers to international search visibility.
Who This Is For
International marketplaces and multi-market websites whose search visibility depends on technical foundations across languages. This case is most useful if:
- you run large sites across several markets and languages
- indexability, canonical tags, hreflang and redirects have never been audited at scale
- you suspect technical search problems but cannot size them
- you want problems traced to templates and routing, not fixed page by page
The Challenge
The client ran two large international education marketplaces, connecting prospective students with degree programmes worldwide.
Search visibility across markets and languages depended on technical foundations (indexability, canonical tags, pagination, hreflang, redirects, metadata and structured data) that had never been audited at scale. The scope and cost of any problems were unknown.
Our Approach
While at Making Waves and NoA, the team now behind ECM.DEV audited the search architecture across both marketplaces.
- Full-site crawls: more than 385,000 discovered URLs analysed.
- Platform-level barriers: issues identified and quantified across indexability, canonical tags, pagination, hreflang implementation, redirect chains, metadata and structured data.
- A prioritised evidence base: one ranked view of the problems, rather than a list of anecdotal issues.
Impact
385,000 URLs, not a sample. Findings quantified against the full inventory, so priorities could be ranked by actual scale.
Causes, not symptoms. Problems traced to their structural source (templates, routing, hreflang configuration) rather than fixed page by page.
A foundation for international visibility. Search architecture treated as maintained infrastructure across markets and languages.
On a site this size, one template error repeats thousands of times. Auditing at full scale is the only way to see which fixes matter most.
Delivered while employed at Making Waves (later NoA Ignite). Any public information referenced here is used for identification and does not imply endorsement.
Topics
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