Summary

Google’s core updates are known to cause significant volatility in search visibility, with e-commerce among the categories most consistently affected sites can see rankings shift dramatically within weeks of a rollout, for better or worse. When Google issued a major core update in March 2023 prioritizing high-quality content and stronger user experience, a leading marketplace with an extensive product catalogue and competitive pricing saw an opportunity: its search rankings hadn’t kept pace with the scale of its catalogue, and the update’s new criteria gave a clear framework for what to fix.

Bajaj Tech.AI ran a structured SEO program across content, technical performance, and on-site experience to align the marketplace with the update’s criteria. The result was a 30% increase in website traffic, 3,073 keyword rankings improved, and the platform’s Share of Voice more than doubling from 0.41% to 0.94%.

Business Challenge

Despite a large product catalogue and competitive pricing, the marketplace was struggling to reach its target audience because of suboptimal search rankings. With a diverse product range spanning numerous SKUs, its online presence wasn’t fully optimized to capture organic traffic a gap that becomes more costly, not less, as a catalogue grows, since more products mean more pages competing for visibility without a matching investment in the SEO fundamentals behind them.

Google’s core update raised the stakes further. It required a thorough audit of the platform’s content and structure against a new, more demanding bar for content quality and user experience. Improving search rankings across a catalogue this size meant addressing SEO details, content depth, and technical performance simultaneously a complex undertaking, but an essential one for sustained organic growth in a competitive consumer goods market.

The scale of the catalogue made this harder, not easier. A handful of underperforming pages can be fixed individually; thousands of SKUs with inconsistent content depth, missing detail, or unaddressed technical issues require a systematic approach that can be applied consistently across the catalogue, not a page-by-page manual fix.

Summary: A large product catalogue with strong pricing wasn’t translating into organic visibility Google’s core update raised the bar further, making a coordinated content and technical SEO overhaul essential rather than optional.

Solution Approach

Bajaj Tech.AI implemented a structured program built around three areas:

• Content auditing and enrichment. A comprehensive audit evaluated and refined product descriptions, banners, and SKU-level content to align with search intent and relevant keywords. Product catalogues were enriched with more detailed information to both meet the update’s content quality standards and create a more personalized customer experience.
• Technical optimization. Tools including SEMrush were used to detect and fix technical issues that hold back search performance page load speed, broken links, and crawl errors since even strong content underperforms on a technically weak site.
• On-site experience improvements. Banners and visual elements were strategically adjusted to improve user engagement and conversion, since Google’s updated criteria weighed user experience signals alongside content quality.

Together, these three workstreams were designed to do two things at once: meet Google’s updated ranking criteria, and improve the actual shopping experience for customers landing on the site treating the algorithm update as a forcing function for genuine site quality improvements, not a narrow technical fix.

Summary: The approach combined content enrichment, technical SEO fixes, and on-site experience improvements aligning the platform with Google’s new criteria while genuinely improving the customer shopping experience.

Business Impact & Results

The content optimization program produced measurable improvements in both search performance and overall site traffic:

• 3,073 keyword rankings improved across the platform, with the impact particularly visible on product detail pages (PDPs), several of which secured higher visibility in Google Shopping’s Organic Rankings.
• 230 new keywords broke into the top 3 positions, and 315 new keywords reached the top 10, a substantial shift in the platform’s competitive search position.
• 205 keywords began ranking within Google Shopping’s Organic Ranking and Reviews section, a high-visibility placement directly in front of shopping-intent searches.
• Search Volume for the top 10 keywords doubled to 1.75 million, and the platform’s Share of Voice rose from 0.41% to 0.94% more than doubling its share of visibility against competitors for the same search terms.
• Website traffic increased by 30%, the clearest top-line reflection of the combined content, technical, and experience improvements.

Summary: The program improved 3,073 keyword rankings, more than doubled Share of Voice (0.41% to 0.94%), and drove a 30% increase in website traffic, direct, quantifiable evidence that the SEO investment paid off.

Key Takeaways

• Google core updates aren’t just a risk to defend against for platforms willing to invest ahead of them, they’re a forcing function that can be turned into a competitive advantage.
• Content quality and technical SEO have to be addressed together; strong product content on a technically weak site (slow load times, broken links, crawl errors) still underperforms.
• At catalogue scale, SEO gains compound: improving PDP-level content and technical health can move thousands of keyword rankings at once, not just a handful of priority pages.
• Share of Voice is a more durable measure of competitive search position than any single keyword ranking more than doubling it (0.41% to 0.94%) reflects a broad-based visibility gain, not a lucky ranking spike.
• Traffic growth (30% in this case) is the metric that ultimately matters to the business but it’s the underlying keyword and technical work that makes it durable rather than temporary.

Conclusion

This engagement shows what’s possible when a core algorithm update is treated as a strategic opportunity rather than a compliance exercise. By combining content enrichment, technical SEO, and on-site experience improvements, Bajaj Tech.AI helped this marketplace convert a large, underperforming catalogue into measurably stronger search visibility and a 30% lift in traffic that reflects genuine, durable site quality improvements rather than a short-term ranking spike. Any organization with a large product catalogue and organic search as a growth channel faces the same underlying opportunity.

Looking to strengthen your platform’s search visibility ahead of the next core update? Connect with our experts to build an SEO strategy that scales with your catalogue.