CorkSport Search Optimization

CorkSport Performance built a brand over a couple of decades synonyms to Mazda Performance.  Although a lot of effort had been placed on car model specific categories little was done to target product specific product categories. The challenge was to improve the search visibility of some of these product categories.  Specifically, short ram intakes was starting point to test the effectiveness of the strategy.  Although I was confident, I needed to prove the concept to management.  Once SRIs were seen to work successfully, we broadened the scope to lowering springs, turbos, big brake kits, and exhaust systems.      

Pillar Pages 

Pillar pages are important as a hierarchal approach to SEO.  SRIs were key foundationally and showed that the overall results were good.  Not only are SRIs an entry point and staple product but was also not subject to production issues that might occur.  First I created a hierarchy of products based by model. I created dropdown using HTML and CSS for a light and fast navigation. This was further broken down into model years as need so that content would be specific to those pages.

Navigational 

Top Level Navigation also provided a signal to user of the categorical offerings that were not only dependent on vehicle models. These pillar pages help in the earlier phases of the buying processes when users are looking for more generic terms like Mazda SRIs, lowering springs, big brake kits, or exhausts.   Certain constraints with the CMS made it difficult to display subcategories in navigation without some usability issues so we remained at a high level within main navigation.  A signal to search engines that this page is of higher importance. 

Internal Links & Social Links

Linking to product categories became much easier for these categories like SRIs.  I mapped out product blog posts that could easily link to the category pages so that they would be more visible and increase importance of these pages.

Another benefit of creating pillar pages is that it became easier to connect social media content to product specific sales.  Formerly, when items like SRIs or Turbos went on sale you would have to point products to a search page and curate products with a search term on the backend to render the product.  The problem with this is it didn’t provide value to the site and made it impossible to organize products or add SEO content to those search result pages within the site.  

Search Results

The overall outcome of this project was positive.  Specific wins like first place results and AI could be clearly documented and noticed even within analytics with references seen also from ChatGPT.  

As seen in the image results here, AI Overviews were also impacted with high level top funnel results like Mazda SRI would show overwhelmingly CorkSport specific products with links.  Although not all results were as robust, this was a major win on the SRI side since many who start modifying their cars begin with an intake.  This is where other marketing channels like email could step in to reengage customers on future purchases.

Thoughts on SEO

This was not the totality of my SEO applications but it was a significant element I spearheaded at CorkSport.  Some other elements that I helped address were optimization through title tags on both products and blogs, alt tag images, editing and production of additional site maps, schema tagging of videos, YouTube SEO through content descriptions and backlinks, AMP and mobile page improvements, and back link and cross linking of other products.  I would say there was still a lot of to address and could have been full time SEO job. 

SEO was an important aspect of the website but it was not my only duty.  All of my SEO efforts were in varying degrees of progress.  If I had more time or could focus more directly on this, I would have built out more category pages to help broaden the reach of the website.  I also would have experimented with LLM sitemaps to see if there were other impacts on the AI views in search.  In addition, more emphasis on gaining customer reviews for various products.  Utilize more AI to find content gaps for some of the other products that are integral to the brand. The overall role was both challenging and complex.  Because CorkSport runs lean on the marketing department, it is impacting the overall success of its SEO pages.