How SEORadar helped Rent.com catch SEO errors at scale

You can’t scale a spreadsheet

Managing SEO for millions of URLs is a monumental task. Often, when you have a site that large, SEO ends up being one of your main acquisition channels. Should something happen to that page, you can see a noticeable dip in revenue. 

For Haris Cajic, a senior SEO manager at Rent.com, making sure these pages are always up and running is a critical part of the job. 

“SEO is one of the leading acquisition channels for a lot of our site traffic,” he said. “Our main purpose is to continue driving qualified traffic.”

To do that, Haris and the SEO team have to constantly monitor the site and make sure that nothing is accidentally changed during production and pushed to the live site. These unintentional changes can cause SEO errors that lead to issues like de-listed pages, which can, in turn, lead to a drop in revenue. 

Haris and the team used a combination of an SEO crawling tool and spreadsheets with macros to manage and track changes on the site. But, spreadsheets can only take you so far before they start getting in the way.

“Even with the macros, it was a fairly manual process,” said Haris. “We had to go through and update manually and try to figure out what sort of items had changed between a QA version of a site and a production version. Over time it kind of got more and more bloated. We needed a solution that scaled better than that and was more automated.”

Not only did they have to do a lot of manual work, but it was a process that ate up valuable time making sure everything was working properly.

“We had to be pretty careful, while at the same time, it needs to be done quickly,” said Haris. “It'd be great to just go and copy and paste a ton of stuff into a spreadsheet and it just works. But you can’t do that. You have to be pretty careful with the data and doing so eats up one hour or two hours a week over time across a couple of different individuals. That becomes a lot of hours over a month or a year.”

An easy-to-implement, scalable solution

The needs of the SEO team were relatively simple - they needed something to check the differences between pages in production and development and they needed something that wasn’t a spreadsheet. 

The challenge was finding a solution that was geared toward SEO. They initially tried tools that could do the job, but weren’t made for the specifics of SEO. Then they found SEORadar.

“The good thing about SEORadar, at least in terms of what we found at the time, is that it was focused towards SEO. A lot of other products were more broad in terms of the stuff that it would check.”

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SEORadar had everything the team at Rent.com needed and, best of all, it wasn’t complicated to use.

“It was straightforward,” said Haris. “It made sense. We were looking for a scalable diff checker and that’s what we found with SEORadar.”

Moving from a spreadsheet to SEORadar was a relatively easy process for Haris and the team, although they needed to make a few adjustments to how they worked.

“It was a pretty smooth transition to using the tool itself,” said Haris. “There were just a couple of things internally that we had to change in terms of our processes to get everything kind of moving smoothly. That mostly involved working with some of the folks on the engineering team who actually trigger some of these deployments to understand that when a certain step of the process starts, we need to run scans.”

SEORadar also gave the team a way to define the errors that were important to them and made it easy to see them when they occurred.

“When you set up SEORadar for the first time, you can define which items are critical errors and which items are not, but maybe they're still flagged because sometimes they are a cautionary flag,” said Haris. “Whenever you run a crawl and you get the results, you can pretty quickly get a visual representation of what the scale of an issue is. It's all presented to you within these crawls. It shows you X out of this many items are critical issues and see a quick output of that. We had something similar in Excel, but it wasn't really as good.”

Less manual work, fewer errors in production

One of the things that Haris and the SEO team noticed after implementation was that sometimes, SEORadar would catch something during a crawl of sample pages and it would be tempting to assume that the error was happening on a small scale, which often wasn’t the case. 

This realization forced them to be more careful with their checks.

“We have millions upon millions of URLs and we can't possibly put all of those to be crawled by SEORadar. We sample our URLs,” said Haris. “You may have an issue where SEORadar says, ‘Hey, you have these issues across these seven URLs.’ You just have to be aware that, while the error may be present across seven URLs, these seven URLs may well be a sample of 20,000 URLs that exist out there. You can’t just say, ‘It's only occurring across seven URLs, so I can go ahead and skip it.’”

This extra level of care helps ensure that things are running as smoothly as possible. 

Ultimately, SEORadar gave Haris and the SEO team at Rent.com the ability to work more efficiently at scale.

“SEORadar helped us automate a process that was somewhat tedious and manual in the past,” said Haris. “And it helped us see everything in a much more visual manner to better digest some of the issues that would occur between QA and production environments. SEORadar allows us to get the efficiency, scale, and automation that we wanted.“