Brainly & OnCrawl - Use Case on SEO project

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Case study : Brainly
CASE STUDY:
TELLING THE RIGHT STORY TO 
GET C-LEVEL, PRODUCT OWNERS, 
AND ENGINEERS ON BOARD FOR 
SEO PROJECTS
INDUSTRY: E-LEARNING DATE: MAY 2020
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Case study : Brainly
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About Brainly
About Murat Yatağan
Website structure at the heart of digital marketing
Confronting SEO deadends
Leveraging SEO storytelling
Results
OnCrawl as seen by Murat Yatağan
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Case study : Brainly
ABOUT BRAINLY
Brainly is the world’s largest online community, uniting students, parents 
and teachers in solving their academic problems and exchanging 
knowledge. Brainly has 200 million monthly unique users from 35+ 
countries. Proving that questions lead to more than just answers, 84% 
of users claim Brainly has increased their curiosity.
About Murat Yatağan:
Vice President of Growth
@Brainly
Murat Yatağan is Vice President of Growth 
at Brainly. He has more than 12 years of 
SEO and UX expertise, of which 5 years 
derive from his role as Senior Product 
Analyst at Google Search Quality Team 
(aka Trust & Safety) in Ireland. During his 
consultancy career he built significant 
experience in technical SEO, high-quality 
content creation strategy, outreach, and 
international SEO. He has managed SEO 
teams for key players in different market 
niches and maintained a portfolio of 100+ 
clients globally from various business 
verticals.
WEBSITE 
STRUCTURE 
AT THE HEART 
OF DIGITAL 
MARKETING
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WEBSITE STRUCTURE AT THE HEART OF DIGITAL MARKETING
Case study : Brainly
Brainly’s online learning offer is based on the ability to offer quality 
answers to real questions from students and their parents.
Murat’s experience and intuition indicated that the possibilities for 
organic growth were conditioned by the website’s internal linking 
structure and the types of pages that this structure indicated as 
important to search engines like Google.
This key fact is also backed up by the data that he collected.
To demonstrate the importance of internal links, Murat segmented 
Brainly’s website by type of page.
He then used OnCrawl to analyze server log data for each type of page, 
and cross-analyzed this information with information in OnCrawl on 
organic visits.
Two types of pages and the relation between them emerged as a 
central element.
From left to right, the page types “questions”, “answers” and “profiles” emerged 
as dominating the site’s landscape.
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WEBSITE STRUCTURE AT THE HEART OF DIGITAL MARKETING
Case study : Brainly
Question pages
Brainly’s question pages are the greatest providers of organic traffic 
to the site:
Therefore, ranking question pages for ultra-precise, long-tail queries is 
key to Brainly’s business model. Consequently, optimizing these pages 
for search engines is a top priority.
As part of their optimization, these pages benefit from close attention 
to their on-page SEO, as well as the use of Schema mark-up and other 
strategies to make them perform better in search. In this particular 
project, optimizing the amount of attention available from Googlebots 
to crawl and index question pages would become a central question.
The number of organic visits to question pages accounts for the largest part of 
organic traffic to the site.
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WEBSITE STRUCTURE AT THE HEART OF DIGITAL MARKETING
Case study : Brainly
Profile pages
Most of the internal links on question pages point to profile pages. 
Profile pages play an important role in the UX of the website by 
providing an assurance of the answer quality through more information 
about the user:
• Community rating
• Past activity
• Expertise
Since these pages provide information to users, but little SEO value for 
ranking Brainly for the long-tail keywords it thrives on, these are not the 
pages Murat wanted Google to see.
CONFRONTING 
SEO DEADENDS
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CONFRONTING SEO DEADENDS
Case study : Brainly
Despite the low SEO value of the profile pages, they receive a very 
large number of links from other pages within the website, which 
misleadingly inflates their importance in the eyes of Google.
However, modifying profile pages or their internal links were not an 
option:
• As legacy pages being interdependent on other platforms, profile 
pages weren’t prioritized to be updated for several years.
• Because of the technological debt, the development teams de-
prioritized projects associated with profile pages.
• As pages with little marketing value, there was no business 
reason to justify the resources needed to index them.
This created a major roadblock for Murat and his team. Due to the 
number of internal links pointing to profile pages—and particularly 
inlinks from question pages to profile pages—, Brainly’s website signals 
relatively lower importance of question pages, even though these are 
the most valuable pages in Brainly’s SEO strategy.
Comparison of the number of internal links to the different types of pages.
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CONFRONTING SEO DEADENDS
Case study : Brainly
This diluted page rank limits the efficiency and results of future SEO 
projects: any improvement that can be made to the indexing and 
ranking of question pages is mitigated by the internal linking structure 
of the website.
• The inability to implement the usual solutions:
Inability to transform low-value pages into indexable ones 
due to resource allocation
Inability, for UX reasons, to remove links
• Resistance from the development teams: lack of enthusiasm
• Resistance from product teams: lack of importance given to 
legacy pages
• Resistance from C-level: no available resources
LEVERAGING SEO STORYTELLING
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Case study : Brainly
LEVERAGING SEO 
STORYTELLING
LEVERAGING SEO STORYTELLING
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Case study : Brainly
To find a solution, Murat realized he would have to explain the ROI of 
SEO for question pages, and show the value of the project.
While Brainly already used OnCrawl for data insight generation and 
regular monitoring, Murat took things a step further. He was able to 
clearly demonstrate the problem using OnCrawl to each of the different 
groups of collaborators at Brainly who needed to be on board in order 
to mobilize the resources to solve the internal linking problem.
This is one project where OnCrawl was a real game-changer 
for me and my team. We use many tools, but this is the one 
that was able to make the difference to get a strategic project 
off the ground.
— Murat Yatağan
LEVERAGING SEO STORYTELLING
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Case study : Brainly
C-level decision-makers
When approaching C-level decision-makers, Murat had to sell the ROI of 
the project. The question in the forefront of everyone’s mind at C-level 
is: What about this project will take us to the next level?
The key to getting C-level on board was to first demonstrate the 
problem in a way that could be understood.
Restructuring the website structure by targeting the links 
between question pages and profile pages was low hanging 
fruit. With the right technical solution, it would mobilize a 
single developer for a few sprints to make a big impact. But 
more importantly, it would open the door for more important 
projects to come. It would help Google see and rank Brainly’s 
website better, which wouldn’t be possible while the page rank 
of question pages was still depreciated. So I could pitch this 
project as the first step to improve the ROI of all of our future 
SEO projects.
— Murat Yatağan
We aren’t getting as much traffic to our questions as we 
should, because Google’s attention is going elsewhere. We 
need to open space for Google to access our pages.
— Murat Yatağan
LEVERAGING SEO STORYTELLING
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Case study : Brainly
Concretely, Murat could demonstrate that 30-60% of Googlebot hits 
were “wasted”, privileging profile pages excessively when compared 
to question pages.
The next step was to show the usefulness vs the cost of the project. 
Murat needed to demonstrate that the project was:
• Low risk: the project was not complex or hard to predict
• Low cost: thetechnical solution Murat imagined would only 
require 1 engineer for only a few sprints
• Easy to measure/monitor: quantitative data was available to 
measure the actions and the results
• Impactful: there was a business benefit to be gained from the 
success of this project
Murat was able to accomplish this using OnCrawl to show:
• The number of internal links, and the percentage of these that 
pointed to profile pages. The number of links pointing to profile 
pages clearly outweighed the pages’ importance.
Despite the significantly lower number of profile pages, they account for 
approximately 60% of the internal linking power in the website’s architecture.
LEVERAGING SEO STORYTELLING
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Case study : Brainly
• The way the website structure would look if these links were 
removed. OnCrawl illustrated in one click how question pages 
would benefit if profile pages were no longer taken into account 
by Google.
• The importance of internal links in ranking pages. Across the 
website, the Inrank of the page and the number of internal links 
to the page made the difference between pages ranked on page 
1 of the SERPs and pages that missed the cut.
Without links to (or from) profile pages, the website architecture is dominated by 
question pages, supported by the archives.
Brainly’s pages that rank on Page 1 have up to 30x the number of inlinks, and a 
significant portion of the website’s page rank.
LEVERAGING SEO STORYTELLING
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Case study : Brainly
• The number of question and profile pages crawled daily. Profile 
pages were easy to spot as one of the single largest consumers 
of crawl budget hits, even though they were rarely ranked.
• The clear correlation between crawl frequency and rank. It 
wasn’t enough to show the relationship between internal links 
and crawl frequency. The relationship between crawl frequency 
and Brainly’s end goal—more users—had to also be clear.
Distribution of bot hits for non-question pages. The majority of Google’s attention 
is concentrated on profile pages (in blue).
The more Googlebot hits, the more impressions: Only the pages that receive the 
most Googlebot hits rank and generate impressions. The other 90% of pages that 
Googlebot visits less frequently do not rank, or do not rank well enough to generate 
significant impressions.
LEVERAGING SEO STORYTELLING
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Case study : Brainly
The quantitative metrics that Murat was easily able to provide with 
OnCrawl made all the difference. They also provided measurable 
conditions for success to further reassure C-level of the project’s logic 
and feasibility: by changing the number of links, Murat aimed to modify 
the behavior of Googlebots and of website visitors.
To provide transparency and set measurable conditions for success, 
the only thing he needed to do was to use OnCrawl to track SEO 
sessions, Googlebot visits, and internal links from one group of pages 
to another.
LEVERAGING SEO STORYTELLING
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Case study : Brainly
Project Owners
With the approval of C-level decision-makers, Murat then needed to 
obtain the buy-in of project owners by showing the big picture and 
aligning his project with their teams’ goals.
Using OnCrawl, Murat could show the link between the work he wanted 
done on internal links and the big picture for the e-learning product. He 
demonstrated that he understood the product team’s objectives, and 
showed how this SEO project could impact them directly.
We’re working to obtain more visitors. More visitors mean 
more answers, and more answers mean more questions. More 
questions provide the ability to scale the product. (And that 
means more resources for the product team.)
— Murat Yatağan
LEVERAGING SEO STORYTELLING
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Case study : Brainly
Engineers
In order to contribute efficiently, engineers need to understand the 
value behind their involvement.
Murat ran a technical workshop to help engineers understand why 
the modifications he was asking for were important. The workshop 
used data drawn from OnCrawl ensured that the engineers had a basic 
understanding of SEO principles, particularly those that contributed to 
this project:
• Internal page popularity
• Internal linking structure
• Crawl budget
• Correlations between crawl budget and direct ranking factors
He presented ways to measure and influence these key metrics, and 
showed how Brainly’s site performed.
LEVERAGING SEO STORYTELLING
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Case study : Brainly
The problem was now obvious to them, and they could propose 
different solutions that were coherent with Brainly’s SEO. Armed with 
a better understanding of the issue and their role in the solution, 
developers showed much greater investment and motivation.
RESULTS
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RESULTS
Case study : Brainly
With the help of OnCrawl, Murat was able to obtain the approval and 
the resources for this project.
The project quickly made an impact, and results were already visible 
within a few weeks.
Optimized internal links
As Murat predicted, optimizing internal links improved the page depth 
for question pages, increased the overall InRank (OnCrawl’s measure 
of internal popularity) of question pages, and improved the crawl 
distribution of Googlebot hits.
• Average InRank for question pages improved by over 20%
• 90% of questions move from 8th-9th place to 3rd-4th place in 
depth 
• Question pages showed a 30-40% increase in crawl rate
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RESULTS
Case study : Brainly
Improved growth of year-over-year Monthly Unique 
Users
The key business metric for Murat and Brainly’s SEO team is the 
monthly unique user. Murat therefore promised results that could be 
measured in year-over-year growth of monthly unique users.
• Overdelivery on forecasted results by 30%.
Improved engineering work
The training session for Brainly’s web engineers yielded unplanned but 
not unexpected results. The engineers reported that their understanding 
of the processes and the principles behind Murat’s requests led directly 
to:
• Better useability testing
• Ability to design better back-end microservices
• Fewer project errors
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RESULTS
Case study : Brainly
Smoothing the way for future projects
Another unintentional result was the C-level support for the next steps.
Murat found that after this project, he already had the buy-ins he would 
need when he started talking about another big idea: crawl latency 
analysis.
The idea is to compare the time between when a question is published, 
when it is crawled, and when it first receives organic visits. This would 
give Brainly a better understanding of how when they release content 
affects how Google sees the site. In turn, Brainly could then improve 
its organization with content operations in order to gain more users.
This could require more development in order to implement it on the 
site. It would also likely change the processes and workflows of the 
entire content department. However, Murat found the idea gained 
immediate support.
At the C-level when I present my ideas, I can tell that there’s 
a lot of confidence. I’d still like to bring the data to the table, 
because you can’t make good decisions without the data to 
back it up. But when I say, ‘here’s what I’d like to do next,’ the 
response now is mostly, ‘that sounds like a good direction to 
move in.
— Murat Yatağan
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Case study : Brainly
ONCRAWL AS 
SEEN BY MURAT 
YATAĞAN
“ What made OnCrawl so valuable to use in this project was the ability 
to cross-analyze all of the available data in one place. It’s my SEO log 
analyzer, but it also draws on extensive crawl data and information 
like impressions and clicks from Google. OnCrawl uses all of these 
sources of information in its analyses. Without that, I wouldn’t have 
had easy access to the numbers and charts I needed to tell the right 
story to the people I needed to work with. And that’s what really made 
the difference for this project.”
“For me, this project was much less about restructuring the website’s 
internal links. That was what we did. But what thiswas really about 
was taking a small but extremely strategic project that no one wanted 
to do, and using OnCrawl and SEO data to get the support we needed 
at all levels.”
— Murat Yatağan
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Case study : Brainly
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