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How Alibaba's sub Visable went from zero to 50k clicks monthly using programmatic SEO

June 23, 2025

Image from LinkedIn page of Visable

Acquired by Alibaba Group in late 2023, Visable SA is the operator of Europe’s leading B2B marketplace featuring 2.8 million Europe’s companies.

Company bio

Visable is owner of wlw.de (plus, its Austrian and Swiss versions) and europages.de (as well as 25 other European sites), large European B2B e-commerce marketplaces.


Industry: e-Commerce, B2B.

The problem

The existing system allowed merchants to choose their keywords from a preset list (the taxonomy), which created a serious restriction as to the number of keywords as well as to the quality of results. The problem was the attribution of product description pages (created by merchants themselves) to categories in order to produce product listing pages.

Image from Alibaba website

WHAT WE'VE SEEN

Challenge

The high level concern was how to effectively increase the number of pages served to search engines without prejudicing their quality? In the eCommerce marketplace business model,


  • the number of indexed URLs per merchant as well as 
  • the number of search terms per merchant

is a key metric of SEO strategy. 

The work was both fast and challenging

With the Alibaba Group team building on massively eCommerce experience the work was both fast but also challenging the work was both fast but also challenging. Counting on the massive development capabilities and speed of execution, Bohdan needed to translate the SEO best practices and requirements into the new model of business processes.


Photo from Visable SA website

We knew that category pages were most effective. So, we needed merchants to upload and describe their products, whereas our job was to create as many pertinent category pages from these product pages (PDPs) as possible.

BOHDAN LYTVYN

Founder, Nertis

The approach

From the SEO point of view, in the business model of marketplaces there exists a distribution of core assignment that drastically decreases the cost of production of content (another core metric). Likewise, merchants are incentivised to create product descriptions, upload images, videos, etc. The marketplace does the tech SEO and quality assurance job: attribution of products to CPV (Category - Product - Value), help creating informative titles, assuring the absence of “thin” content, duplication, similarity of content, etc. 


Striking the perfect balance between merchants’ and marketplace’s job was the approach


This is how the idea of an SEO platform appeared.

What did we do?

Photo from LinkedIn page of Visable

The work included - on the first stage - developing a programmatic SEO tool that enabled keywords discovery, expansion as well as attribution of PDPs to multiple category pages. On a second stage, - the programmatic creation of landing pages, on-page elements as well as internal links management etc.

The full list of functions included: 


  1. module of keywords management with a keywords expansion feature
  2. landing pages creation feature, 
  3. internal links management, 
  4. on-page element management, as well as a 
  5. solution for (external) link building and 
  6. automated sitemaps management.

Scope of work

The principal assignment included:

SEO research and business analysis

Internal discussion reports to align both teams

PRDs for SEO-related tasks

Roadmaps and SEO checklists

SEO education of internal stakeholders

SOP (Standard Operating Procedures)

"A minimum acceptable scenario is when a marketplace is able to describe a product by a set of keywords even if a merchant fails to do so by himself/ herself."

BOHDAN LYTVYN

Founder, Nertis

Photo from Visable SA website

The central element of this platform - a keyword expansion - comprised the following elements:


Keywords collecting

The platform gathered keywords from several sources, including the company’s Google Search Console, internal search results or “What people were searching” as well as manual inputs.

Keywords seeding

The keywords collected were marked to include their "heritage" categories, landing page they belong to as well as their expansion potential.

These seeds are pushed for expansion in buckets, one bucket consists of:

  • a principle keywords,
  • expansion rules and
  • resulting keywords.

Keywords expansion

Buckets are scheduled and served to Google Keywords Planner API and SemRush API for expansion, i.e. creating a list of new keywords that are related to the seed. For certain queries 3-in-1 process was envisaged:

  • expansion, 
  • synonymisation and 
  • localisation of keywords.

Primary quality check

Removing stop words, keywords containing brand names, etc.

Enabling filters

Our idea was to enable keyword management from here:

  • search by database and 
  • filtering by keyword type, 
  • Google trends, 
  • level of competition, 
  • relevance of results (scoring), 
  • number of products in the database against a specific keyword, etc.


SEO Results, stage 1

Number of quality keywords after expansion rose x20.

BOHDAN LYTVYN

Founder, Nertis

Keywords expansion: x20. One collected or sourced keyword would result in around 20 quality and relevant keywords. As a result of the primary stage of application of this tooling, the number of keywords on a website rose from 240,000 something keywords to 1.1 million keywords. To the date, the number has exceeded 21 million keywords.

SEO results, overall

The new type of pages went all the way from zero to 20% of total website traffic, i.e. to some 50 '000 of clicks from organic search monthly.

Results of application of keywords expansion with automatic creation of landing pages, including creating HTML tags, internal linking and more.


+50k clicks

in SEO traffic

Screenshot from Google Search Console