Coldharbour Fleet
Van & fleet leasing broker · Birmingham
How a Birmingham leasing broker fixed 60,000 duplicate deal pages
Tens of thousands of near-identical deal pages were queuing for the same crawl. We closed the lanes that led nowhere, cleared the hold-ups and opened one clear route per van.
- Programmatic SEO
- Crawl budget
- Core Web Vitals
- Vehicle schema
- Engagement
- 9 months
- Plan
- Signal
- Market
- Birmingham
- Result
- +129% organic enquiries
01Incident ahead
Each term, mileage and trim combination spawned its own URL, splitting authority and burying the deals that mattered.
Coldharbour Fleet brokers business and personal van leases from a Birmingham office, with a stock feed of every derivative from small panel vans to crew-cab tippers. The site let a visitor pick term, annual mileage and initial rental, and every choice wrote a new, indexable URL.
To a search engine that looked like tens of thousands of thin pages saying almost the same thing. Links and engagement for any one van were spread across hundreds of variants, crawlers spent their visits on permutations, and fresh deals sat undiscovered for weeks. On mobile the pages jumped as prices loaded.
How the URLs multiplied
- 254van derivatives
- × 4lease terms
- × 6annual mileages
- × 10initial rentals
Rounded in the audit to 61,000 once make and model listings were added.
02Survey · lane closures found
Six faults on the network
Fourteen days of server logs, a full crawl, field Core Web Vitals and a structured-data scan. Each fault carries the signal we would later use to fix it.
- Indexing
61,000
Indexable deal URLs
254 van derivatives × 4 terms × 6 annual mileages × 10 initial-rental options. Each combination was its own indexable page with near-identical copy.
- Crawl
83%
Googlebot fetches wasted
Fourteen days of server logs showed most crawler requests landing on permutations. New deals took 19 days on average to be crawled at all.
- Canonicals
240×
Authority split per van
Every variant canonicalised to itself, so links and engagement for one Transit Custom were spread across up to 240 competing URLs.
- Core Web Vitals
0.31
Mobile CLS on deal pages
The price widget and finance calculator were injected after load, and vehicle images had no dimensions. The whole page jumped as it settled.
- Structured data
0
Pages with vehicle markup
No Vehicle or Offer schema anywhere. Results showed bare links while competing brokers surfaced monthly prices.
- Sitemaps
58,400
URLs in the XML sitemap
The sitemap listed almost every permutation, all with an identical lastmod, telling crawlers nothing about what had changed.
03Strategy · four lanes
One signal per fix, one route per van
Built on our Signal plan. Programmatic SEO, Crawl budget, Core Web Vitals, Vehicle schema: each runs in its own lane, and the order matters. Close the dead-end lanes before you open new ones, or crawlers never reach the new pages. Pick a lane to read its signal.
3,800 PAGES TO INDEX
Programmatic SEO
One canonical page per derivative, generated from the vehicle data feed, with term, mileage and initial rental moved into on-page selectors instead of URLs.
- 3,560 derivative pages built from manufacturer spec data: payload, load length, towing, WLTP range for EVs
- 240 make, model and body-type hubs (panel van, tipper, pickup, crew cab) as the routes into them
- Deal history and “from” price per derivative so every page has content a permutation never had
04Route · 9 junctions
Month by month, junction by junction
- J1Month 1
Survey the network
URL inventory, 14 days of crawl logs, field CWV data and a baseline of 120 tracked van queries.
- J2Month 2
Pick the canonical
Derivative level chosen as the indexable unit; term and mileage become selectors on the page.
- J3Month 3
Close the lanes
Permutations canonicalised and kept out of links; robots rules and a 3,800-URL sitemap shipped.
- J4Month 4
Stop the shift
Price and calculator rendered on the server with reserved space; CLS falls to 0.09.
- J5Month 5
Open the templates
3,560 derivative pages generated from the feed with spec, running costs and deal history.
- J6Month 6
Mark up every van
Vehicle, Offer and breadcrumb schema validated across the template set.
- J7Month 7
Build the junctions
Make, model and body-type hubs plus a West Midlands business-leasing hub to route links.
- J8Month 8
Keep it fresh
Stock feed drives lastmod; expired deals redirect to their derivative instead of 404ing.
- J9Month 9
Hand over
Index coverage settles at 3,800 URLs; monitoring and a template change checklist handed over.
05Arrival · results
+129% organic enquiries
Duplicate URLs
-94%
Organic enquiries / month
+129%
CLS
-87%
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
- ENQUIRIES
- INDEXED URLS
- CLS
Tracked queries, Birmingham, mobile
| Query | Before | After | Canonical page |
|---|---|---|---|
| van leasing birmingham | 34 | 3 | /van-leasing/birmingham |
| ford transit custom lease | 41 | 5 | /ford/transit-custom |
| business van leasing no deposit | 27 | 4 | /business-van-leasing |
| vw transporter lease deals | 58 | 7 | /volkswagen/transporter |
| electric van lease | 72 | 9 | /electric-vans |
| toyota hilux lease | 46 | 6 | /toyota/hilux |
| short term van hire west midlands | 39 | 4 | /van-leasing/west-midlands |
| tipper van lease | 63 | 8 | /body/tipper |
The same search, before and after
coldharbourfleet.co.uk › deals › transit-custom?term=36&miles=10000&ir=9
Ford Transit Custom Lease 36 Months 10000 Miles 9 Months Upfront
Lease the Ford Transit Custom. Lease the Ford Transit Custom 36 months. Lease the Ford Transit…
coldharbourfleet.co.uk › ford › transit-custom
Ford Transit Custom Van Leasing | From £289/month ex VAT
Every Transit Custom derivative, payload and load length compared. Choose term and mileage on the page.
From £289/moDiesel · EVIn stock
Get a plan like this
Faceted catalogue, duplicate pages, crawlers lost in parameters? We start with the survey and build the lanes from there.