Zoutons & Collegedunia
Two global platforms, in two of the hardest organic categories online.
The business
Zoutons is a coupon and discount platform; Collegedunia is one of India's largest higher-education portals. Both run at a page scale where manual optimisation is physically impossible, against well-funded incumbents, in categories where rankings move weekly.
The brief
Lead SEO across both platforms simultaneously, with a distributed remote team, in 2017, long before remote work was normal.
What was in the way
- Coupons and higher education are dominated by incumbents with deep domain authority and budgets that cannot be matched.
- Both platforms operate at a page scale where any manual, page-by-page optimisation is physically impossible.
- Content freshness is a ranking factor in both verticals, offers expire weekly, admissions cycles turn over annually.
- A distributed team across time zones, in a category where a single algorithm update can erase a quarter of work.
What I did
Led at team level, not task level
Built the process, priorities and quality standard the team executed against, so output stayed consistent without every decision routing through one person.
Templatised the optimisation
At this scale the leverage is entirely in patterns, page templates, internal linking rules and content frameworks applied programmatically across the whole inventory.
Built for freshness by vertical
Content and update cycles were structured around how each category actually behaves: weekly offer expiry in coupons, annual admission cycles in education.
Competed on structure, not spend
Against better-funded competitors, the winnable advantage was technical architecture and depth of topical coverage.
What changed
International, remote and at scale, a decade before that became the default way of working.
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