When a visual marketplace finally showed up in search

Context

LottieFiles is the platform designers and developers use for Lottie animations - create, manage, ship lightweight motion into products. Trusted by 135,000+ companies. The product is the catalog.

I joined as SEO Manager in September 2023.

Search traffic already existed. What didn’t: a system that made the highest-value product surfaces easy for Google - and Google Images - to find, understand, and keep ranking.

Marketplace SEO fails when you treat it like a blog. The work that moved the needle was architecture, structured data, and intent-owned product pages. Three bets. One story.

Problem

Three surfaces carried disproportionate conversion and brand value. None of them were set up to compound in search.

Free animations was high traffic and high conversion - and still underlinked. Listing pages sat as islands. Crawl wasted energy. Long-tail topical relevance leaked.

The asset library was visual by nature. Search engines mostly met text. No dedicated image sitemaps. No image schema that explained context, licensing, or metadata. A visual marketplace with a weak Image Search channel.

Plugins and integrations sat on high-intent queries - people already looking for a Lottie workflow in Figma, After Effects, the tools they live in. Those pages existed. They weren’t defended like money pages.

The constraint wasn’t “write more posts.” It was: make the product graph and the assets themselves legible to search.

Approach

1. Internal linking on free animations

I started where conversion already lived.

We analyzed asset-level tags on listing pages and built an automated linking layer: surface the tags that recur most often on a page as contextual internal links. Not a hand-built spreadsheet. A system that scales with the catalog.

Users and crawlers both got paths to the most related neighbors. Crawl efficiency improved. Indexation tightened. Long-tail queries had a graph to land on.

That section stopped being “a useful URL cluster” and started behaving like a core SEO asset.

2. Image sitemaps and schema

Despite selling visual assets, LottieFiles lacked the basics Google needs to surface them in Image Search.

I worked with developers to generate and submit comprehensive image sitemaps - every asset referenced and described. In parallel, we shipped image-specific schema on product pages: context, licensing, metadata.

Same concept as the linking work. Different channel. Make the asset itself machine-readable so a new organic surface can open.

3. Plugins and integrations as money pages

High-intent plugin queries don’t forgive thin pages.

We kept each plugin and integration landing page aligned to search intent, product truth, and UX - then monitored, refreshed, and partnered with eng, content, and design so rankings didn’t rot. The goal wasn’t a one-time audit. It was ownership of the queries that already meant “I want this product.”

Outcome

Three numbers. Same thesis.

+27% organic users on the free-animations program - the headline lift from the linking architecture. January 2024 vs January 2025: +28.06% users from organic search. Average YoY growth 30.22%. Average MoM 2.23%.

1.5× image clicks after image sitemaps and schema - Image Search as a real channel, not an afterthought.

3× clicks on plugins and integrations landing pages - high-intent product queries owned end to end.

Together, organic stopped being a side channel and started compounding from product surfaces that already converted.

What I’d do differently

I would have shipped image schema and sitemaps earlier. Linking moved the main organic curve; Image Search was a parallel channel we left underbuilt for too long relative to how visual the product is.

I would also have locked a shared dashboard for plugin landing intent vs. product release cadence. When a plugin ships or changes, the money page should update on the same clock - not in a later SEO pass.