Services
Full SEO Strategy, Audit, Consultancy; Website Development; Marketing Strategy
Niche
News Website
Client data is kept confidential in order not to disclose the SEO strategies used.
The client launched the news site in September 2023. They reached almost 3 thousand organic visits in January 2024, 5 months after the launch of the site.
In an online media market dominated by established media giants with massive editorial teams and decades of authority, a new site has minimal chance of coming out ahead.
By then the client had made considerable efforts to make SEO as good as possible:
- department of 5 content writers
- 600+ articles written without Ai tools, original content, interesting for readers
- 10-15 backlinks acquired per month
- dedicated SEO optimizations on every article published
So, the main challenge was to increase organic traffic to the site and to be recurring every month, not just momentary.
We conducted a qualitative audit, not quantitative an SEO tool, but based on principles and experience in the field, we evaluated why the articles do not bring traffic and what should be done. From the audit we identified:
- Most important: Content Strategy: Articles were published reactively, without keyword research behind them. There lacked an effective “evergreen” content strategy that would attract long-term traffic, not just in the first 24 hours. It also lacked proper targeting of what the target market was searching for on Google. With SEO we don’t create demand, we deliver based on demand (what people are searching for).
- Using SEO plugin was extra work that brought 0 results. No point optimizing something that has no strategy from the start.
- The backlinks were poor quality, but even so in this project we managed to quickly grow to 100k without the focus on backlinks.
So one of the solutions was the research part:
- in-depth domain research
- understanding target user behavior
- analyzing what works and what doesn’t
- Choosing the words we are most likely to succeed at.
It’s not enough to pick keywords that are being searched and write about them. If you do that you risk appearing on page 2-3 if you’re a small site.
So, through strategic research, we identified certain keywords that had a lot of monthly searches, but were not being properly targeted by any major news sites. The key was a deep understanding of what users wanted to find in these Google searches.
At this stage we worked with the content writing team to best implement the SEO strategy. Basically I didn’t just send a report in which I conveyed “it’s not good the way you did it, we need something else”, but I made a simple plan for all team members to understand and delegated to each team member the content they had to write + simplified procedure and collaborated with them to implement it properly with the SEO strategy.
I didn’t fundamentally change the way they were writing content, I just added a few components that were going to make a difference. We worked very well with all the team members who quickly implemented the strategy and so the results came quickly too.
An important component was also the fact that we analyzed and planned in advance topics that were going to be popular and searched on Google or we covered the search intent for evergreen articles so well, that when the subject of the article (an influencer) came to the forefront in the press, our whole site appeared at the top in Google because it best satisfied the search intent without us having to change anything else in the article.
In addition to audit, research and strategy, we also did technical implementations to optimize the site as well as possible:
- Settings to get your website listed on Google News
- Settings for SEO settings of articles and images to be optimized directly, without team members having to change SEO settings.
- Organizing pages and sections on the website to attract more visibility from google
- Optimization of images based on search intent (very important, later proved to be an important component of success)
- Technical automation to update certain information in articles automatically. (this helps articles stay relevant and up-to-date)
- Various other technical implementations that fall into the “details” category.
