Awesome is a fantasy sports column and news site named after the worlds #1 DFS (Daily fantasy sports) player.
Original Video Audit
This is the original video I cold sent to their CEO and Co-founder. This video was watched by their entire team and led to a phone call.
Background
In February 2019 they made a job post for someone to help them optimize their site for organic search traffic, they were hardly ranking for any sports terms and their organic traffic was at 5,164 clicks per month according to Ahrefs.
With only 52 keywords in top 3 and 80 keywords in positions 4-10.
On top of that the clicks were almost 60% coming from branded searches, what I call direct organic traffic. Basically, people who type a search term into Google hoping to end up on your site anyways (The terms Fantasy Cruncher and FanVice are both partner brands with Awesome).
The Issues
The first thing I do when starting with a new client is a complete in depth manual audit. This means I can use site audit tools like Ahrefs, Moz, WooRank, etc. But these are only used as a guide.
The majority of larger problems are frequently not found by auditing tools, sure it will tell you which pages lack a meta description, have redirect chains, 404 errors, but they often will not find more glaring problems like best indexing practices and site architecture, silos, etc.
The biggest issues I found in order of priority:
- Lack of SEO titles, meta descriptions, header tags
- Website architecture
- URL structures
- Sitemaps
- Website speed
- Broken links
- Lack of keyword strategy
Let’s expand on the issues and why they needed to be fixed.
Lack of SEO Titles, Meta Descriptions, Header Tags
This one goes without saying as the easiest thing to fix and will net you the quickest results with clients who always want to see quick wins.
The SEO title for the home page was just Awesemo.com.
We quickly updated most pages SEO titles for the home page, categories, guides, and any other pages that were getting organic traffic.
When updating the titles you want to ensure that the term is legible, and that…..
Website Architecture
This is a mess (Created with Dynomapper)
The website had 28 pages after the home page. Instead of using neat collections of content they had focused content spread out over 3-4 different folders.
When I build out a new website I want to keep all the content as neat and focused as possible. If you’re writing about basketball, football and baseball make sure that ALL content are in their respectful folders.
This is clean
In this case /nba /nfl /mlb and not /basketball because NBA is a more used term than basketball, but more on URL structure next.
The other issue with having a messy site structure is that it plants pages deep inside your website. This is called click depth, a search engine will often scan through your site by following clicks and if the structure is disorganized it will have a hard time.
When we got started the majority of pages were 6 clicks deep, for reference, a good click depth should be 2 with the higher value pages closer to the source. Click depth is an often overlooked part of SEO but nonetheless extremely important, crawlers have limited resources (especially with massive 5,000 page websites) make sure it’s easy for them to navigate!
Bad click depth
Better click depth
URL Structure
When I first started their URLs were a mess. Something like this:
The problems with this URL structure is the following.
The word Category does not provide any value to crawlers. The word category is redundant, if you replaced that with NBA it would be clear that.
- This is a category
- It’s about the NBA
The word Draftkings, while valuable – Was not part of a larger folder with lots of Draftkings articles, it was just a standalone category.
Here is a better URL structure
Now we have a cleaner, clearer URL that is not only easier to understand for users but cuts out redundant information and allows crawlers to more easily comprehend the page.
Sitemaps
Yoast by default has all sitemaps enabled, that means that it will create a sitemap for pages, posts, tags, author archives, portfolio-items, and basically any other unique type of content that you might have.
When I started with Awesemo they had 11 sitemaps enabled.
They had 3 post sitemaps because Yoast has a maximum of 500 pages per sitemap, so we needed to keep those 3 since we wanted Google to keep older articles around in case anyone wanted them.
Then we had forum, topic, reply, post_tag, topic_tag. All of which are not terms people are typing into Google, thus, don’t need to be kept around.
The thought process behind removing low value pages is that we get Google to understand that we only have high value content on our site, we want to keep lower value content like Post_tags away from crawlers.
Once I was done going through the Yoast settings and disabling all the irrelevant sitemaps we were left with 7.
Easy fix.
Bonus: If you want to take this a step further you can always go to individual pages like Privacy Policy and manually disable their indexing. Thus keeping only the important stuff for Google to crawl and index.
Website speed
Website speed is incredibly important when it comes to organic traffic. When I’m optimizing websites I try to get the score to 80+, unfortunately when it comes to complex sites with lots of services involved it can be super tough.
The lowest hanging fruit is generally image optimization and compression which can be accomplished pretty easily on WordPress.
You generally want to:
- Compress: Make sure the files
- Serve in WebP format (Google prefers it)
- Lazy load
Some of my favorite compression apps are Smush Image Optimization, and Autoptimize but experiences can vary.
This site proved extremely difficult to get speed improvements from, with our best efforts only netting about 30 on Google Pagespeed with issues like blacked out images and shutting down certain content feeds.
After getting some basic things I decided against spending more time on Pagespeed since the client did not deem it a priority.
We would have to get wins through other methods.
Broken Links
129 Broken Backlinks Thats a lot of lost link juice
There are lots of websites who have never focused on SEO who have a TON of broken backlinks to their site, the older the website the more you’ll find the links are frequently going to old pages that are now 404s.
This is a massive waste of link juice leaking through cracks.
In order to find a websites broken backlinks on Ahrefs just go to Site Explorer > Broken Backlinks on the top left.
Once you find the list you can just go to WordPress and download any redirecting plugin. I use Redirection which is a super simple one. Yoast Premium also has this feature.
Lack of keyword strategy
Since Awesemo is a news publishing company with new content coming out daily it was super important that they start using better keyword combinations.
For example, they wanted to rank for the term NBA DFS but rarely, if ever actually wrote that term.
Some quick Google Trends searches also allowed me to quickly find other terms. Google Trends can be used in conjunction with volume searches on Ahrefs to find Good seasonal patterns and relative volumes.
The quick fix for this was to find the most commonly used keywords through competitor analysis and by using the Keywords explorer on Ahrefs and clicking on All keyword ideas on the left.
This will organize similar keywords by volume and is extremely helpful for finding most commonly used keywords and their Keyword Difficulties (KD).
The Results
While SEO takes time to see results some of these things took off quicker than others.
Within two months of work this is what the results looked like.
Traffic
February
April
We went from 5,164 clicks per month to 10,534. A 100% increase in traffic.
Keywords
February
April
We dramatically increased our ranking keywords in top 50 positions from 3177 to over 4000.Keywords starting to appear in the top 50 results are early indicators of imporved keywords rankings later on. Why?
Because sometimes you just appear in the top 10 results but most of the time you’ll suddenly up in position 45, then you’ll get to 20, then maybe if you have the juice you’ll get to 7. Once you’re in the top 10 Google closely monitors users reactions to your website.
Google asks questions like..
- How long are the users staying on that site?
- Are they coming back to the SERPs and clicking on a different results?
- What are their bounce rates?
By answering these questions Google can find out whether your page is useful to users. Does this page match user intent?
Conclusion
At the time of writing this in November 2019 Awesemo has reached a peak of 46,294 views per month on their website.
Those massive spikes you see are because they show up in Google News since they’re a publisher but that doesn’t constitute consistent organic traffic.
They currently are showing up for 908 keywords in the top 3 positions and 825 in positions 4-10.
I hope this was helpful for you to go on and do your own Awesome-O SEO!