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Massive b2c Finance content site
We helped a massive content-driven site in the finance niche recover from a sharp traffic drop and regain over 100,000 visits/mo.
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Outcomes / results
100k
traffic recovered
73k
technical and on-site changes
13k
pages audited & analyzed
How’d we do?
We were able to audit and diagnose a huge, sharp traffic drop that occurred with this site and come up with a list of rapid technical and on-site changes to deploy.
We were able to implement changes at scale and measure the effects of each change. In the end, we stopped the traffic drop and reversed the trend. At the end of the campaign, the site had regained over 100,000 lost organic visits per month.
organic traffic
organic keywords
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About the project
Description
This was a massive, B2C content-driven site in the finance niche but also covers lots of tangential areas, like celebrity net worth and college rankings. It was a relatively general site that had produced content on a massive scale and was suffering from a sharp traffic drop that was about a month old when we came on.
Our Role
Ranq’s role was to run diagnostics on the traffic drop to pinpoint what happened and to come up with a plan to stop and reverse the trend. Then, we needed to deploy changes at scale to rapidly preserve revenue.
03
Project challenges
Challeges
This site was gigantic and had lots and lots of content, because scale was the most important thing to this site, content quality had suffered, and technical issues had snowballed over time.
Challenge #1
Ads had to stay. This site was monetized with highly optimized display ads. It didn’t matter if we recovered all the traffic if we weren’t making money with ads.
Challenge #2
Technical issues had snowballed. Technical issues that might have been a small deal on a small site had grown into gigantic issues because of the incredible scale of content production.
Challenge #3
Content quality had suffered. Also because of the scale of growth, content quality had suffered over time, creating lots of problems around Google’s E-A-T requirements.
Challenge #4
Technical solutions needed to be applied at scale. Technical solutions needed to be applied at scale and tested rigorously, also at scale, presenting significant technical challenges.
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Our strategy / approach
Approach
We leaned on an approach we use with lots of eCommerce clients, we just leaned on it more heavily and got a lot more aggressive: good blogging.
We did a massive audit.
The first thing we did was to audit the site, which can be tough on a site as big as the one we were working on. Sites are often large, but not many have as many truly unique pages as this site does.
We diagnosed the drop.
We identified the pages most affected by the drop, identified trends, cross-referenced those with both our audit and with recent changes from Google, and we came up with a huge list of likely culprits.
We deployed changes.
Based on our list of prioritized recommendations, we deployed our changes in small batches, testing each batch of changes as rapidly as we could, compiling data and pivoting the strategy on a weekly basis.
We scaled.
As the drop stopped and the trend reversed, we scaled the changes that were working so we could not only keep the trend going in the right direction, but also speed up the recovery as much as possible.
