How I Grew TechCrunch’s Traffic By 30% in 60 Days
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The Problem
Although the TechCrunch website holds significant brand recognition within its industry, the company was concerned that its pages weren’t receiving the highest possible volume of natural search or social media traffic. They hired our team before the AOL acquisition to address weaknesses in both the site’s content and its overall architecture in order to drive additional traffic from both the search engine results pages and popular social networking sites.
The Results
By implementing a number of different SEO best practices on the TechCrunch website, my team and I were able to double search engine traffic within 60 days and bring about a 30% increase in overall site traffic within the same time period.
Our Strategy
Our approach to increasing TechCrunch’s inbound traffic relied on the use of a number of different white-hat SEO best practices. As described below, our efforts were focused on duplicate content concerns, indexing issues, on-page optimization, network leverage and social media marketing.
Technique #1 — Eliminate Duplicate Content
The first issue that my team and I encountered was a high number of duplicate pages, as reported by the company’s Google Webmaster Tools account. Because this could prevent key pages from being indexed and ranked correctly in the natural search results, we took the following actions to minimize the number of duplicate results reported:
Technique #2 — Ensure Proper Site Indexing
In addition to uncovering instances of duplicate content that could be hampering TechCrunch’s inability to rank well in the natural search results, my team and I also determined that the search engines weren’t properly indexing all the pages on the site. As a result, TechCrunch was missing several vital opportunities to be listed in the search results pages, which we remedied with the following actions:
In addition, my team and I created a series of guidelines for TechCrunch staff writers to follow that help them understand the importance of creating internal links between content pages, as well as how to do so effectively. Going forward, this will enable the TechCrunch team to avoid future indexing issues on their own.
Technique #3 — Optimize On-Page Code
Because SEO best practices change from time to time, one of our first priorities on the TechCrunch site was to ensure that all on-page optimization met current quality standards. The following are just a few of the elements we addressed as a part of this strategy:
Technique #4 — Leverage Network Assets
As a single part of a much larger network, my team and I found that TechCrunch wasn’t properly leveraging the authority of the Crunchbase network and its related properties. Because of this, our remediation efforts in this stage focused on harnessing the authority from these related websites through the use of the following actions:
Technique #5 — Maximize Social Media Marketing
Given TechCrunch’s web-savvy viewer base, extending the company’s existing social media marketing campaigns was an easy way to generate additional backlinks and traffic. By focusing on both on-site and intra-network activities, we were able to effectively boost TechCrunch’s social media presence through the use of the following tactics:
Lessons Learned
Lesson One
Pay attention to Google’s Webmaster Tools program – Over the last six months, Google has dramatically increased the amount of information available through this suite of tools, in addition to bumping up the number of notifications sent to webmasters through this site. Make it a regular priority to check your site’s stats within this program, keeping a close eye on your site speed, duplicate content instances and crawl errors. If you see any problems with these metrics, correct them as quickly as possible to improve your overall SEO.
Lesson Two
Stay on top of changing SEO best practices – Given the rate at which things change in the SEO world, it’s imperative that you stay up-to-date on industry news. Though it may seem time-consuming to revise your site in accordance with each update that rolls out, doing so is the only way to ensure your site receives the high search results page rankings and volume of natural search traffic it deserves.
Lesson Three
Work with social media influencers, not against them – Even if you aren’t an established authority figure in your industry, connecting with power users on popular social networking sites can be a great way to get your name out there. While you’ll need to focus on building relationships first, your efforts here can pay off in terms of increased social media traffic and backlinks.
Neil has advised TechCrunch for more than two years and been an important part of the growth of the TechCrunch Network by helping us implement SEO best practices. Search engines have grown to be responsible for 1/3 of all TechCrunch traffic, so Neil’s support is critical to our business.
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