4x Organic Traffic Growth for Delicious

When Delicious, a leading recipe site, saw declining traffic for no apparent reason, Head of Digital, Vic Grimshaw trusted SEO expert Barry Magennis to investigate.

Challenge

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When we started working with Delicious, we identified a number of challenges. Traffic had been rocky for 8 months and they were facing decreasing traffic.

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1. Experience: Although Delicious was already using an SEO agency, the business was not seeing the results it needed. With no single clear reason for the decline in keyword rankings, Delicious wanted a dedicated, seasoned SEO consultant who had experience of large content sites to get the site back on the road to recovery and to help drive future growth.
2. Legacy SEO issues: Delicious has launched a new site. There were on site technical SEO issues with on site errors, redirect chains, canonical issues and more.
3. Technical SEO opportunities: There was no one to identify new SEO factors that would positively impact rankings in Google.They needed someone not just to identify on site errors but someone to identify further technical SEO optimisations that would make an impact.
4. Content strategy: The recipe team were well versed in editorialSEO but needed someone to steer them in the right direction at times which covered keyword research, thin content and content optimisation. They needed support on creating content plans based on search.

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"We needed to find someone with concrete experience of working with large, commercial content sites. We were losing rankings and didn’t know exactly why."

Vic Grimshaw, Head of Digital at Delicious

Solution

With no single, clear explanation for their problems,Delicious needed a highly experienced SEO consultant to put their business back on track. The company also wanted to drive future growth, in order to avoid slipping back into this position. Delicious needed SEO expertise, and they needed it fast!With a decade of SEO experience, Barry is not fazed by complex, challenging or demanding projects, he focuses on problem solving and increasing growth.

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1. Barry carried out an initial site audit into the traffic decline the site had been suffering from over the previous 8 months. This investigation uncovered a range of technical issues on the site. Some of these were created as a result of a new website going live and the SEO expertise required to proactively avoid these errors had not been available.
2. After that, Barry completed a full technical SEO audit of the site. Barry worked with the web development team and the editorial team to resolve these issues over the coming months.
3. As well as equipping them with a new, data-led content strategy, Barry coached the editorial team in SEO best practices and helped them apply these to new and existing content.
4. We know that how fast a page loads is an important ranking factor. Barry identified a major quick win along with several other optimisations that would result in positive movement in rankings.
5. Next, Barry performed an in-depth keyword research project that uncovered thousands of recipe and food-related terms that delicious could rank for. This provided the keyword intelligence needed to create new content pages – overtime, these would ultimately increase keyword relevancy and organic traffic.
6. An important part of Google’s algorithm is based on the websites that link to your website.It was important that we harnessed the power of all the sites linking to Delicious as well as ensure that any potentially harmful links were disavowed in Google.

"Barry created an objective plan to tackle our issues methodically, and in priority order. We have a small content team, and he appreciates how much we can and can’t do. Barry’s communication is excellent."

Vic Grimshaw, Head of Digital at Delicious

Results

• Within 10 months, organic traffic increased from 1.7 million monthly page views to 4.3 million page views. Within 24 months page view hit 7.1 million and is still growing.

• Delicious is now ranking number 1 for over three times as many recipe related keywords - going from 5,000 to 48,000 keywords in positions 1-3. All ranking keywords have gone from 250,000 to 860,000.

• Over 100 technical SEO issues were uncovered by Barry. These were discussed with the editorial and web development team, prioritised and fixed.
• The editorial team now had a content strategy driven by keyword insights.This uncovered new opportunities but also maximised the number of keywords a piece of content would rank for. The team is now well trained in how to optimise content for Google.

“Barry is diligent, tenacious and also realistic. It took us a short while to get our heads into the language of the SEO world, and to understand why - but through in person meetings, video chats and online collaborative tools we’ve done it. I would absolutely recommend Barry to other companies.”

Vic Grimshaw, Head of Digital at Delicious

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