Thread by @GiordMarco96

[Case study]: How I got a publisher website past 400K sessions per month with Semantic #SEO and careful planning.

This is my longest thread so far and I will try to document all the steps I followed and the main takeaways. 🧵

The niche is pop culture (actually two subsets) and the market is Italy. Zero budget as it is a test project and I am just helping a friend of mine.

Everyone is writing and the most important skill, in this case, is knowing the industry.

The first thing I did was to do a technical audit back then to spot serious issues. Since I know the niche I can tell that it's not so important unless it's dragging you down.

The technical situation of the website wasn't that bad.

After that, I noticed that the website wasn't ranking for any meaningful queries.

My focus moved on creating two new sections to capitalize on the fact that the competition was weak for some topics.

There were a lot of untapped opportunities and it's not that easy.

The most important thing is having good taste in these niches where you need to suggest shows or give advice.

Sure, you may object that it's not relevant for direct SEO purposes. And you are right, this is more of a branding problem. Anyway, it's important to know the topic.

If we take pure SEO into account, disregarding the user and the quality of the text, then we risk creating another boring website.

For this reason, I tried to inject as much quality as I could into articles.

Now, for the tools used, nothing strange as it is a low-budget project.

- Screaming Frog
- Semrush
- #Python/R
- Google Sheets
- Google Search Console
- Google Data Studio

And that's it, I don't even do Keyword Research with third-party tools, I just use Google Search Console.

The content type of the website wasn't working, most of the pages were suitable for social media, not for organic search.

Super high quality with the wrong channel in mind.

I put SEO first by giving more weight to these 2 new sections.

Once you have outlined your areas it's just a matter of hard work and patience. All I care about is evergreen content, competing with news in this industry is crazy and nonsense.

This could be reconsidered for later stages.

A major role was later played by template creation. Define a type of article and the target audience/intent.

Define some templates/structure to satisfy that intent and repeat. In this way, it's easier to edit content and understand what are the requirements.

When I discovered actual Semantic SEO I fell in love with it and I had to test it. On an older website, it worked very well but now I was even more prepared.

What I noticed is that it's extremely beneficial for evergreen content and your core topics.

This means that I don't recommend semantic strategies for topics that are not your main domain.

Large publishers usually expand on other unrelated niches to be more generalist and gain traction over untapped niches.

If you are small don't do this, define a core area first.

Semantic SEO gave a tremendous boost for topics where it was justified by extensive coverage. It takes quite some time to see results sometimes, so plan accordingly.

Internal links and the flexible page structure I defined were the most important factors.

So the website managed to get 10 times the traffic but wasn't as stable as I thought. I decided to put more effort on the other new section I mentioned, which was only evergreen content.

I totally ditched the news and removed them from the website as they weren't our focus.

Some may think that removing news content is nonsense but it works wonder if you know what you are doing.

You are avoiding fierce competition while differentiating on new topics.

This is also a mindset shift from copy-and-paste content to in-depth analyses.

While the structure is flat due to technical reasons, there were plenty of topic clusters.

One in particular was super successful and is one of my favorite examples of monopoly for a set of unbranded queries.

In the alternate scenario where this was a more competitive project, the focus would have been on affiliate and community building rather than getting traffic.

Affiliate links are not a problem now but it's hard to build a community without the proper financial resources.

The main constraints with such projects are not the tools but the people, since everyone is doing it for free.

Even if you decide to monetize later, the amount of money should be split among so many people that you would get nothing.

Still, it's an interesting hobby!

We didn't build any backlinks (budget) and fortunately the competition for the targeted queries was low. We were able to outrank more authoritative competitors with Semantic SEO tho.

Get backlinks if you can!!!

The Italian market for this specific niche ranges from impossible to extremely easy. It's essentially an oligopoly for the most competitive queries and a perfect competition for slightly less competitive queries.

In the USA I would say it's always hard in general.

For some subtopics the content is either generated or copied from the classic American websites.

While it may seem easy to outrank large players you have to consider they have a solid backlink profile and more writers.

Nonetheless, you can still excel in what you do with the proper topical coverage and some brains.

This is a quick example of what I mean:

The image above shows you what I mean when I talk about evergreen content. This is actually a topic cluster ranking for a lot of keywords.

And what's more is that tools don't have the same queries I have in my GSC.

Another example is for this set of unbranded queries. Find a gap and go for it. And this is just for the last 3 months eh

Online magazines and publishers often do the mistakes of not updating evergreen content in favor of news.

Larger websites have to keep the machine running, news are the surefire content to stay relevant in your industry.

The main issue is that you are missing on a big chunk.

In fact, many opportunities exist because large publishers don't care about building topical authority.

This changed recently in this specific industry as many competitors noticed that one of our sections could be more profitable.

Still, I've taken this into account as well!

And that's where I mention differentiation. Don't put your eggs in one basket, try to diversify as much as possible.

One section of your website is driving a lot of traffic, what's the first thing you do?

A. Build more topical authority
B. Find the next topic

My answer is a mix of A and B. This is a very common strategy for website treating different aspects of pop culture.

Videogames lead to TV series and Cinema
TV series may lead to other types of animations
and so on...

You can think of them as complementary goods in a certain sense. Have you ever asked yourself why generalist websites tend to take over other niches over time?

Simple, they want to increase their market share and reduce variability.

Imagine the COVID period where a lot of videogames were postponed. There was nothing to talk about and a lot of websites had sharp decreases.

You don't have this problem if you diversify your topics and cover different related niches. Evergreen content is a huge help as well.

I've talked about the importance of evergreen content in my other thread.

It was crucial for the success of this case study.

https://twitter.com/GiordMarco96/status/1501271627576844295

Pick sets of queries where you are sure the intent is mostly static or there are not abrupt changes. No reason to compete with goliaths.

Remember that the goal here is to

This doesn't mean that SEO is the only factor to take into account, definitely not. To improve the market and offer good results you should update your articles and provide relevant content.

It is not enough to be first if your website is bad.

To build a brand and go beyond the concept of rankings you need to be professional first. If you are not convincing you don't need SEO, you need to understand how to have a good reputation.

That is why quality comes first.

The value proposition changed to extreme quality and offering advice that you don't find anywhere else. This is what I am trying to do on Twitter as well.

The concept of quality is extremely intangible and relative and has different definitions according to the literature.

I define quality as a mix of offering something unique and highly differentiable and trusted. This is the best definition I came up with for this specific niche.

It's not that easy if you don't know what you are talking about.

AI content is not able to work in such markets because you are missing good training sets.

This is one big difference with English-speaking countries where edited AI content works more often.

And this is related to what I wrote the other day, the Americentric view of case studies:

https://twitter.com/GiordMarco96/status/1501633989710278659

What I've written in this thread is totally false for the US. They have tougher competition and some niches are already taken over by dedicated websites.

In Italy, you can see English websites ranking sometimes. I don't see the opposite in the US.

This is why I think that there are plenty of markets to explore in different languages.

IME South-East Asia, Japan and East Asia as a whole are interesting markets. The same goes for some European countries like Norway, Denmark and Finland.

I work in a lot of markets as an in-house SEO and I can tell you that there are plenty of opportunities all around the world.

My favorite market will remain the US for several reasons but it doesn't mean I am not considering other choices.

The main takeaways are:

- Define core topics first
- Be an expert in one topic where there is no strong competition
- Create content templates
- Smart Keyword Research (if at all)
- Develop social skills (leadership being the most important for me)

Unbranded situation so far, I started in May 2020 but GSC only keeps the last 16 months.

There is still a lot of work to do and I am happy because this website was supposed to be shut down.

Let's use Google Data Studio now.

Users: 2.4M
Pageviews: 5.8M
New users: 2.4M (consider the timeframe)
Entrances/Sessions: 4.6M

For this website Entrances == Sessions

The plot shows Pageviews

My beloved Google Analytics is able to show you the situation from when I started up to yesterday.

As you may see in the picture above the website was getting super low traffic.

Future plans include more topical coverage and eventually taking over Wikipedia.

I've beaten Wikipedia sometimes and it's extremely hard. It's usually not worth it unless you have a plan in mind.

Wikipedia in other languages can be terrible if compared to the English version.

If you like this type of content let me know and retweet it. I am open to collaborations with any English/American publisher out there, as long as I hone my skills.