Providing SEO consulting allows me to engage with different companies in many different ways. In some cases, I provide input and feedback, while in others I may take care of everything while a small business owner focuses on what they do best. In other instances, I work behind the scenes for another marketing provider and never even meet the client directly. In the case of DK Pittsburgh Sports, my love for their content as a fan led to a great relationship where they take my SEO input and run with it in-house. In the past year, we have seen tremendous jumps in their organic search presence with some basic technical tweaks. This is meant as a brief case study to show how a company can insert some SEO best practices into their business processes and see great results.
In SEO and at DK Pittsburgh Sports, Content is King
The SEO industry has long lived by the code that “Content is King””. With the DK Pittsburgh Sports site, content is the easy part. Often I struggle to get businesses to provide content to help build their SEO strength and presence. With DK Pittsburgh Sports, content is the easy part. They are constantly churning out great content and just needed some help to get it “aimed” properly and follow some best practices and technical standards to get the site running a little bit cleaner. Though we still have some technical advancements to cover in the future, they have done a great job of taking my input and putting in into practice. It is much easier to title tag properly and handle content issues as you are writing your stories and articles than to go back and edit hundreds of posts at a time, though they did a little bit of that too.
Structuring their content in a way that makes it easier for Google to find and index it gets them started, and though they are often competing with national news sites with lots of organic strength, the speed with which they are able to get key local Pittsburgh sports stories out there, as well as the thorough nature in which it is covered, leads to a strong presence. Where national sites may brush over a local Pittsburgh story, DK Pittsburgh Sports gets in and gets the important details and takes from the important players in each situation. That is what the passionate Pittsburgh fan base wants. Few cities can boast a fan base so passionate and far-reaching as Pittsburgh, and many find DK Pittsburgh Sports and learn that this should be their first stop for the real news on the latest.
SEO Tweaks at DK Pittsburgh Sports
When we first started to work together, we found hundreds of broken links that we had to clean up on the site. This can be a lot of tedious work. Any site churning out as much content as they do is going to run into this issue. Writers may come and go and site changes get made and links get broken because of that. It is important to stay on top of that and redirect or fix the links that go to pages that don’t exist anymore. The staff at DK worked hard on getting those fixed and we try to continually stay on top of that. We also continue to make updates and suggestions to better organize, connect, and display the content in a manner that both Google and more importantly the readers, can best find and interact with it.
With proper meta-tags of the article structure, we are better able to aim and gain presence. With each Pittsburgh team being a category that can be indexed, as well as key players moving forward, the site has more of a presence for general news, updates, and coverage searches. With the WordPress template we deal with, we sometimes find that the tags go back to default or other strange things happen that we need to address and stay on top of, but in general we have seen tremendous growth with their continued efforts to run the business in a natural way, but with SEO in mind, so they are taking advantage of the strengths they already have.
New Visitors Through Organic Traffic Doubles Year over Year
DK Pittsburgh Sports Year over Year Jan-Apr Organic Search Traffic
With all of that said, it has been an absolute pleasure working with Dejan, Dali, and Taylor on a regular basis and helping answer questions and keeps the site looking toward the future. In our most recent meeting, Taylor finished some hard work cleaning up a section of the site while we sat and addressed another issue. It is a hard-working group and that makes it easy to move forward. Though there are always some issues that are more challenging than others, we are able to fix what we can and add the other bigger issues to the list of next level adjustments. With that approach, DK Pittsburgh Sports has been able to nearly double organic traffic in general, and more than double new users through organic since last year, when looking at January through April statistics. Being a subscription site, many current users go directly back to the site or app for the latest news or audio updates. That’s what I do. It is important to find those potential new subscribers through search, and they are doing a better job at addressing that than ever before, and I’m proud to be a part of it.
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