The IndependentThe Independent

The Independent becomes the fastest growing online newspaper

Background

Latitude took on the search engine optimisation (SEO) task for the Independent in March 2008. With circulation for print newspapers falling, the Independent recognised the need to boost their online readership. The Independent had traditionally been one of the worse performing online newspapers with the likes of the Guardian, Times and the Telegraph generating a lot more site visits and page views. For this reason the Independent tasked Latitude with increasing the papers revenue through higher page visits and higher page impressions from organic search results.

The Solution

Latitude identified a number of issues with the Independent website and alongside them worked to prioritise the tasks to quickly generate the optimum number of page views. The first of which was to address the amount of content which had been de-indexed by the search engines because it was buried so deep in the site, which meant search engine spiders could not access it.  This de-indexing resulted in the search engines viewing the Independent site at half the size it actually was. To overcome this Latitude created an on-site sitemap which allowed search engine spiders to access any page through just 4 clicks from the homepage.

Latitude also identified sections of the website that had a lot of potential for generating additional page views.  For example, the paper publishes “The ten best….” articles, which can vary from “The Ten Best Bath Oils” to “The Ten Best Board games”.  All of the content was displayed on one page, and didn’t generate a large number of page views. Latitude recommended putting the content into a popup gallery, displaying one item per page, thus encouraging users to click through to see the next item.  As a result, this is now one of the best performing sections of the site, with several articles achieving over 1 million page views each.

Other big wins for the campaign have been through a new look navigation structure, improved placement of content on the site and improving the CMS system, preventing duplicate content issues which can cause penalties with major search engines.

The Results

Through Latitude’s work the Independent went from having approximately 170,000 pages indexed by Google to 380,000 pages. This created a massive spike in organic visitors with UK page views increasing from 8 million per month in January 2008, to 20 million per month in October 2008.

In September 2008 the Independent was announced by Media Week as the fastest growing online newspaper of the year. Not only were they the fastest growing they were the fastest growing by a long way, after being the only newspaper to report double digit month-on-month growth with a 20.6% increase in unique users, rising from 6.6 million to 8 million. The Independent’s page impressions also increased by 114% since January 2008, whereas the competitors lagged behind, The Telegraph (39% increase), Times Online (27% increase) and Guardian (15% increase).

 

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