TechGenix

56% Increase in Organic Traffic – Online Tech Publisher

Our client is an online media company that provides high quality technical content to millions of IT professionals. Their business relies on a high volume of organic search traffic to sell advertising. But, after a CMS migration of five different websites, they faced a sharp drop in organic search traffic. Our client needed help from a search marketing expert and brought on Fire&Spark™ to recover lost traffic and revenue.

Solution

We used our systematic, analytical process to 1) rule out factors that could not have caused the drop in traffic, and 2) discover the root cause of the problem.
Our process involved:

• Reviewing web analytics, server configuration, and the code behind the websites
• Restoring the original websites to compare against new websites
• Correlating changes in traffic patterns against Google algorithm updates
• Assessing past activity in engineering and marketing departments that may have affected traffic

We found and resolved issues with missing content, inbound links pointing to 404 pages, and messy redirect chains, all resulting from the CMS migration.

Methodology

The Fire&Spark™ team performed an exhaustive SEO audit of all five websites. We found that only three of the five sites experienced a severe traffic drop after the CMS migration, with a sharp decrease for two specific pages, and only one website accounting for nearly half of the drop in traffic. The other two sites had a long and steady decline in traffic before and after the migration.