Sport24
Sport24 is a modern dynamic Russian sports media:
- The team includes famous and respected journalists with the experience in major sports and socio-political issues.
- The site publishes up-to-date news, interesting articles, frank interviews, vivid photos and relevant videos.
- At the end of 2019, Sport24 became the most cited sports media in Russia and entered the top-5 of the most popular sports websites.
Sport24 was founded in 2018. It is part of the Russian multifaceted holding company S8 Capital.
Project Goals
- Development of recommendations for improving the indexing and ranking of the site based on the technical audit.
- Traffic growth to the so-called evergreen content (non-news) - these are articles, pages with the information about sportsmen, clubs, etc.
Difficulties
and Solutions
Technical Audit
One of the main specific features of media sites is a large amount of content: hundreds of thousands of pages, many new items every day. That’s why, we started by conducting a comprehensive technical audit of the site in order to improve its indexing and ranking. The audit results document was over 100 pages long. We came up with several ways to improve and speed up indexing, and also suggested methods of optimizing internal linking.
Working With Evergreen Content
The volume of traffic to all sections of the site, except for news, was chosen as the main KPI for SEO. Most of the pages are news, but there is also quite a lot of evergreen content: articles, sections on sports, information about leagues and clubs, pages with biographies of sportsmen, and so on.
We divided the whole site into several parts (sections or types of pages) and systematically worked with each of them in descending order of traffic potential:
- Analyzed demand and current traffic.
- Gathered keyword list or basic search query types which may attract traffic.
- Prepared recommendations for optimizing page title templates and meta tags, as well as the unique tags for pages with maximum traffic potential.
- Analyzed page templates, navigation and content.
- Prepared recommendations for page optimization in order to increase organic traffic.
The entire work plan was divided into weekly sprints. Every week we discussed with our client the conducted work and prepared recommendations.
Working With Event-Trigger Demand
We worked with the project when there were relatively few sporting events: many events were canceled or postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That is why, it was important for us to squeeze as much out of the remaining events as possible. We prepared for them in advance: we predicted demand, determined what content would be needed and in what quantities, what new types of pages and what content should be created, and so on. One of such events was the fight between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Justin Gaethje on October 24, 2020. The bout caused an unprecedented furor, and the traffic to the site broke all records!
Results Achieved
Development resources were very limited. The implementation of SEO recommendations was not the priority. And, unfortunately, most of our proposals have been laid on the table. However, we have managed to double our core KPI for just 4 months. At the same time, organic traffic was 5 times more than we predicted.
We thank the Sport24 team for the interesting experience. We have learned a lot about sports media, and now we have ready-made solutions how to attract search traffic to such sites.
+90%
more visits to evergreen (non-news) content over 4 months
х4,5
times more organic traffic than was predicted
Client Testimonal
The sports web media “Sport24” expresses its gratitude to iSEO LLC for the work done. The project team showed professionalism and high expertise in solving our non-trivial tasks.
I would like to note the individual approach, focus on results and teamwork.
We can confidently recommend iSEO as a reliable and professional partner!
Sport24 LCC
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