Our roadmap included internal linking and technical “quick win” strategies designed to improve crawl frequency, increase overall rankings, and influence the number of results that included featured snippets. Our technical SEO audit prioritized recommendations to increase page speed and the overall user-experience. The NPD team also supported the technical implementation efforts, focusing on schema mark-up and increasing Core Web Vital scores.
Additionally, we implemented our proprietary “6R” Content Audit methodology to better optimize any existing content to align with searcher intent.
This 6R Content Audit told us what content should be “reformatted”, “repurposed”, “refreshed”, “retired”, “redirected”, or what content should just “remain” as-is in order to meet user intent for different search queries. Our initial focus was on updating and optimizing articles using the “evergreen” methodology- target articles that can support keywords with high search demand throughout the year.
Answer The Public, NPD’s proprietary content recommendation platform, helped us identify rising search interest for current and on-going news events. The World Cup and controversies surrounding the elections in Brasil presented significant opportunities. We capitalized on this in the form of new content, in a variety of different formats. Research showed us that Google rewarded (better ranking) different types of content for the various keywords that we were targeting. While written articles might work in some cases, images or videos are what were needed to rank in the top 3 positions for others.
CNN’s business strategy was to grow authority in the categories of Politics, Business, and Sports. On a weekly basis we developed and launched new content pieces. We created and posted articles with optimized schema-markup that were rich with relevant imagery, video embeds, and other features that matched user-intent. Internal linking strategies helped to tie relevant articles to each other, this helped to develop the critical E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals that both Google and potential readers were looking for.
In addition to the content strategy and development, NPD conducted SEO and Copywriting Best Practice workshops for members of CNN’s editorial team. This was part of our long-term SEO strategy. It was critical to give our partners at CNN the resources and training required to develop well researched and well written content on their own, from the beginning.