Non-branded organic traffic growth and EAT optimization for diari ARA

Diari ARA, the leading daily in Catalan, seeks to establish its position as a reference newspaper in Catalonia by strengthening its visibility both in Search results and in Google News and Discover.

We started the project in times of pandemic and knowing a little about the newspaper and its authority, everything indicated that the growth potential was immense, and it still is, but we found that it was affected by the Core Update that Google deployed in May 2020 :

An Update that focused on general affectations, but emphasized the evaluation of the contents; whether or not they were credible content and from trusted sources. Clearly, it was referring to the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) so it was one of our main focuses when proposing new changes in the newspaper.


Objectives of Diari ARA

Before getting into the matter, let's look at the main objectives of the project:

  • Improve organic visibility, which directly implies an increase in the newspaper's audience.
  • Establish the leadership of the newspaper in Catalan as well as explore other areas for improvement.
  • Most of the traffic was branded, so another of the main objectives was to increase visibility for non-branded keywords.

The initial objectives were clear, but the impact of the Google update will not help prioritize those points to work on to reverse a decrease in visibility.

 


Actions to improve visibility

With the clear objective of improving both the daily visibility, improving the E-A-T as well as solving different technical problems related to the AMP that directly affected the potential appearance in Discover, the main actions we focused on were:

  • Audit technical issues that were causing a potential loss of traffic via Discover.
  • Reinforce and improve the E-A-T of the newspaper through actionable proposals.
  • Definition and proposal of new architecture.
  • Definition and strategy of potential topics.

 


Results obtained in the Diari ARA

All the actions applied together with a new focus on the use of entities has helped us, together with the ARA newspaper team, to the following results:

  • Increased organic traffic in Search.
  • Increased traffic on Google Discover.
  • Recovery of more than 3 points in the visibility index as shown in the image:

  • Non-branded vs. branded traffic growth.

+233% traffic growth with non-branded keyword.