At a glance
The project in brief
| Client | Large German media corporation (TV broadcasting and online publishing). The client is not named in this case study. |
|---|---|
| Our role | Interim Head of SEO, working inside the client’s organization |
| Period measured | October 2018 – September 2019 |
| Main lever | Restructuring the content pages and making them substantially more accessible |
| Results measured with | Year-over-year organic search traffic, and keyword positions 1–20 tracked in Ahrefs |
This was an interim leadership engagement, not one of our current SEO packages, and no guarantee applied to it.
The work
Restructuring content pages at media scale
A media site publishes and keeps a very large number of content pages. At that size, a structural weakness is never a single-page problem: whatever makes one article, show page or topic page harder to reach or understand repeats across thousands of URLs. The reverse is also true. A structural improvement, made once in the page templates and content organization, applies across the whole inventory.
That is where the work concentrated. We restructured the content pages and made them considerably more accessible, so that content was easier to reach, follow and understand. The changes were made at the structural level rather than article by article, which is why their effect showed up across the domain’s keyword set rather than on a handful of pages.
If you want to see what this kind of work involves on your own site, our guides to SEO site architecture and technical SEO cover the underlying principles.
Results
Search visibility at its highest point
In the week of 16–22 September 2019, the domain ranked for 327,974 keywords in Google’s top 20 positions, according to Ahrefs. That was the highest top-20 visibility recorded for the domain up to that point. Over the same 12-month period, from October 2018 to September 2019, organic search traffic grew 46% compared with the previous year.
| Google positions | Keywords | Share of top 20 |
|---|---|---|
| 1–3 | 88,683 | 27% |
| 4–10 | 121,604 | 37% |
| 11–20 | 117,687 | 36% |
| Total, positions 1–20 | 327,974 | 100% |
Source: Ahrefs, Organic positions report, week of 16–22 September 2019.
Two-thirds of the top-20 keywords sat on page one (positions 1–10), and more than a quarter were in the top three. That distribution matters more than the headline count. Keywords in positions 11–20 produce very little traffic, while top-three positions take most of the clicks.
Reading the numbers
What these results do and don’t show
- Ahrefs counts are estimates. Ahrefs tracks rankings for its own keyword database, not every query the site appeared for. Treat the keyword counts as a consistent trend measure rather than a complete inventory.
- The traffic figure compares two 12-month periods. The 46% growth compares October 2018 – September 2019 with the preceding 12 months.
- SEO was not the only factor. Google released several core updates during 2019, and a media site’s traffic also depends on news cycles, programming and publishing volume. The restructuring was the main SEO change in this period, but no single cause can be isolated with certainty.
We apply the same standard to client reporting: a baseline, a defined comparison period, a named data source, and a clear statement of what the data can’t prove.
Takeaways
What this means for your website
- Fix structure before volume. On a large site, a template-level improvement reaches every page it governs. Adding more content to a weak structure multiplies the weakness.
- Measure distribution, not only totals. A rise in ranking keywords means little if most of them sit on page two. Track how many move into positions 1–10 and 1–3.
- Compare like with like. Use year-over-year periods for seasonal or event-driven sites, and record the external changes that happened in the same window.
Next step
Is your site’s structure holding back its content?
Start with an audit of how your pages are organized, reached and understood, and get a prioritized list of structural fixes.
