Recurrent Ventures Fixes Technical Issues, Improves Organic Performance

Introduction

Recurrent Ventures, the US digital media company with such well-known publications Field & Stream, Bob Vila, the Drive, Popular Science and Task & Purpose, and its the SEO team, needed a comprehensive view of the
website performance for the company’s 15+ sites.

Challenge

While the company has different goals for each SEO team and brand, without a full view into these metrics, it wasn’t able to determine or track SEO KPIs. Further, while Recurrent’s development team was adept at finding and solving website technical issues, its SEO team had limited visibility into the impact these changes were having on organic search performance. The company
sought a solution that would empower it to be proactive to ensure it wasn’t missing anything that would negatively impact SEO.

Solution

Recurrent began using Botify Analytics and Botify Intelligence to review log files, segmentation, and crawl logs to gain a better understanding of how well all its pages were being crawled by search engines, and what could be done to improve crawl budget.

It also leveraged Botify to create an internal monitoring process to better communicate with the development team. As part of that process, the SEO team now creates a change report for each request that sends email alerts when developers have completed the change, and links each report to the Botify platform to show the impact the changes is having on web performance.

Results

Using Botify solutions has helped Recurrent not only improve various technical challenges around its web performance, but it was also able to proactively catch and fix various issues. By identifying and eliminating 404 errors, 3xx errors, and redirect chains, it was able to eliminate items that were blocking a few of its brands from being crawled, before it had the chance to significantly impact its performance.

With a better understanding of its organic search performance, Recurrent has been able to determine and test nine specific technical KPIs it now uses to defend and improve organic search performance and revenue across all its brands as well as leverage as leading indicators of future traffic across its sites.