The Hindu boosts visibility by increasing organic visits by 27%

Introduction

The Hindu, an Indian English-language daily newspaper recognized for journalistic integrity, was the first publication in India to launch an internet edition in 1995, when SEO was primarily focused on keyword stuffing and basic HTML optimization.  Today, The Hindu has over 10 million online articles. 

Challenge

A move to digital-first was successful but generated severe tech debt and impacted on the ability of search engines to discover their strategic pages. The Hindu was also finding it increasingly difficult to compete with sensationalized, clickbait titles from other media outlets.

The sheer scale of its website and subdomains, plus a legacy CMS, was impeding the ability of its small SEO team to implement the fixes they had identified to improve visibility and organic traffic.

Solution

The Hindu needed a large-scale solution capable of helping it to understand the full extent of the issues affecting the site, and achieve its focus of increased visibility and organic traffic growth without compromising its values. Botify delivered the full picture needed, validating the issues The Hindu’s SEO team had identified and uncovering other areas needing attention.

Results

Much of The Hindu’s site crawl budget was being wasted on URLs with technical problems, orphan pages, or old content that search engines and consumers should not have been able to access.

Utilizing Botify, The Hindu identified which parts of the website Google was wasting its crawl on, putting its team in a position to take action.

The in-depth expertise and intelligible custom reports, also provided clarity and understanding to every member of The Hindu team, empowering them to prioritize the fixes that would yield the most impact.

This resulted in over 50% more indexable pages being crawled by Google, improving the visibility of The Hindu’s strategic web pages, doubling their impressions, and increasing organic traffic by 27%.