Award Winning Podcast Studio

A premium production studio with thousands of episodes and award-winning series felt like it was broadcasting dead air when it tanked an estimated 67% of its traffic and 73% of its page 1 Google rankings following a recent website redesign with no thought given to podcast SEO.

Traffic declines from search engines following the launch of a site redesign are not uncommon. The likelihood of a decrease in traffic goes up even higher anytime a business makes foundational changes to URLs or internal links.

Saying all of that… most well known digital properties don’t usually fall to a four year low in traffic in the first month.

Our team of strategists and SEO account managers were retained to work alongside their team of web developers to help:

• Determine what SEO best practices they overlooked during their site redesign
• Improve page ratings for the studio’s top 10 shows to improve the frequency that the pages get crawled
• Increase traffic coming to their platform for show notes and details over Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and TuneIn
• Recover the page 1 keyword rankings in Google that the studio lost following it’s redesign

To further complicate the challenge presented to our team, all of the work needed to be done without forcing their developers to recode the entire site, built using a variety of interactive features coded with JavaScript inside a WordPress theme.

Our strategy revolved around correcting the course of a poorly executed website redesign in the following ways:

SEO Migration Services: Some sites lose as much as 30% of their traffic from search engines if they fail to plan ahead. The longer a company waits to make corrections to their site structure after a redesign, the higher the likelihood their ranking losses can become permanent.Because this podcast studio had just recently redesigned their website, our team did a deep review of their Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and site error reports in Semrush to ensure the site was being crawled correctly. We also wanted to make sure any errors that were uncovered weren’t getting out of control. If third party tools encounter errors, the likelihood that search engine spiders will also encounter the error are high, too.It was clear after our review that this site was suffering from a lack of content that search engines were able to read and index, leading to a 50% decline in daily users in as little as two weeks.

SEO Services: Our analysis of the error logs indicated a widespread problem with the delivery of content for search engines in the JavaScript applications the studio was using to present show information to its site visitors. Instead of producing content for each show page in a way that follows Google’s JavaScript SEO best practices, Google was unable to index any content on the page. This caused a rapid decline in keyword rankings and traffic from organic search despite this studio’s archive of thousands of episodes.We recommended they install and configure one of Google’s preferred dynamic rendering tools to transform the content into static HTML. Deploying this solution allowed 90% of the page content easier for search engine spiders to consume.To help search engines further understand the topic of each page and episode, we also composed schema templates for the organization, each podcast host, and each podcast episode. Several basic on-page SEO recommendations for page titles, meta descriptions, page headings, and image alt tags were also required for the homepage and dozens of episodes of the top 10 shows.

Link Building: Our link building efforts were done with one goal in mind: speed up the turnaround time for Google to re-index the pages for these top 10 podcasts so they can return to their page 1 keyword rankings in the search engines and restore the daily traffic volume the studio organically receives.