Recovering and Growing Gizmo Story’s Organic Traffic
“The SODP team quickly analyzed our website and provided us some valuable insights, which helped us achieve 300k monthly visitors in just 4 months, which is a remarkable achievement! We continued with the membership and grew our website to ~800k visitors with the help of the online training and educational materials available. I highly recommend SODP to anyone looking to grow their web property. I want to thank Vahe and the SODP team for helping us achieve our goal.”
714%
Traffic increase in 4 weeks
6,430%
Traffic increase in 1 year
800,000
Monthly users in 1.5 years
About the Company
Founded in 2019 by Mohit Pathria in Delhi, India, Gizmo Story was a news publisher in entertainment and pop culture news. Gizmo Story provides news and reviews in categories such as Movies, TV, Gaming, and Anime, including Korean and Chinese Drama.
Following its original success and strong organic traffic performance, Gizmo Story made a few editorial and SEO decisions that, unfortunately, resulted in a drastic decrease in traffic.
Gizmo Story’s founder contacted SODP Media to help recover the traffic and set up a long-term strategy to further facilitate growth.
The Challenge
Lack of SEO visibility of content
Lack of a content strategy that was delivering consistent traffic
Changes to the URL structure that resulted in significant traffic drops
While initially the site was experiencing significant traffic gains, the leadership decided to diversify outside of its expertise to the point where low-quality and spammy content was being created and thought redesigning the site for better site speed was a solution. Gizmo Story recruited SODP Media to help resolve several challenges. The most pressing ones included:
Our Approach
For two months, SODP Media took over the SEO and editorial operations of Gizmo Story. The goal was to bring the publication back into compliance with Google News SEO requirements, set up a content cluster strategy that could deliver short-term wins as well as be optimal for long-term results, and set up editorial processes that would allow Gizmo Story’s team to operate independently once the engagement with SODP Media was over.
This approach resulted in a rapid recovery and path to profitability, after which ongoing team support was provided in the form of learning tools like a Publisher SEO course and community support via a dedicated Slack channel.
Strategy and Execution
Technical and Content Audit
Gizmo Story got flagged by Google, and subsequently Google News, due to the publisher’s editorial decisions that led to more adult-focused entertainment traffic.
Therefore, understanding the full scope of the problem was the first order of business. To that end, SODP Media conducted a full technical, link, and content audit.
The audit identified several issues, including:
These problem areas made Gizmo Story non-compliant with Google News SEO requirements.
Content Pillar and Cluster Strategy
Upon initial pruning of content that was identified as “low quality” and outside of the publisher’s expertise, SODP Media devised a content pillar and cluster strategy to help boost traffic.
Part of the content strategy was focusing on movie genre ranking lists, which capitalize on weekend user search trends. SODP Media also focused on documenting monthly new releases, thereby tapping into interest from binge-watchers.
A more long-tail oriented strategy allowed Gizmo Story to compete against larger media sites.
In order to mitigate the reputational damage and bring Gizmo Story back into good standing with Google News as an authoritative news and reviews site, SODP Media implemented a dovetailing evergreen content strategy. This entailed the following:
Further internal linking optimization allowed the publisher to reclaim its reputation as an authoritative, expert, trusted source in the entertainment and pop culture field.
As a result, Gizmo Story entered the top 10 rankings in less than a week.
These strategies resulted in almost-immediate short-term wins, with the traffic recovering from 7,000 to 50,000 monthly users in just 4 weeks.
The mid-term result was 300,000 monthly users.
The content pillar and cluster strategy was devised to allow the publisher to develop high-quality content around themes and topics that would continuously appeal to the target audience, facilitating consistent growth over time.
The long-term objective was to both increase the organic traffic search baseline while also becoming more discoverable in SERP features such as “People Also Ask”.
As a result, the site’s traffic went from 7,000 to 450,000 in monthly users between September 2020 and October 2021, reaching 800,000 monthly users by the beginning of 2022.
Furthermore, Gizmo Story received social media mentions from leading Hollywood directors William Friedkin and John Fusco.
Website Relaunch Assistance
In light of the changes implemented by SODP Media and to further distance the property from the initial poor reputation of the site, Gizmo Story required a relaunch. That entailed a new look and feel, tactical link building on key assets, and unveiling the new site to the audience.
SODP Media provided assistance in this process from start to finish, advising on matters ranging from technical issues to UX design.
Templatization of Content Types
Since Gizmo Story recruited SODP Media only for a short period of time, it was imperative to set up optimized templates and a content strategy that could serve as a foundation of long-term growth and be scalable.
That’s why SODP Media developed content type-specific templates that could easily integrate in the editorial processes and were user-friendly for the writers to operate.