Reference.com SEO Content Strategy
The Challenge
How I Helped
The Outcome
In 2018, the content on Reference.com was in need of an SEO overhaul to increase organic traffic and improve UX. The site was home to an archive of legacy content that hadn’t been recently updated or maintained. Many of the landing pages contained thin or outdated content, and the site lacked an internal linking structure that would enable search engines to crawl and rank the content.
After working with executive product owners to understand organic growth goals and KPIs, I conducted an SEO audit, identified keyword-based organic growth opportunities, and crafted a content strategy and SEO optimization plan that included:
Revised site architecture and taxonomy that aligned with user intent and highlighted the site’s top performing topics
Improvements to the internal linking structure allowing users to navigate naturally through the content library
SEO rewrites and optimizations to landing pages to improve UX, align content with search intent & relevant keywords, and add missing SEO metadata
I created an SEO style guide and voice and tone guidelines to inform the content improvements (excerpted below) and worked with AMG’s editorial and product teams to implement my recommendations.
After working with the content team to optimize and rewrite over 200 content pages for SEO, this group of optimized landing pages saw a 19% increase in organic traffic over the following 6 months.
Organic traffic to the Reference.com homepage increased by 15% in the 6 months following the revised taxonomy & site architecture release.