NineMSN- SEO Case Study

Managing Organic Search & Visibility through Education

The Challenge

Ninemsn has a collection over 50 news, entertainment, fashion and sports sites including the ninemsn portal, Wide World of Sports, TheFix, News, Travel, Dolly, Cleo, and Ralph.  The goal was to increase advertising revenue by boosting traffic in specific categories across these multiple sites.  Working with many disparate teams, and improving visibility of traffic to the different sites were key hurdles to overcome.

The Strategy

Outrider set out an intricate strategy that included everything a good SEO campaign should expect for on and off-site recommendations including linking strategies, keyword research and content recommendations.  What was unique to ninemsn was the revolutionary tracking strategy.  Working with the Decide DNA development team, a single tracking tag was built that could be deployed in the same format across all sites.  This meant that lead times from the project commencement and for the addition of any future sites could be significantly reduced and the traffic visibility was greatly enhanced as a result.

The second unique strategy to ninemsn was the delivery of training through several, cleverly structured workshops from online writing to building search friendly websites. Critically important to the success of the delivery of these was getting buy-in across multiple disciplines working on the different sites.  In order to achieve this, for online writing, ninemsn ran a competition that engaged with people across all roles and actively encouraged participation to building relevant, unique content taking Outrider's SEO strategies and best practice on board.  All workshops conducted have been very successful and Outrider continued this education process for new starts within ninemsn.

The Results

Since the campaign kicked off in December 2007, site traffic increased across all the verticals targeted and overall returned 84% more visitors than eight months previously.

Further to this, implementation time of tracking for new sites was reduced to zero for what previously took weeks or months.

Ninemsn continues with their SEO efforts to drive increasing qualified traffic levels to its range of developing, highly popular sites. In addition, 12 months on, education of ninemsn stakeholders continues to underpin their SEO strategy.

What Nine MSN had to say

“Outrider were engaged by ninemsn in Aug 2007 to be their agency of record for SEO activity on a retainer basis. Outrider, in particular Amye Saunders, approached the challenges of multiple channels and a variety of stakeholders in a methodical and organised manner.

Outrider were a pleasure to work with. They provided added value and insight where ever possible and guided us through the difficult process of the integration and education of SEO principles to a lot of time poor individuals. The true test is always in the results and since we started work with Outrider we have seen a steady increase in the percentage of our traffic that is driven from organic search results.”

Rebecca Jacobs
Search Business Manager
ninemsn

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