Tampabay.com is powered by the St. Petersburg Times and the tbt* Tampa Bay Times. The St. Petersburg Times, which won two Pulitzer Prizes in 2009, is Florida’s largest newspaper, serving readers in the Tampa Bay area and beyond. Its website, tampabay.com, features the newspaper’s content, as well as web-only articles, blogs, photo galleries and multimedia pieces. It also features content from the St. Petersburg Times’ free tabloid, tbt* Tampa Bay Times.
“Writers and line editors know they’re competing on SEO but they don’t regularly see the results. With Optify they can see how we’re doing versus the competitors and it makes them want to get more involved in keywords and link-building.”
Online Operations, tampabay.com
Challenges
The St. Petersburg Times sought to increase its organic traffic and local visitors
(considered to be the most valuable readers) to its website, tampabay.com. But the
sheer daily volume of its content creation posed a challenge for the paper’s management
team. Even with powerful analytical tools at its disposal, tampabay.com was missing countless SEO
opportunities, due to its inability to quickly prioritize amid the enormous flux of content. The
publisher was also unable to illustrate to its newsroom staffs, in a simple manner, which keywords were
generating the most visits by subject and how the competition was ranking comparatively.
Tampabay.com needed an SEO solution to clearly identify actionable tasks that could be easily grasped
and implemented by all levels of the organization, including their increasingly taxed newsroom journalists
and editors.
Optify Solutions
With the goal of raising organic and local traffic, the St. Petersburg Times rolled out Optify’s
SEO application suite, including Keywords and Website Optimization tools, in order to
prioritize SEO opportunities within the various markets the paper competed in.
The Keywords tool enabled St. Petersburg Times to create specific keywords and map them to groups of
pages sharing a similar topic such as health or sports. The publishing company could then identify
markets where it was performing well and others where it needed improvements. After making adjust-
ments, the St. Petersburg Times revisited the tool to measure the effectiveness of these changes, thereby
creating a quick, organized feedback loop.
The Website Optimization application suggested SEO improvements for each of tampabay.com’s
individual website pages. Additionally the application ranked these recommended action items from most
to least impactful, allowing the company to easily prioritize SEO improvements.
The Optify tools effectively demonstrated, even to the least SEO savvy within the company, how pages
and topics were faring competitively with regards to specific keyword searches. The intuitiveness of the
Optify data enabled all levels of the organization to tangibly work toward common strategies. Everyone
in the newsroom from metro desk editors to sports journalists had easily identifiable SEO tasks, which
they could then act on, directly impacting the search ranks of their daily articles as compared to their
competitors’.
Results
“Since using the Optify tool to implement SEO changes, search engine traffic to our site
has increased 22% year over year, and Tampa Designated Market Area visits, which we
especially value, are up 33%. And, I have only scratched the surface of Optify’s potential. We have laid
the groundwork to begin taking advantage of many more optimization opportunities.” –John Schlander,
Senior Editor/Online Operations, tampabay.com
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About this customer
The St. Petersburg Times is Florida’s largest newspaper. Tampabay.com features the newspaper’s content, as well as web-only articles, blogs, photo galleries and multimedia pieces.
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Challenges
- Increase Tampa DMA traffic
- Prioritize SEO efforts
- Engage newsrooms in SEO improvements
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Solutions
- Keywords Application
- Website Optimization
- Focused SEO strategies
- Easily implementable SEO actions
