Florida’s Largest Newspaper Uses Optify Software to Increase Website Traffic and Align SEO
SEATTLE—February 9, 2011 — Optify (http://www.optify.net), the leading online marketing software and services provider for the real-time web, today announced that the St. Petersburg Times, Florida’s largest newspaper, operator of Tampabay.com, and winner of eight Pulitzer Prizes since 1964, used Optify’s Real Time Marketing suite to improve its organic traffic, align its editorial teams, and track and share results. With Optify, Tampabay.com saw a search engine traffic increase of 22 percent, and a Tampa DMA visitor increase of 33 percent year over year.
The St. Petersburg Times and sister publication tbt*/Tampa Bay Times power Tampabay.com, which publishes the newspapers’ print content, as well as web-only articles, blogs, photo galleries and other multimedia. Despite outstanding editorial quality, Tampabay.com faced a number of challenges, including maintaining a leadership position in content areas that are highly relevant to its local readership. The editorial team also wanted to effectively demonstrate the results of SEO initiatives inside the organization.
“With Optify, we were able to organize, focus and improve our SEO across departments. Optify shows the results of our SEO efforts, and encourages our editors and writers to get more involved in making their stories rank high in search engines,” said John Schlander, senior editor/online operations at Tampabay.com. “And, we’ve only scratched the surface of Optify’s potential. We have laid the groundwork to begin taking advantage of many more optimization opportunities.”
High-quality online publishers face a very competitive environment. The St. Petersburg Times is not the only major publication facing a challenge to optimize its online content for search engines. Newspapers not only need to create great content, but also make their content discoverable to readers.
“Media publishers, even with great content, face an extremely competitive environment for attracting readers,” said Brian Goffman, CEO and co-founder of Optify. “The web moves in real time with attention shifting quickly. Our vision is to rapidly and simply enable publishers to optimize their search engine and social media efforts, and measure and share results.”
Optify’s hosted, easy-to-use real time marketing software is designed to help media publishers and online marketers use SEO and social media to increase traffic, convert visitors to customers, and share results. Optify tracks more than 100 million page views and tens of thousands of leads for customers including AdReady, LexisNexis, Microsoft, Marchex, Lifescript, Sonosite and Ubermind. Optify customers see, on average, a 315 percent increase in leads, a 310 percent increase in conversion rates and a 126 percent increase in website visits over a period of four months.
Optify is designed to scale to the needs of a wide range of customer sizes and requirements and is available in four editions, including Free, Professional, Premium and Enterprise. Optify also offers a full-featured 14-day trial. For more pricing information, please visit www.optify.net/editions-pricing/.
