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Breaking New Traffic Records

The Challenge

For four years, Parade.com—website for the Parade magazine brand—had been unable to rebound from a steep decline in traffic. While the site ranked highly in entertainment and pop culture, it didn’t index well for wellness, lifestyle, and food topics—the most compelling verticals for advertisers.

The Solution

After conducting a technical and editorial SEO audit, Masthead identified several key underlying issues causing depressed rankings in organic search. We worked with Parade to quickly fix theses issues and restore its domain authority. Masthead also guided optimization for thousands of high-priority articles, provided detailed and large-scale keyword research to guide all future content, and trained Parade’s in-house team to publish content in line with up-to-date SEO best practices. 

These combined efforts resulted in a sustained traffic jump that considerably exceeded Parade’s goals for the period (traffic goals for 2021 were reached a full year ahead of schedule). In addition, Parade now reaches a younger audience of millennials—another key mission for the brand.

The Results

Across three years, traffic accelerated faster than at any other time in the site’s history. Monthly sessions grew 829%, from 3.4 to 31.3 million.

Organic search traffic rose from 1.6 to 24.6 million sessions—1,405%. Keywords ranking in the Top 3 positions in the search engines rose from 10K to 118K keywords.

Average bounce rate decreased 20% after: addressing site-speed issues, no-indexing low quality URLs, and on-going SEO trainings.

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