seismic shifts in search & referral traffic

at a glance

ESPN.co.uk was launched in August 2009 as a marketing website to drive subscriptions to the television channel. In February 2010, the domain espn.co.uk was re-launched as a sports news portal; the marketing site now residing at the sub-domain tv.espn.co.uk. The challenge for agenda21 was to manage the switch and retain authority and ranking for espn.co.uk, as well as the new tv.espn.co.uk.

ESPN

Each site was given a comprehensive onsite technical audit, which included recommendations to increase traffic from the SERPs (search engine results pages). Given the size of the individual sports portals, it was a priority that search engines were able to access and index the information as quickly and efficiently as possible.

agenda21 made various recommendations to ensure that the rankings improved and leveraged the sub-domain for brand visibility in natural search in Google UK.

Natural Search traffic results:

ESPN F1: 41% increase in natural search traffic.
Cricinfo: 151% increase in search engine traffic.

Google news referral traffic increased dramatically, due to specific recommendations and strategy provided by agenda21 and implemented by ESPN:

Cricinfo: 570% increase in natural news referrals.
F1: 21,266% increase in natural news referrals.
ESPN UK: 17% increase in natural news referral traffic.

In addition, working together with the client and design agency, we were able to ensure that the wesbite was intricately optimised for search compatibility; a critical oversight that is often made in website development.

Given the size of the individual sports portals, it was a priority that search engines were able to access and index the information as quickly and efficiently as possible.