Case Study
Expanding We Are Explorers’ Organic Traffic

You don’t know what you don’t know, but SODP do! Vahe and the team live and breathe SEO and from day one they’ve been passionate about helping our content reach the audience it deserved. They understand the realities of publishing and work to help you create high-performing content that doesn’t compromise on quality. Best third party we’ve ever engaged!

Tim AshelfordPublisher, We Are Explorers

42%

increase in organic traffic between October 2022 and July 2023

163%

increase in traffic from Google Discover between October 2022 and July 2023

37%

increase in traffic product review pages between October 2022 and July 2023

About the Company

We Are Explorers (WAE) is a leading publisher within Australia’s flourishing micro-adventures community. WAE appeals to a broad demographic consisting of those interested in outdoor experiences.

WAE was launched in 2014 by passionate adventure seekers based in Australia who aimed to make content that inspired people to live more adventurously. The site’s extensive network of similarly passionate writers, photographers and filmmakers produces authentic and award-winning content.

Despite its loyal following, WAE struggled with organic visibility and occasional technical issues on its WordPress site, making expanding its audience share challenging.

The Challenge

The site’s organic traffic declined by around 50% between January 2021 and November 2021.

Site architecture lacked specific taxonomies displaying relevant content.

Lack of ongoing SEO and content management for existing pieces.

WAE approached SODP in November 2021 with several challenges. Some of the most significant issues it faced included:

Content cannibalization
Lack of content clustering
Suboptimal categorization of content
An approach to search user intent and formatting content creation to users’ needs
Technical issues

These challenges were hindering the publisher’s ability to attract and retain audiences, leading to lower UX and engagement metrics.

SODP developed a comprehensive SEO strategy that analyzed everything from search trends to seasonal and weather conditions.

Our Approach

We worked on improving WAE’s publisher SEO via three distinct pillars: optimizing information architecture, bolstering content production capacity and introducing the pillar and cluster strategy.

These three approaches meant the WAE site was easier to navigate, the publisher’s editorial team increased the variety and scale of their coverage with templates, and this coverage contributed to the site’s overall topical authority, thereby helping drive traffic and engagement on the site.

Strategy and Execution

Content Recategorization

Many of WAE’s articles were incorrectly categorized, impacting user navigation and reducing the topical authority of the categories themselves. Moreover, we noticed that some categories had also been assigned the wrong parent categories.

As such, the SODP team worked with WAE to conduct a complete content recategorization. We carefully reviewed all existing categorizations and made the necessary fixes on a case-by-case basis.

For example, we expanded WAE’s “Destinations” parent category from just three Australian states to include all states and the country’s two biggest territories. Each state and territory also had its most popular locations created as a sub-category.

During the recategorization process, we maintained accuracy and consistency throughout the website’s hierarchical structure, helping to improve the user experience (UX) and crawlers’ indexing capabilities.

Content Strategy

SODP’s content strategy for WAE consisted of three main pillars: keyword research, competitor gap audit and pillar-cluster topic selection.

During the keyword research phase, we analyzed popular activities within Australia as well as products that could be used in these adventures. This led us to build a list of topics that had a maximum organic traffic potential of almost 100,000.

While our research showed WAE’s total traffic potential in Australia was more than 1.5 million unique visits per month, this would have required them to create significantly more content.

As such, we recommended focusing on two types of content: product-based (monthly traffic potential of around 45,000) and location-based (monthly traffic potential of around 54,000).

Our competitor gap analysis determined what was missing in the market and what opportunities were available to WAE. We identified popular adventure activities such as hiking, camping, fishing, running or wild swimming.

We then moved on to the pillar-cluster strategy, where we finalized content based on the adventure type. After analyzing WAE’s industry and competitors to create deeply researched, detailed and personalized content for its target audience, SODP designed different content templates specifically for the publisher. We bucketed the content into reviews, listicles, comparison guides, how-tos and checklists.

Finally, we entered the planning phase and input the required actions into a content calendar on Monday.com to make it easier for WAE to implement. We used this calendar to assign content creation to its team of freelance writers and travel enthusiasts.

The Monday board helped the client streamline project deliverables from both internal and external resources.

Tech Enhancements to Content

Our team took a strategic approach to enhance WAE’s content by implementing Schema Markup on its website. It’s a technical enhancement that provides search engines with additional information about the content on a website, making it easier for them to understand and index.

One of our enhancements was adding FAQPage Schema to all pages that had frequently asked questions within the article body. This allowed the pages to rank higher in search results with rich snippets, helping WAE secure more SERP real estate and attract more clicks.

These rich snippets helped improve the CTR of pages from 3% to 4.2%.

Another enhancement we made was adding HowTo Schema Markup to the how-to articles on the website. This also led to the pages ranking higher in search results with rich snippets, which helped attract more clicks.

Case Study Expanding We Are Explorers’ Organic Traffic