CASE STUDY

TITLE

Cablefax

Progressive Gating & Archived Content

Cablefax.com

About Cablefax:

Cablefax is a leader in providing

C-suite cable, broadcast and

telecommunications executives

with industry news, accolades

and events.

The Problem

In the spring of 2015, Cablefax switched from Cable360.net to Cablefax.com. During this switch, several changes to the site were made including integrating both paid and free content. Also, over 25,000 content pages did not come over during the migration.

During the months after the switch, Cablefax staff noticed a significant drop in web traffic (38% YOY as of the digital services’ 2016 Q1 report).

Cablefax.com Case Study:

Boosting Organic Site Traffic

CASE STUDY

TITLE

Cablefax

The Solutions

Cablefax approached the problem with a site assessment. This included heat map tracking, google analytics reporting and several discussions between the Cablefax team and Access Intelligence’s digital services team.

After reviewing all web information, both qualitative and quantitative, the Cablefax team decided to employ a progressive gating model on paid content and to begin migrating content from Cable360.net to Cablefax.com.

Why these solutions?

We chose to experiment with progressive gating because of the immediate influence it would have on our site traffic and engagement. Allowing Google to crawl more of our pages positively impacted both organic site traffic and lead generation for Cablefax’s premium publication, Cablefax Daily.

Also, we decided to migrate archived content from Cablefax360.net to Cablefax.com in order to help with web authority.

The Implementation

The process of implementing the progressive gating was adjusting the privacy settings on Cablefax’s premium content and developing an Optimizely campaign to target new organic visitors for lead generation.

The process of data migration involved using keywords and phrases to match against the content archive. Based on Cablefax.com’s top keywords and phrases, we were able to parse through the 25,000 content pages to migrate 6,000 that best suited Cablefax.com. Redirects

were put into place and the pages were migrated during the week of June 20.

Results and Future Plans

What were the results?

Although Cablefax has incorporated other SEO tactics into our website improvement, we believe the progressive gating has been our highest ROI and lead to organic traffic growth (+46% YOY) and new traffic from that organic growth (+57% YOY). In addition to the increased traffic, Laurie, Director of Market Development, has seen growth in Cablefax Daily leads. She now gets 10 – 15 new trial sign-ups a month from organic traffic.

Since the migration has only recently been completed, we hope during Q3 and Q4 to see increased web traffic. It is our belief that while not necessarily a draw for users, it definitely increases the relevancy of the site in the eyes of search engines.

What are Cablefax’s future plans? Cablefax is currently working on several site modifications to enhance user experience, including updating the navigation bar and modify the search bar. The team is also actively learning BrightEdge and making sure all content has the appropriate keywords and tags. The team will continue to work with digital services to enhance Cablefax.com.