The Solution

In order to increase organic search traffic to the www.athletenetwork.com site, we put into place technical file best practices (robots.txt, XML sitemap), URL structure updates, image optimizations, 301 redirection updates, metadata refreshes, and blog schema.

Most updates launched in August 2017. The two-month comparison of organic site traffic from June-August (pre-launch) and September to November (post-launched) yielded:
67.2% increase in organic traffic
75.1% increase in athlete registrations
76.1% increase in organic traffic to blog
47.7% increase in Google Page 1 Keyword Rankings


Athlete Network tends to follow a seasonal trend that aligns with a typical collegiate school year. The August updates went live right before a strong season, so in order to show the increases were not purely seasonal, we compared September to November year over year:
28.7 increase in organic traffic
185.2% increase in organic traffic to blog
404.1% increase in Google Page 1 Keyword Rankings


The year-end recap gave us the data for the full contract year of SEO efforts. We were able to meet, and surpass, the goal of 20% increase in organic traffic, along with increasing organic blog traffic by almost 200%.
21% increase in organic traffic
194% increase in organic traffic to blog
234.3% increase in Google Page 1 Keyword Rankings