Nasdaq Sees Triple-Digit Growth with ClickSeed

stockmarket

Nasdaq

Client Profile: Nasdaq.com offers an enormous volume of stock market data, news, and analysis content to an audience of more than 7 million retail investors and financial professionals each month.

The Need: Nasdaq sought ClickSeed’s help in improving page views, organic search traffic and unique visitors, and ultimately improving their overall ad impressions and revenue.

The Solution: ClickSeed identified critical pain points in the website’s SEO and content strategy, crafting a plan of attack that included mobile optimization and internationalization to get the website in front of more eyes.

The Results:

  • 300% increase in mobile search traffic to the site
  • 200% increase in search traffic to international pages
  • 78% increase in site-wide organic search referrals YOY

“ClickSeed combines deep SEO expertise with the ability to look at your overall strategy and say, ‘Here’s everything you need to do with your site and content to accomplish your goals.’”

Recognizing the Value of Site Traffic

Running a website millions of investors turn to for news about the stock market, financial trends and investment insights is no small task. And growing that site’s reach is an important challenge — more organic search traffic improves discoverability, resulting in a higher percentage of unique visitors, a continually expanding audience and ad impressions that translate into greater revenue for the site.

That’s why when Nasdaq recognized the need to improve their organic search traffic, they knew they needed an SEO agency with experience working with major publishers and large-scale enterprises, as well as the latest tools and best practices in audience development. That’s what brought them to ClickSeed.

“ClickSeed combines deep SEO expertise with the ability to look at your overall strategy and say, ‘Here’s everything you need to do with your site and content to accomplish your goals,’” says Nasdaq.com’s VP and General Manager.

That holistic view of the client’s problem is what helped separate ClickSeed from the pack. “We serve as a true extension of the client’s web team, communicating directly with individual stakeholders and technical resources to help shepherd through changes that will produce measurable improvements,” says Jim Robinson, Founder of ClickSeed. “By getting some early wins, establishing solid internal relationships, and ultimately earning the trust of key stakeholders, we’re able to move quickly when the need arises to seize new opportunities and avoid miscues.”

Identifying Opportunities for Growth

To help the client achieve their goal of greater organic search traffic, ClickSeed first audited their website for untapped SEO opportunities, as well as potential tweaks to their content strategy. ClickSeed worked closely with the client to help identify and address two major areas where gains could be made: international pages and mobile optimization.

Internationalization

Nasdaq realized that with its global audience, translating key pages on their website to the most commonly spoken world languages would be an important component of growing their influence. ClickSeed participated in conference calls with the Nasdaq team and translation services vendor, making critical recommendations with regard to technical configuration, URL structure and keyword targeting.

ClickSeed then reviewed the multi-language page variants for each translated page and made sure each group of pages was properly annotated to avoid canonicalization issues, while also ensuring that the correct language version would appear at the correct time in various international search engines.

It was this technical expertise, combined with ClickSeed’s high degree of personal attention and eagerness to interact with both Nasdaq  and their vendors on a close level, that helped Nasdaq see a 200% increase in organic search traffic to pages that had been internationalized within a single quarter.

Mobile Optimization

Nasdaq recognized that an increasingly large portion of its audience was accessing the website via mobile devices, but the vast majority of the website had not yet been ported over to the mobile version. Around the same time, Google had announced that mobile-friendliness would become a factor in search rankings.

When it became clear that impacts to search traffic were imminent (based on ClickSeed’s analysis and recommendation), the client realized it would be best to speed up the timeline for rolling out additional mobile pages. ClickSeed helped by identifying key pages and sections throughout the website that were major drivers of search traffic, yet were not yet mobile-friendly. ClickSeed then delivered a prioritized list of candidate pages to port over to the mobile site, along with mobile usability recommendations and complete code-level mobile SEO annotation and metadata.

In the weeks immediately following the launch of the new mobile pages, Nasdaq.com observed an expected drop in mobile search traffic on the desktop site (since mobile pages were now being served directly served in mobile search) and a corresponding uptick on the mobile site. Mobile search traffic increased more than 300%, which confirmed an excellent indexation rate of mobile content.

The ClickSeed Difference

The internationalization and mobile optimization projects were only two major cornerstones of a holistic SEO assessment and growth project. As a direct result of these projects, combined with a broader monthly engagement to increase search traffic to the website, Nasdaq.com experienced a 78% year-over-year increase in total organic search traffic, an improvement numbering in the tens of millions of organic search visits annually.

“The in-depth knowledge of our site, the personalized attention and service and the ability to tackle any problem I bring was critical to the wins we saw,” says Nasdaq.com’s VP and General Manager. “ClickSeed’s ability to take a high-level view of your entire website, help you create an overall strategy, and be there for you every step of the way — implementing the strategy right down to nitty-gritty SEO details — is why I’d recommend them to enterprises with similar needs.”