In 2019, their flagship site was hit by a Google algorithmic penalty tied to technical SEO issues from the March 12 Core Algorithm update. This sent their traffic plummeting and resulted in significant advertising losses. Since the company relies on advertising for the bulk of its revenue, this meant the business itself was in freefall. Dexerto’s executives had no idea how to recover their previous traffic levels.
Ben came to Dexerto through a referral. He did an in-depth investigation, uncovering significant technical issues that were affecting how Google crawled and indexed the website. Other issues included Core Web Vitals and AMP page problems that affected server response time, image optimization, caching, and render-blocking issues.
The challenges were highly technical, involving legacy code and infrastructure put in place before there were established best practices addressing Core Google updates. They required a very experienced, technically astute SEO to untangle. Ben stepped in immediately, working with Dexerto’s web development team to lead a coding overhaul that addressed all aspects of these challenging technical issues.
Dexerto lost 78.1% of their organic Google traffic within a month after the Core Algorithm update. Within three months, Ben had increased their traffic 139.2%. Within a year, he fueled a whopping 259.29% growth, representing an improvement of more than 2 million views per month.
One of the issues facing Dexerto involved content strategy. Ben led a comprehensive training program helping their team recognize what makes content “quality” and how to improve the expertise, depth, creativity, and authority of the content they produced—as well as strategies related to posting frequency, user experience, breaking news, instream video ads, and more. Ben also addressed Google News spidering issues to ensure accessibility, and successfully removed key algorithmic penalties.
As they recovered from the Core Algorithm update, Dexerto was facing a new landscape of competitors, some very well funded. They were chipping away at the company’s gains by copying story ideas and sometimes even headlines, diverting traffic away from their site. Ben performed a detailed analysis on emerging competitor threats, offering strategic insights into exploiting competitors’ weaknesses.
Today, Dexerto’s brand is stronger than ever, with its journalists winning multiple high-profile industry awards—and its team is well positioned to handle any SEO challenges that come its way.
139.2%
increase in organic
search traffic
2 million views
improvement per month
Top 3
rankings for over
100 target terms