Driving Quick Wins + Long-term Success with the SEO Quadrant™

challenge

FreightWaves is the world’s leading supply chain intelligence platform. Their flagship SaaS product, SONAR, is used by industry professionals and global enterprises to make informed decisions about their current and future supply chain operations.

The company also provides news and information through the logistics industry’s largest media platform. FreightWaves’ advertising-supported media business has a team of full-time journalists and analysts who deliver information through a website, streaming TV products, and podcasts.

FreightWaves’ media business revenue is largely based on pageviews. When we started working together in 2022, the media site was experiencing a lull in traffic, and the FreightWaves team wanted to understand how to leverage SEO tactics to increase pageviews and earn a higher position in the SERPs.

solutions

The SEO Quadrant™ is how we approach foundational organic search support. For FreightWaves, we started with a quick wins review, conducted a technical SEO assessment, and provide ongoing content and keyword support.

Our SEO experts began with the SEO Quadrant™, which helps prioritize opportunities and identify how to make an impact quickly while planning for long-term success.

Starting with a quick wins review and technical SEO assessment of the website, we identified and executed several opportunities for immediate improvement. Some of these included:

• Image compression and site resource optimizations to improve overall site speed, Core Web Vitals metrics, and user experience
• XML sitemap strategy recommendations to improve site crawlability and indexability
• Structured data recommendations specific to FreightWaves’ content types (news articles, videos, podcasts, events) to increase visibility and drive traffic

After ensuring the website was technically sound, we developed a plan to optimize on-page content monthly. We began with a content + keyword audit to identify which pages to prioritize and research/map keywords to each page. We then made the actual content updates to each page using this information.

We also hosted virtual training sessions for the FreightWaves marketing and content teams to teach them how to incorporate SEO best practices into their work. These sessions were customized for each audience based on discussions with key stakeholders to ensure we covered the right mix of topics at the right depth.

When the SONAR team heard of our successes on the FreightWaves side, they wanted to ensure we weren’t cannibalizing any of their efforts on the SONAR side. We collaborated on a keyword opportunity audit that identified where there was crossover between FreightWaves and SONAR keywords and content themes and where each side of the business should focus their SEO efforts. This led to an ongoing partnership with SONAR, focused on foundational SEO support.

outcomes

Our goal in working with the FreightWaves and SONAR teams was to help them clarify where to focus immediately, generate outcomes quickly, and position themselves for long-term success.

As a result of our SEO efforts, we’ve seen near-immediate improvements in site-wide performance, most notably:

• Visibility: +273% growth in page one keywords YoY
• Traffic: +24% growth in organic sessions YoY

In addition, since beginning our on-page content optimizations in January 2023, we’ve seen the following improvements to those pages:

• Visibility: +273% growth in page one keywords YoY
• Traffic: +91% growth in organic sessions YoY