Cross-border sports-news publisher
Case study · AI Search Readiness & Semantic Visibility
A football-news publisher was strong in its home market but effectively invisible in the neighbouring one it wanted to expand into, with no ranking presence against entrenched legacy publishers. Reactive news traffic spiked and vanished instead of compounding, and the team couldn’t see why authority wasn’t building.
What I did
I mapped the authority landscape against named competitors (domain authority, backlink profiles), ran a full technical crawl and architecture audit, audited the CMS taxonomy and editorial patterns, and built an intent-based keyword framework separating broad audience hubs from monetisable data/utility queries.
What the audit surfaced
- Authority was leaking out of the domain: bloated, empty taxonomy categories and 100% template contamination in utility sections were diluting the pages that mattered.
- Conversion attribution was entirely broken, with zero key events and zero revenue tracked from the core organic landing pages.
- Commercial/utility content was tangled into the editorial feed, undermining both credibility and crawl efficiency.
- The lowest-resistance path into the new market was an “entity-led” wedge around fast-rising teams the incumbents were slow to cover.
The recommendation
I delivered a sequenced plan: purge and redirect the empty taxonomy to recover crawl budget, quarantine commercial content from editorial to protect authority, build entity hubs with disciplined internal linking to a shallow click-depth, and enter the new market through tightly-clustered team silos rather than generic syndication. The measurement fixes restore the ability to attribute commercial outcomes at all.