Find the technical problem
A detailed technical analysis identified references to GAY TIMES’ staging environment within the live website, including internal links and canonical tags.
Gay Times
Top-ten organic rankings rose 232.7% and estimated monthly organic traffic increased 116.7%.
The brief
Grow the reach of Gay Times
GAY TIMES is one of the world’s most recognised LGBTQ+ media brands, with exceptional editorial content and an extremely authoritative backlink profile.
But its organic search visibility did not reflect the strength of the brand. Rankings had declined and the site was missing from searches where its authority and content suggested it should have been highly visible.
Our goal was to find what was suppressing performance, fix it and improve the site’s search visibility.
232.7%more top-ten organic rankings
116.7%more estimated monthly organic traffic
155.9%more top-three organic rankings
“Thanks for your work on this, it’s been really impressive and has helped us a lot”
Layla Soufi, Partnerships & Business Manager
The work
How we did it
Fix staging-site indexation
Discovered that parts of the staging site were indexable and had gradually begun appearing in Google in place of pages from the live website.
Rebuild indexation signals
Established clear sitewide rules for canonical tags, robots.txt and noindex directives so search engines could correctly understand which pages belonged in the index.
Content gap analysis
Compared GAY TIMES’ editorial coverage with relevant competitors to identify valuable evergreen topics that the existing publishing strategy had not yet covered.
Evergreen content
Built a focused plan around the strongest missing topics, complementing GAY TIMES’ existing editorial output with content designed to generate sustained organic visibility.
The results
See the results
Top-ten organic rankings rose 232.7% and estimated monthly organic traffic increased 116.7%.
Search rankings
232.7% more top-ten organic rankings
Keywords in positions 1–10 rose from 10,625 to 35,348. Within that total, positions 1–3 grew from 3,284 to 8,403 (+155.9%), while positions 4–10 grew from 7,341 to 26,945 (+267.0%).
116.7% more estimated monthly organic traffic
Ahrefs estimated organic traffic rose from 66,746 to 144,643 across the period shown.
Rankings responded immediately
Organic rankings began improving as soon as the key technical fixes were implemented.
Technical debt turned into growth
Removing conflicting indexation signals allowed the authority and quality already present within the GAY TIMES website to translate much more effectively into organic visibility.
Go Up is a leading SEO Agency in London. If you’d like to get a quote, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
Testimonials
"Thanks for your work on this, it’s been really impressive and has helped us a lot"
Partnerships & Business Manager
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