Case Study:
Audacy.com Migration
This case study demonstrates the power of a well-planned website migration, replatforming, and consolidation, along with a robust SEO product strategy. By consolidating a complex digital landscape and implementing SEO best practices, Audacy achieved significant improvements in user experience, operational efficiency, SEO performance, and content management.
Transforming a Fragmented Digital Landscape into a Unified Powerhouse
Client:
AUDACY, INC (formerly Entercom)
Industry:
American broadcasting company, the second largest radio company in the United States, owning over 220 radio stations across 47 media markets.
Challenge:
Imagine managing content and operations for 260 separate websites! That was the reality for Audacy, a leading broadcaster with a network of radio stations across the country. Spread thin across subdomains, their digital presence suffered from:
- Complexity: Maintaining 260 subdomains meant juggling multiple servers, CMS systems (Drupal and WordPress), and a fragmented content ecosystem that hindered collaboration and scalability.
- Performance Issues: The distributed architecture caused performance bottlenecks, impacting user experience and search engine crawling efficiency.
- Limited SEO Reach: The fragmented structure diluted SEO efforts and made it difficult for individual stations to achieve search engine visibility.
Solution:
Partnered with Product, Engineering, ProdOps and Stations to embark on a comprehensive website migration project, consolidating 260 subdomains into a single, unified platform. The SEO-focused migration encompassed several key strategies:
- Mapping: Meticulously planned the migration by mapping content from subdomains to their new locations within the main website's directory structure.
- Enhanced Architecture & Navigation: A user-friendly and SEO-optimized architecture and navigation system were implemented to ensure intuitive browsing and content discoverability.
- Improved Taxonomy: Established a clear and well-organized taxonomy to categorize content effectively and improve search engine understanding of the website's structure.
- Content Optimization: Existing content was optimized for relevant keywords and user experience, ensuring its value and searchability.
- CMS Optimization: The new CMS (Clay) was optimized with features like tags, schema markup, page template optimization, canonicalization, robots.txt, meta robots, sitemaps, and RSS feeds to enhance SEO performance.
- Website Speed Optimization: Technical optimizations were implemented to improve website speed and user experience.
Results:
The website migration and SEO efforts yielded significant benefits for Audacy.com:
- Streamlined Operations: Stations were successfully migrated from multiple servers to a single platform, and from two CMS systems to Clay, simplifying management and reducing maintenance overhead.
- Enhanced User Experience: A clear and efficient architecture and navigation system improved user experience and content discoverability.
- Improved SEO Performance:
- Organic traffic increased by 7%, indicating better search engine visibility.
- Crawl budget optimization resulted in a reduction of low-quality content from 20 million to 6 million pages, improving search engine crawling efficiency.
- Duplicate content issues due to content syndication between stations were resolved.
- Content Management Efficiency: Content creation and publishing became faster and more streamlined with a unified CMS platform.
- Reduced Engineering Time: Streamlined operations and a single CMS platform significantly decreased engineering time spent on development and configuration.
- News & Sports Visibility Boost: Every news and sports station was successfully included in Google News Publisher Center and Apple News Publisher as separate entities, increasing their visibility on these key news platforms.
- Improved Listening Experience: Average session duration, a key indicator of listening experience, increased by 13%, demonstrating a more engaging experience for station audiences.
Irina Yekaterinoslavskaya
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