Documentonews.gr’s journey to the top

Documentonews.gr is one of the largest news portals in Greece, with a strong socio-political orientation. Despite its recognition, the lack of an SEO strategy limited its ability to compete with top players in the news industry.

The decision to partner with SLEED came as a natural evolution of the need for organic growth. The goal was twofold:

• Increase organic traffic from non-branded keywords by at least 30% YoY through Google’s channels (Search, Discover, News).
• Establish Documentonews.gr as a top-tier news portal, capable of surpassing the market average and standing out from the competition.

The journey to the top was not without obstacles. SLEED was called to face three main challenges:

1. Intense Competition

The news portal industry is highly competitive, with strong brands dominating organic channels. The need for differentiation was imperative. It was essential to:

• Identify opportunities in topics and keywords where competitors had an edge.
• Establish Documentonews.gr‘s Authority by creating high-value content that would earn the trust of users and Google.
• Prioritize actions in the SEO roadmap based on the quickest return on investment.

2. Technical SEO Difficulties

Technical improvements were critical to ensure the site performed optimally in search engines. The strategy included:

• Enhancing the crawl budget and indexation capability, so only the most important pages would appear in searches.
• Implementing schema markup for better readability of news by Google.
• Fixing Core Web Vitals to ensure a smooth user experience.
• Merging indexable pages to avoid duplicates and removing unused or insignificant pages from the Google Index.

3. Team Collaboration

Integrating SEO principles into a journalistic team requires organization, training, and continuous support. For this reason, SLEED:

• Organized training seminars to inform editors about SEO trends and necessary optimization steps.
• Developed processes for daily use of SEO tools, such as Google Trends, to help editors find trending topics on Google.

Ensured that topics would be covered in-depth by creating “Topics to write” for each content category.

The team’s strategy was based on two key pillars: Content SEO and Technical SEO.

1. Content SEO

• Thematic analysis: Extensive keyword research and keyword gap analysis against competitors.
• Thematic structure: Use of LLM models to define topics based on content already published by Documentonews.gr.
• Creation of new content: Incorporation of evergreen content that will remain relevant for a long period.
• Seasonal topic coverage: Creating content around trending topics (Olympic Games, Euro, natural disasters) and developing content that could rise in Discover searches.

2. Technical SEO

• Merging redundant sitemaps and adding Google News Sitemap.
• Canonicalization and deindexing to avoid duplicate pages.
• Implementation of structured data for each type of page.

Core Web Vitals improvements to enhance the user experience.

After 12 months of collaboration, there was impressive growth and results across all areas:

1. Non-Branded SEO Clicks

• +217.50% organic increase in clicks from Google
• 120% increase in keywords ranking in positions 4-10
• +81% in keywords that appeared in the top 3 positions of search results.

2. Google Discover Clicks

• +373.32% increase in clicks, translating to 13 million more traffic!
• Impressive growth in categories:

• Politics: +426.92%

• Crime: +1411.63% 

• International: +2517.45%

3. Google News Clicks

• +310.77% increase in clicks

• Significant growth in sections like:

• Politics: +426.92%

• Crime: +445.64%

4. Market Share SEO Growth

Documentonews.gr surpassed its direct competitors and made a jump in visits, exceeding the average visits of news portals in Greece (Similar Web).