IstiZada Arabic SEO Case Study

Background

Russia Beyond the Headlines, a large Russian newspaper, came to IstiZada about a year after they launched the Arabic version of the their website. They were struggling to increase their organic traffic from Google and they had recently seen their traffic start to decrease instead of increase. Desiring to attract more readers to the Arabic versions of their stories they came to IstiZada to help them increase their organic traffic in Arabic.

Goals

Increase organic traffic from Arabic speakers all around the world and especially in the Middle East.

Strategy

IstiZada did extensive keyword research to determine what keywords to focus on. As a publisher website we realized that RBTH would benefit much more from ranking for thousands of low search volume long tail keywords than they would from ranking for just a small handful of high search volume keywords. In light of this IstiZada focused heavily on the optimization of articles and article topic categories on the website. This made it so each article that was published would get far better reach and visibility on Google. We also helped RBTH take advantage of traffic spikes around trending topics using Google News. Finally, we worked with RBTH on off-page strategies to significantly increase the link authority of their website.

Results

During a 14 month period Russia Beyond the Headlines had a 415% increase in organic traffic to the Arabic version of their website. In addition to this IstiZada discovered and helped RBTH fix an issue that was impacting all 18 language versions of their website which in turn lead to organic traffic improvements for those versions of the website as well.