Songwriter Universe is the ultimate resource for musicians. Founded by Dale Kawashima, who has an extensive and impressive background rooted in the music industry. Kawashima has served as President of major music publishing companies, A&R exec, indie publisher, and music critic. He has supervised and represented many of the world’s top catalogs, including the songs of the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Prince, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Little Richard, and more.

The website has nearly two decades of content under its belt- including an exclusive original interview with then newbie Taylor Swift. In addition to interviews with industry elites, the site also has plenty of resources for musicians such as publishing companies & record label directories.

With thousands of high-quality content pages, good domain authority, thousands of great links in their backlink profile (including hundreds of links in Wikipedia) why would this type of client suffer SEO issues?

The Problem:

In order to diagnose the problem, we had to perform a deep technical analysis as well as an SEO audit. One of the key issues we found was, after a Google core update in May of 2020, the client’s organic search traffic was reduced drastically. By estimation, a 29-47% reduction in traffic depending on which month, since May 2020.

Songwriter Universe Traffic Stats April 2020 Compared To May 2020

In the above traffic stats, you can see when the Songwriter Universe first took the hit- nearly a 30% drop in traffic in one month. Unfortunately for us, Google has valid reasons for this. They are engulfed in high search quality results. This update also promoted under-rewarded pages, too. Here is an anecdote that best describes why…

“One way to think of how a core update operates is to imagine you made a list of the top 100 movies in 2015. A few years later in 2019, you refresh the list. It’s going to naturally change. Some new and wonderful movies that never existed before will now be candidates for inclusion. You might also reassess some films and realize they deserved a higher place on the list than they had before. The list will change, and films previously higher on the list that move down aren’t bad. There are simply more deserving films that are coming before them.” Source: Google

Songwriter Universe Traffic Stats April 2020 Compared To August 2020

As months passed, the client took up to a 47% drop in organic search traffic. This has a direct impact on revenue as this means the client cannot serve all of their advertising commitments. Unfortunately, there are some things a site owner cannot do to remedy the problem. However, in this case, we could recover most of the lost traffic…

The Solution:

Remove hindrances…

Songwriter Universe accumulated many technical user experience issues over the years. We had to diagnose the problem from several internal layers including;

• Conflicting WordPress plugins
• CSS issues in the site’s theme
• Technical SEO issues (i.e. broken links, missing meta descriptions, missing ALT tags, etc.)
• SSL version conflicts
• Slow PageSpeed Insights

To elaborate on the latter, Google uses the loading time of your site as a ranking factor. Meaning, if your pages are loading slower than your competitor, you can lose search rank positioning to them. This attributed to the client losing so much organic search traffic. We took measures to drastically improve the loading speed of the client’s website as a result.

Songwriter Universe Traffic Stats April 2020 Compared To October 2020

In the stats above, you can see the point when we started working with the client as they saw an immediate bump in search traffic (compared to April 2020).

Songwriter Universe Traffic Stats April 2020 Compared To November 2020

Here are statistics after nearly two months of working with the client. And as you can see, they have recovered over 85% of lost organic search traffic (since April 2020). We are monitoring the results over the next few months as we expect them to recover and exceed traffic results with new quality content.

Songwriter Universe Traffic Stats April Compared To December 2020

Update: we are proud to announce that our client has fully recovered lost traffic. In fact, from the Google Analytics report which compares December 2020 to April 2020 (the month before the decrease in traffic) and traffic has exceeded previous levels. Therefore, in just under 3 months we were able to recover and exceed traffic expectations for our client. At this rate, we can project to see a nearly 30% increase in overall traffic due to strategic search engine optimizations.

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