Summary

Reedsy connects aspiring authors to people who can help them complete and publish an indie book and then connects that indie book with an audience through its Reedsy Discover platform.

While that marketplace and discover platform works great for authors and there are many case studies that demonstrate it. Reedsy needed to ensure they were still connecting with their customers in Google Search.

After the exit of the company’s SEO veteran they needed to bring on a strong replacement to continue to grow their search presence.

Here’s how I doubled Reedsys’ search presence in 10 months and dominated bigger brands.

The Reedsy Sites & Sections

Challenge

Reedsy wanted to increase their search visibility and beat out larger institutional players in its 3 markets; authors, freelancers who help authors and readers. The competition  was stiff and completely different in each market and a new keyword and content strategy had to be developed for each separately. But, scalability was important.

Insights

Reedsy’s competition was tough and each market spoke to a different type of person and profile but just producing content was not going to be enough to dominate these competitors. Not all competitors were big players but some were so topically relevant and well-known that nudging them out of search was not as simple as just creating skyscraper content and hoping to promote it with some links. We needed to stand out and establish Reedsy at the forefront of consumers searches.

Solution

The Reedsy Digest

It was apparent in researching competitors that fundamental SEO was being applied to all but close attention was not being paid to technical SEO and most were not even trying to leverage rich results in SERPs.

Reedsy had been doing the same thing for the most part and a move toward actively thinking about content structure and JSON Schema Mark Up changed the game. I set to work educating the Reedsy content team on more technical SEO changes that should be applied to the content when being uploaded.

Covering content structure, using structure elements like headings, image alt text and internal anchors for a better and more digestible content for search engines. Empowering the content team to add additional and improved SEO was key to driving the results but so was implementation of structured data mark up for How-To’s and FAQs as well as more obscure elements.

A complete overhaul of these elements for all old content and driving fresh and targeted link building efforts saw a large increase in our ability to secure rich results like Featured Snippets, People Also Ask boxes and Image results for high intent and high traffic keywords important to Reedsys business model.

reedsy book cover pages
The Reedsy Book Cover Art Page

Results

My 10 month focus and the teams implementation of recommendations proved to be a huge success. The overall visibility of Reedsy grew immensely and was poised well to take advantage of the unfortunate situation globally with lock downs due to Covid-19. With More people at home 24/7 many were finally starting progress on that book they’ve always wanted to write. With Reedsy now dominating the SERPs record days were had for both traffic and revenue between March and May (and were continuing as the contract ended).

Stats

+11.5 Million

Google Impressions per month

+650,000

Clicks from Search per month

+700

SERP Features like Featured Snippets and People Also Ask boxes