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WholeFoods Magazine Builds Solid Foundation for SEO with Continuum
February 16, 2024
WholeFoods Magazine had outgrown WordPress and its current web provider. They were ready for a publisher-focused, purpose-driven partner.
Driving their desire for change was a need to generate more revenue. While WholeFoods Magazine had a wish list of items that ePublishing’s Continuum delivered – fewer departmental silos, better audience data collection, dynamic content metering, directories, and improvements to newsletters – search engine optimization to drive more traffic was a top priority.
They knew that most people begin their searches in Google and wanted to capture those visitors looking for information so they could benefit from the 40-year archive of expert content and insights found within WholeFoods Magazine. SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank higher on search engine results pages. The goal is to increase online visibility.
To help them do that, ePublishing partnered with their team for technical SEO to maximize content discoverability and indexing by all search engines. Technical SEO significantly affects a website’s chances of appearing in Google search results.
When redesigning the website, ePublishing focused on:
- User experience. Google and other search engines highly value sites and content that provide a great user experience for real people.
- Proper redirects. Ensuring Google knew the new location of each piece of content. This step is critical when transitioning to a new content management system.
- The visitor experience. Leverage ePublishing caching infrastructure and external Content Delivery Network (CDN).
- Core Web Vitals. Improve the website’s overall performance to meet key Core Web Vitals, which play a key role in showing up in search engines.
- Technical structure. Adding essential underlying elements and tactics such as structured data, XML sitemaps for search engines and Google News, identifying and fixing duplicate content, implementing canonical URL tags, and more.
- Mobile experience. Google puts a high emphasis on mobile, so it is critical to avoid measuring results only in the context of desktop browsers.
- Security and compliance
- Accessibility
How ePublishing Helped WholeFoods Create an SEO-friendly Website Architecture
ePublishing partnered with WholeFoods Magazine to reorganize the website to help users better find what they are looking for. This included designing clearer navigation, streamlining categories, and improving internal site search.
In addition to helping their readers better find what they need, a well-organized and logical site structure can help search engine crawlers find their content. And that increases the chance the content will rank higher in search results.
Over three months, organic search traffic increased by 10% on a stronger foundation for SEO.
The SEO tune-up alongside the new, more modern, and functional design – all on a platform designed for publishers – is helping WholeFoods Magazine grow its audience and drive revenue.
“Our newly relaunched site has such a refreshing, uncluttered, modern look. We are very pleased, as are our customers. The feedback we have received from customers and visitors is wonderful. ePublishing has made things easier for us and our future,” said Heather Wainer, Publisher/VP of Media at WholeFoods Magazine.
Need an SEO tuneup? Want to learn more? Reach out today.