Case Study

The Challenge

As with most news sources, a significant share of search traffic to The Washington Post website (www.washingtonpost.com) tends to be event-driven such as searches around U.S. elections or the Olympics. In order to stay ahead of the competition while maintaining market share, The Washington Post wanted to attract a greater percentage of search traffic through un-branded terms.

The Solution

To maintain market share in the highly competitive News and Media industry, The Washington Post produces content to capture traffic from "timeless" terms that are not seasonal or event driven. With the help of Hitwise Search Intelligence^TM and Hitwise Charting, the team at The Washington Post discovered how to leverage un-branded search to benefit their business.

Using Hitwise Search Intelligence^TM, The Washington Post looked for groups of terms that were aligned with their journalism and drove similar amounts of traffic over different time periods. Further optimizing content around these terms provided long term organic traffic without seasonal volatility.

For example, after using Hitwise Search Intelligence^TM and Hitwise Charting to track the popularity of terms that revolve around continuously searched news items, The Washington Post determined that "timeless" search terms include those related to Barack & Michelle Obama, health articles and global warming. As a news organization, they also move quickly to provide content on fast-changing, topical terms, such as those that are political related or weather related (examples: "snow storm" and "David Letterman"). By acting on this information, The Washington Post reaffirmed they do not want competitors to "own" popular topics and used these techniques to generate traffic.

The Benefits

Since using Hitwise, The Washington Post has been able to use search analysis to attract internet users to its website year-round without solely relying on branded search.