Coingape
80% Traffic Growth in One Year
When I joined Coingape in 2024, the site wasn't failing. It was stuck.
Decent domain authority. Established audience. A content team producing articles. But organic growth had flatlined. The content strategy was reactive — chasing news cycles without a structured approach to capturing evergreen search demand.
The site was running, but it wasn't growing. And in SEO, if you're not growing, you're falling behind.
My job: figure out what was broken and fix it.
Coingape was competing in one of the most saturated verticals in digital media.
Crypto content has dozens of well-funded competitors — CoinDesk, CoinTelegraph, Decrypt — all targeting the same high-volume keywords, many with larger teams and bigger budgets. Going head-to-head on the obvious keywords was a losing strategy.
But the bigger problem was under the hood.
The site had accumulated technical debt. Crawl errors. Thin content pages competing against each other. Inconsistent schema markup. Page speed issues dragging down mobile experience.
The content wasn't the problem. The foundation was.
Before I could focus on growth, I had to clean up the mess everyone had been ignoring.
I started where no one had looked: the technical foundation. Ahrefs crawl audit. Google Search Console deep-dive. What I found wasn't pretty — crawl errors everywhere, content cannibalization, broken schema, page speed issues killing mobile performance. I fixed crawl errors. Consolidated cannibalized content. Implemented proper schema markup across key templates. Addressed the worst page speed offenders. None of this is glamorous work. But it unlocked the organic potential the site was leaving on the table.
Result: Zero crawl errors. Clean technical foundation.
Instead of going head-to-head on the highest-volume terms, I ran systematic competitive analysis. I looked for topics where Coingape had a realistic chance of ranking — terms where the top results were weak, outdated, or poorly optimized. This gave us a content roadmap focused on efficiency, not just ambition.
Result: A targeted hit list of winnable keywords.
I built a structured content calendar around evergreen topics: how-to guides, token comparisons, protocol explainers. These pages compound over time instead of spiking and dying like news articles. Within 3 months, the evergreen library was already contributing measurable organic traffic.
Result: Content that keeps growing, not content that disappears.
Every two weeks, I reviewed performance data. What was ranking? What wasn't? Where were we close to page one? Content that underperformed got reworked. Pages sitting at positions 11-20 got targeted optimization pushes. This wasn't set-and-forget; it was a continuous feedback loop.
Result: Continuous improvement, not one-time optimization.
Sometimes the biggest growth lever is fixing what's already broken.
The technical cleanup wasn't exciting. Nobody writes conference talks about fixing crawl errors. But it was responsible for a significant portion of the early traffic gains. Content can't rank on a shaky foundation.
In crowded markets, strategy is about what you don't target.
Competitive gap analysis let me focus limited resources on keywords where we could actually win, rather than burning effort on terms dominated by sites with 10x our budget. Smart targeting beats brute force.
Quick wins buy time; systems buy growth.
The 35% growth in the first 3 months came from fixing obvious technical problems and publishing against validated demand. The remaining growth to 80% came from the slower, compounding work of building an evergreen library and iterating on data.
Let's Build Something Together
If you need someone to turn a plateau into growth — whether that's fixing the foundation or building the content engine — let's talk.