norsk.es: from 0 to 10,000 visits a month in two months

Challenge

norsk.es is our own site for Norwegians in Spain: news, guides and practical help in Norwegian. It had plenty of content, but three things held back readers and Google:

• Articles took between three and five seconds to load, because the whole site was served without a page cache.
• About ten pairs of articles competed for the same searches, and more than 130 had no excerpt.
• Articles about rules, tax and paperwork contained errors that could cost a reader money.

Strategy

We started with speed, then content, then trust.

Speed. A page-view counter in the site builder set a session cookie on every request and switched the cache off. We turned it off. Articles then loaded in 0.35 seconds, about 15 times faster.

Content. New articles were packed in batches and scheduled to come out steadily, four a day. The fiction series "Ole i Spania" became its own category with 42 episodes. The full-season pages are set to noindex, so they do not take the place of the episodes in search.

Trust. We fact-checked the 210 highest-risk articles and published 441 corrections across 155 articles. All of them sit in the revision history and can be undone one by one.

Sign-up. A free NIE guide in return for an email address gives readers something to take away and gives us a list to write to.

Result

Visits went from 0 to 10,000 a month in two months. The figure is visits per month, measured by us.

norsk.es is our own site, so there is no client quote here. The numbers are what we have.