The Daily Meal: Developing Dashboard to Improve SEO Ranking

The Daily Meal is among the biggest food websites in the United States, providing up-to-the-minute news from the food industry, an extensive selection of recipes, informative articles, and expert advice on healthy eating. You'll also find comprehensive dining spot reviews, contributed by editors, industry specialists, and community members. The website consistently draws between 30 to 50 million pageviews each month, with an average of 2.5 million unique users, and has a collection of over 250 gigabytes of images and a rich repository of more than 1.7 million recipes.
We worked with The Daily Meal for over 5 years, providing ongoing support and maintenance for their website. As the site grew in size and complexity, occasional releases began to introduce minor glitches, including JavaScript errors and display problems with ads, among other issues. These hiccups could swiftly impact Google's algorithm and user numbers and even influence user behavior and conversions. Consequently, we recognized the need for a tool to swiftly identify and resolve these issues.
Project Overview:

• Location: US
• Product: Website
• Scope of our work: Back-end, Front-end
• Technologies: Drupal 7/6, DAM, Sails.js, Node.js, Apache SOLR, AWS, Akamai, integrations (Foursquare API, Edamam API, USDA API, Wine.com API, Mailchimp)
• Team: 2x Back-end Developer, 2x Front-end Developer, Project Manager
• Timeline: 5+ years

We developed a comprehensive dashboard designed to track key SEO metrics, allowing us to assess the site's performance against our predetermined benchmarks. This dashboard featured graphical and tableau representations to provide a visual overview of the metrics.
Using predefined metrics like pageviews, sessions, and various types of conversions (such as video plays, ad views, scrolls to the bottom of the page, and form submissions), along with specific site sections like the Home Page, Video Network, and Content Archive landing pages, managers could quickly determine whether the overall site or specific sections met, exceeded, or fell short of planned targets within a selected time frame (e.g., the last day, week, month, or month-to-date).
We primarily relied on Google Analytics data, but we also leveraged internal event tracking for a more comprehensive view of performance, all conveniently displayed in one place.

Additionally, we sent out this data via daily and weekly email newsletters to authorized staff members. These reports included comparisons between the current and previous weeks (for weekly reports) and between the current and previous days, along with the daily average (for daily reports).

Through the development of this dashboard, we assisted The Daily Meal in the following ways:

• Their SEO ranking improved significantly, thanks to the regular reports providing essential decision-making information.
• The conversion rate saw a notable increase of 9%, primarily driven by a surge in traffic and the strategic solutions implemented on the website, guided by insights from the dashboard.