How RebelMouse Generated Long-Term SEO Growth for Panorama

Panorama has been a beloved publisher in Italy for decades. They replatformed from WordPress to RebelMouse in early 2020, and have enjoyed all types of success with us since. In the past 12 months alone, we’ve embarked on a journey together that has been able to deliver continuous and healthy growth across the board month over month.

For over a year, we have worked closely with Panorama’s team and their SEO agency Inrete Digital. The key to building growth when working with different teams is to establish and nurture mutual trust and partnership so that everyone’s efforts can be amplified.

The first step is to create a safe environment where:

1. All teams become one team with the same goal. In this case, it was to grow Panorama’s search traffic.
2. Everyone has a chance to bring their ideas to the group and participate in brainstorming.
3. Alignment on priorities based on feasibility takes place, and the group determines the right action plan together.

The results below reflect all of the hard work and expertise that all of the teams put into this historic Italian brand.

Search Traffic

Search Impressions Steadily Increased Over a 12-Month Period

Stable Video Search Impressions

This was a win because a lot of publishers suffered from a significant decline in video search impressions after Google redefined its video indexing rules.

Growth on News Search

The uptrend on news search growth has been obvious since the last quarter of 2023.

We believe that optimizing for SEO actually means optimizing for users. This is when Google really rewards you. The best way to show this is user stickiness and engagement.

User Stickiness

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), user stickiness is a set of metrics that answers the question, “How often do readers/users return to and engage with your website?” It’s a great way to measure user engagement and loyalty. The higher these ratios, the better, and in the case of Panorama, we’ve seen significant increases over the past six months.

Together, the teams working on Panormana’s SEO strategy viewed it as a long-term commitment and not a one-time implementation.

Technical SEO

We started with technical SEO improvements, and this is where Inrete Digital performed the key work of optimizing category and tag pages by making sure we removed all section and tag pages that were thin. In addition to removing the pages, the right redirects were put in place, robots.txt and sitemaps were optimized, and page titles and meta descriptions were improved.

Zelle Gatoc from RebelMouse worked closely with Alessia Borgomastro and Teobaldo Semoli at Inrete Digital on identifying the low-hanging fruit that RebelMouse could tackle to optimize pages further for SEO. These usually included scripts that our server-side engineers ran based on the instructions provided by our strategy team. These scripts included (but were not limited to):

• Cleaning up old and duplicate sections, which included:
  • Identifying the sections
  • Removing the sections and migrating content from them to relevant sections
  • Setting up redirects, which included removing section URLs that were then redirected to new (or existing and relevant) section URLs
  • Updating templates and content so that Panorama wouldn’t be able to reference the old URLs anymore, as well as replacing the old URLs with the new ones

• Scripts to optimize crawl budget, which included:
  • Replacing URLs with uppercase formatting with URLs with lowercase formatting because uppercase URLs usually appeared in Panorama’s older content
  • Replacing unsecure links with HTTPS versions
    • Panorama has been on the web for decades, so it wasn’t a surprise that there were HTTP links across their content.
    • This was an easy task for RebelMouse’s server-side engineers.
  • Reviewing and replacing URLs that resulted in a 301 redirect
    • 301s are not bad because they direct the user where they should land instead.
    • But in order to improve the user experience and trim down the time it takes a user to reach their final destination, we replaced URLs that resulted in a 301 redirect with the intended final destination URLs.

“It's no secret that at RebelMouse, we’re deeply proud of empowering publishers with everything they need for sustainable growth — from data-driven insights to advanced CMS features. What truly inspires and delights me is seeing Andrea, Marianna, Alessia, and Teobaldo not only embrace these resources, but also implement them with remarkable consistency. It’s a powerful reminder of the lasting rewards that come from putting in the effort and staying focused on the goal,” Zelle said.

Performance and Core Web Vitals

As a part of technical SEO, our commitment to our clients is to deliver great Core Web Vitals and maintain great crawl stats, which is typically an average response time that’s around 100 milliseconds.

We achieve this by not only committing to security and infrastructure, but by also incorporating a deep focus on performance as a part of our ongoing site development, which allows us to continuously deliver those results.

User Experience and SEO

Author Structured Data

We know how important it is to expose users to information like who the content creators are on a site. Panorama has a wonderful editorial team that’s led by Andrea Soglio. These writers are well respected throughout both the publishing industry and Italy, so we made use of that fact by exposing them to the site’s users. Implementing author structured data also helps Google understand the site’s content better. To make this happen, we used Google Search Console’s Rich Results Test and Schema.org’s Schema Markup Validator.

Video

The Panorama team invests a lot in building video content. To help with categorization of that content on their site, we performed a couple of different things to optimize the videos:

1. Consolidated video-related sections
2. Redesigned the landing page for videos
3. Redesigned the article page for videos

Being proactive, in addition to committing to editorial best practices, helped sustain the site’s video performance long before Google released its video-indexing updates.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

It’s not just a phrase. Having teams work together makes a huge difference, and each team member across Panorama’s project provided a significant impact to their growth.

Zelle, RebelMouse’s Digital Strategist, is exceptionally talented at discovering growth opportunities, recognizing potential issues, and identifying good practices that need to be nurtured. One of her first findings during the analysis of Panorama’s traffic was that the editorial team already had great instincts to keep the content fresh and up to date.

Andrea, Panorama’s Editor in Chief, is someone who is always looking for opportunities for growth. He took all of the findings that Zelle presented and made sure that they were incorporated into the existing editorial processes. That was key on the editorial side of things — listening, providing feedback, and then adopting best practices.

Andrea introduced us to Inrete Digital, their SEO agency, who he loves working with. Having someone perform an independent audit and then build out a plan with all of us was incredibly helpful. We were able to make the most of constructive feedback, focus on listening, and take an iterative approach to developing best practices.

This relationship and partnership could not have been possible without Panorama’s RebelMouse Account Manager Cindy De Gouveia and RebelMouse’s Director of Account Management Zoë von Scharfenberg, who both worked on making sure that all of the priorities were aligned and that everyone had clarity on what was feasible. Marianna Baroli at Panorama was the glue for all of us. She went above and beyond to ensure that all of our teams were aligned. All of them added so much lightness to all of the hard work that was performed, always adding a little bit of fun to make the work so much more enjoyable.

“Working together with Andrea, Marianna, and Alessia to create shared goals and accomplish them together reminds me of why I love what I get to do every day! The results are not only a reflection of everyone's hard work, but more importantly our shared vision of what success looks like together,“ said Cindy. “It’s not all about 'what can we accomplish?' We always say at RebelMouse that ‘almost anything is possible,’ but the real question is 'what do we want to accomplish?’“

RebelMouse’s design and development teams made all of these ideas and strategies come to life. João Marcos Oliviera, RebelMouse’s UX/UI designer, took the vision that the SEO and strategy teams had to the next level by adding more details to the designs for the author components, as well as creating a new video experience.

Miloš Moravac, RebelMouse’s solutions architect, took all of our ideas and built out technical plans for implementation, making sure that we followed best practices every step of the way.

“From the start, there was a clear goal, expectation, and timeline. This is thanks to the project managers and clear communication from Panorama’s team. Creating a technical implementation plan and breaking down the work between server-side engineers and platform engineers was easy because we always received clear requirements from the client and strategy teams,” Miloš said.

Platform engineers Sapna Parwani, Leonardo Fonseca, Juan Camilo, and Dmitry Tarasov worked on all of our requests, ensuring that the new experiences really came to life in the best possible ways.

RebelMouse engineers Jorge Puente Sarrín, Oka Gartria, and Florian Agalliu made sure we seamlessly ran all of the scripts that the SEO and strategy teams identified. In this way, we were able to optimize crawl budget and remove and replace all unnecessary links.

Our QA engineers Alisa Hrustić and Lennin Troya always made sure that we delivered exactly what we promised to the Panorama team. Catching any issues before the deliverables are presented is key to an enjoyable work experience for all sides.

Coordinating all of our internal teams and making sure we delivered things on time and without any overlap required careful planning and organization. This is where RebelMouse’s project manager Melissa Rabanal Ortiz and RebelMouse’s VP of Operations Gabriela Carrion performed outstanding work to ensure we kept the promises we made.

The Panorama team is not just a client to us, and we’re not just a CMS vendor or an agency to them — we’re partners with the same growth goals.

If you would like to work together to build continuous growth for your site, request a demo today.