Responsible Statecraft: SEO Growth After Switching to RebelMouse CMS

We had a vision, and the team realized it for us. They genuinely listened, did not push their solutions, but worked with us to get where we needed to be. There is not better feeling than waking up in the morning and seeing a design and product look exactly as you envisioned. If not better.

Kelley Vlahos
Senior Advisor and Editorial Director

Introduction

a person is casting a vote into a boxPhoto by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Every project benefits from a clear roadmap and defined goals. We prioritize understanding our clients' objectives and providing cost-effective solutions. Our commitment to our clients' success fosters long-term relationships, as demonstrated by clients who have been with us for over a decade.

We had no back-end or coding experience. We just know that we could be doing better in terms of having a user-friendly site that was sticky and highlighted all the great work we and our writers were doing every day. The RebelMouse team was patient, professional, and above all, creative in getting us to where we needed to be.

Kelley Vlahos
Senior Advisor and Editorial Director

Solution

There are a few reasons why the Responsible Statecraft team decided to switch to RebelMouse’s platform:

• Their site was launched in December 2019 on WordPress. They have grown considerably in that time — not just in traffic, but also across content providers (e.g., reporters, themselves, and outside contributors). They needed the right platform to support internal growth.
• They were ready for the next round of traffic growth, especially in terms of SEO. Even with great expert content, they just weren’t getting enough traffic. There was a concern that their existing website was not fully optimized. The website architecture was old and it hadn’t been updated.
• They were also looking for a complete strategy overhaul to give their readers more reasons to stay on their site and build loyalty.

Taxonomy

The breadth of topics and categories that Responsible Statecraft touches on is very significant. Previously, the site was heavily based on tags with only a few categories, which wasn’t the ideal way to organize all of the content.

While it can be a challenge to reflect a wide range of topics in taxonomy, our Senior Vice President of Product & Strategy, Alex Leo, started the project by performing a comprehensive analysis of all the tags and topics Responsible Statecraft had used previously. From there, our Director of Audience Development, Craig Kanalley, took a close look at common threads and found that a geographical structure would work best. This was based on the high volume of location-based tags the site had been using. We presented this to the Responsible Statecraft team and got timely and receptive feedback to move forward with the new taxonomy.

All of the content was divided into six regions: Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and North America. Within each region, there were countries and relevant categories.

This new taxonomy was reflected in the redesign with a Regions drop-down menu on the site’s main navigation. The new menu made it easy for users to pull up a region of interest and see the latest news, launching into a section page for each specific region.

Complete Redesign

RebelMouse's design team transformed Responsible Statecraft's vision into a reality that exceeded expectations. Their eye for aesthetics and understanding of UX principles resulted in a website that effectively communicates its vision and directs users to relevant content.

www.rebelmouse.com

RebelMouse provided new logo options, because a well-designed logo is memorable and easily recognizable. We also offered new typography because having proper font sizes enhances readability, making it easier for users to consume content and understand the message.

We also updated the layout to be segmented because egmented layouts help organize content into logical sections. Each segment is dedicated to a specific message or topic. This enhances overall site navigation and the user experience.

Implementation

Our technical team is the team that brought all of this work together. Igor, a RebelMouse Solutions Architect, did a fantastic job of navigating the technical solutions, working with Ben and Kelley on understanding how the old site was set up, how to get all of the data from the old instance over to RebelMouse, and how to bring the new vision for the taxonomy to life.

Igor and RebelMouse Platform Engineer Dmitry worked together with Kelley and Ben on making sure that the home page not only reflected a beautiful design, but also had the right functionality from an editorial perspective. With the new look, the editorial team can easily highlight stories and move them around the site as a part of the editorial process.

“This was a pretty custom request because it was really important for the Responsible Statecraft team to have full control over the home page experience and which stories go where. It took us probably a week to find the best possible solution together and I’m really happy to see the Responsible Statecraft team using it so well. They have been great to work with on coming up with solutions,” said Igor.

He built out a plan that was seamlessly implemented with Dmitry and Florian, a RebelMouse Server-Side Engineer. José, a RebelMouse Project Manager, made sure everything was planned and that resources were available from all sides. He kept all of us on track by making sure there was transparency on what we needed to prioritize, move, and what we needed from Kelley and Ben.

The Quality Assurance team, Natallia and Mariano, were the ones who made sure everything looked perfect before anything was shown to Kelley and Ben. It’s so important to have a thoughtful QA team as part of this process since it saves enormous amounts of time by preventing sending incomplete work or unnecessary back and forth.

Technical SEO

With such an amazing team, it’s easy to keep our promise to our clients — that we’ll always keep them modern and ensure that we improve their performance upon launch. Delivering high performance and great Core Web Vitals is our standard.

We care a lot about on-page and technical SEO, and we are very proud to have launched Responsible Statecraft’s site with a Semrush Site Health Score of 86.

These results were achieved by:

1. Leveraging the power of RebelMouse’s CMS and our out-of-the box features, such as (but not limited to):
   1. Sitemaps
   2. Structured data
   3. Dynamic page titles
   4. Fallbacks for meta descriptions
   5. Correct canonicalization
   6. Absence of server or security issues
2. Following the built-in processes that we’ve created over the years from migrating countless sites, such as (but not limited to):
   1. Cleaning up bad or old links (e.g., HTTP links)
   2. Optimizing JavaScript and CSS so that there are no performance issues
   3. Submitting sitemaps to Google Search Console
   4. Optimizing robots.txt files
   5. Defining rules for titles and meta descriptions for the most valuable pages
3. Defining priorities and setting up plans with the Responsible Statecraft team on what is necessary to achieve before launch (such as making sure we have the taxonomy set up correctly) vs. the things that can be addressed later (such as optimizing titles for pages that are not as valuable).