Content Strategy

Proposed Website Restructure

Auto Industry Woes

Six months after ForbesAutos.com was launched, we faced a daunting challenge. This was a tumultuous period for the auto industry, marked by financial turmoil and government bailouts. With car advertising budgets severely slashed, our fledgling website had to navigate this hostile landscape.

During that time, auto industry advertising budgets were divided into levels ranging from Car/Brand Specific (such as a BMW M3 review, photo, and specs), Segment Specific (highlighting the best SUVs), and Awareness (everything else).

However, due to constrained budgets, auto companies started to limit their display ad purchases to their Car/Brand Specific pages and Segments. As a new website still building its user base, we struggled to generate significant traffic to these specific areas. 

Popular Content Was Not Monetized

Conversely, our general editorial content, featuring Forbes Lists, captivating slideshows, and insightful articles, received immense praise and often garnered attention from other news sources, leading to a substantial influx of users. Unfortunately, these users were not necessarily car shoppers and did not explore the pages that advertisers considered valuable. Consequently, this type of content fell under Awareness in the car companies’ advertising budgets, and faced severe cuts.

Site Structure vs SEO

The site was structured based on the industry standard, Year, Make, Model, but as our pages gained traction in terms of SEO, inbound links, and indexing, the clock would reset every year, and we would start from scratch with a new folder. This flaw significantly hindered our SEO rankings in a competitive field.

Original structure: / 2023 / BMW / M5

Proposed: / BMW / M5 / 2023 M5 Review

To address this issue, I proposed the introduction of Brand Landing pages, Car Landing Pages, and Segment Landing pages. These additional entry points would be ranked and gain popularity year after year.

Proposed Solutions

I could see a structural flaw concerning content structure. We were delivering traffic to areas that were not valuable. My proposed strategy involved restructuring the site to move all editorial content under a specific brand or segment, create new landing pages for better SEO, and expand the segments to include topics such as High Performance or Fuel Efficient. This would allow popular editorial content to fall within an area of the site that was monetized, bridging the gap between advertisers and the audience.

Although the final decisions regarding the content strategy fell outside the scope of my role as the Art Director, being part of a startup meant wearing multiple hats. Therefore, I created a comprehensive proposal to rectify the structural problems plaguing the site. However, its implementation was beyond my control.

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Kacy Colson is a freelance designer and artist living in the Catskill Mountains.