Smarkets

The challenge

Smarkets challenged us to deliver a secure news platform where they could publish large amounts of content. The goal of the platform was to attract and engage their audience and improve brand awareness.

SEO was a huge focus for Smarkets and they wanted to generate high levels of organic traffic with the new website. As a brand new website, we needed to collaborate with Smarkets to implement a marketing strategy that would enable the site to build authority, increase their domain authority (ability to rank) and generate organic and social traffic.

The website

We delivered a high performance headless website for Smarkets that statically publishes content to achieve the best speed, security and cross-device user experiences. This means that the front-end interface of the website that visitors see is a static version of the site that is entirely separate to the CMS.

We leveraged Smarket’s custom CMS platform to create a content platform that the Marketing team could use to connect with their audience.

SEO strategy

Starting from scratch with a new website and domain, Smarkets had a challenge ahead of them to build their repetitional metrics, begin ranking in search engines and generate inbound traffic.

We delivered an SEO strategy that defined content pillars and categories that could be optimised across the website to attract and grow organic traffic. Our strategy dovetailed with Smarkets’ content strategy and ensured that both the work streams supported the other rather than competed.

The architecture

Before any design work had been undertaken, our UX designers created wireframe layouts of the website to plan the content structure and user flows throughout the site. We created article hierarchies and featured article components to direct the user journeys and enable Smarkets to promote popular content.

Calculators

Our team produced a set of online calculators to help users calculate betting odds and convert bets. The calculators linked to Smarket’s betting platform and to relevant articles throughout the site. These became popular resources that attracted users to the site.

Publishing workflows

To enable Smarkets to efficiently produce and publish content, we collaborated with their team to implement a publishing workflow in the CMS. We created custom user roles to cover the users within their system, including content writers, journalists, editors, guest editors, publishers and so on, to provide the right users with the right permissions level for Smarket’s content approval process.