THE OBJECTIVE:
Unlocking new opportunities for audience growth by replacing the web platform, enhancing site authority and surfacing editorial expertise with a new content strategy.
The Big Issue is a social enterprise and B-Corp on a mission to help millions of people in the UK who are affected by poverty earn, learn, and thrive.
THE CHALLENGE
The Big Issue required support to accelerate audience growth. While traffic growth was evident, two factors hindered its ability to unlock new opportunities and achieve ambitious growth targets.
The first issue was the legacy web platform, which was overly complex and made it hard to use. As it wasn’t optimised for search, it limited the editorial team’s ability to plan for, and drive, audience growth.
The second was unpredictable traffic volume. While the editorial team were working hard to deliver high volumes of news articles, there was inconsistency in performance. There was a clear need for a defined content plan that would reinforce expertise and more consistently drive traffic every month.
THE SOLUTION
To understand the problem faced by the Big Issue, we spent time talking with key stakeholders about the business, and the challenges they were facing to establish a clear understanding of the business goals.
This deep dive enabled us to create a tailored proposal that was focused on achieving two objectives.
The first was to improve their website platform, the second was to develop an editorial strategy for driving audience growth.
Website Migration
Working with our web development partners at Yellow Peach, we managed the migration of the Big Issue’s website and content onto WordPress.
We carried out a technical audit, both pre- and post-migration to ensure we knew what needed to be fixed or optimised, so we could be sure the solutions allowed us to build a faster site with better core web vital scores.
Building the website on WordPress delivered two of the Big Issue’s objectives immediately.
- The new site was powered by the existing CMS and database – ensuring the team were familiar with existing workflows.
- The existing library of WordPress plugins made adding new functionality simpler and faster and the development of the site was more affordable.
Editorial Strategy
Once the new website was launched in early 2024, we started to work with the editorial leadership team on an editorial strategy to begin creating articles that would deliver more dependable traffic.
The objective was to reduce reliance on the news cycle and to start building traffic growth with evergreen content – i.e. articles that would rank well on Google for terms valuable to Big Issue’s audience.
By matching the evergreen plan to topics where the Big Issue’s team had expertise we improved the performance of news content as well as creating articles that form a consistent foundation of monthly traffic.
Working in partnership with the editorial leadership team we produced an editorial strategy, along with an execution plan broken down into weekly actions.
The better web co. became an extension of their internal editorial team. A combination of 1-1 meetings with the content creators, detailed briefs on how to structure articles, the best topics to cover and reporting results in terms of search visibility and subsequent traffic. We developed the strategy and provided the training, research and insights the editorial team needed to deliver on it.
“Big Issue is a household brand name rightly recognised for its support of vendors through the street sales model. However with 3.8m people in the UK now living in destitution, it is imperative that Big Issue’s message reaches a wider audience and we are able to evolve our business model to offer more solutions for marginalised people. Underpinning this has been our rapid digital growth, facilitated by the better web co., equipping our editorial team with the skills required to identify search trends and create engaging content that results in more time spent on site.”
Paul Cheal – Group CEO, Big Issue
THE RESULTS
Doubled the number of monthly unique users over 12 months.
Strengthened the site’s authority and search visibility to an all-time high.
The website migration, content organisation and emphasis on evergreen content strengthened the site’s authority and search visibility to an all-time high.
Our collaboration with the Big Issue and the hard work put in by their editorial team resulted in the number of monthly unique users doubling over 12 months.
Editorial authority and subsequent traffic improved, with demonstrable wins in the Department of Work and Pensions and Housing – two key pillars for the business.
The next step is now to work with the editorial team to help expand the number of topics they’re covering – fitting with their mission while maintaining topic expertise, to help continue growing the underlying traffic to BigIssue.com.
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