The client
Canarias en Pleno is a digital news outlet covering current events, politics, the economy, and local news in the Canary Islands. Like any news outlet, its organic traffic depends heavily on ranking well on Google at the right moment — but they needed a real diagnosis of where they stood before investing in a growth strategy.
The challenge
The client had 10 priority target keywords, but didn't know for certain which ones were actually driving traffic, which had untapped potential, and whether underlying technical issues were holding back the whole site's organic growth.
Methodology
We applied the 4F Method — my own methodology of cross-referencing 4 independent data sources — to get a complete, objective read:
- Google Search Console: real performance for each target keyword (16 months of history) and indexing status across the whole domain.
- Google Analytics 4: real organic traffic by landing page (12 months, 2,966 distinct pages analyzed).
- Semrush: real search volume, domain visibility, and a complete technical Site Audit.
- WordPress / Yoast SEO: direct source code inspection to review technical configuration, schema markup, and internal linking.
Key findings
- Only 1 of the 9 keywords analyzed had real traffic with clicks — the rest had little to no visibility.
- A significant indexing problem: 5,323 pages crawled but not indexed by Google, and 4,823 pages with redirects — consuming crawl budget that took priority away from new content.
- Keyword cannibalization: up to 4 different articles competing against each other for the same keyword, diluting authority instead of building it.
- The site relied heavily on paid social media investment (74% of traffic) while the organic channel, though smaller in volume, brought more engaged users (49% engagement vs. 12.8% on paid social).
- Technical Site Audit: 0 critical errors, but 148 internal links with nofollow limiting authority flow, and 7 pages missing an H1 heading.
- Yoast SEO configuration was correct at the schema level (NewsArticle, BreadcrumbList) — the problem wasn't technical at the plugin level, but one of linking strategy and prioritization.
Action plan delivered
We organized the 10 target keywords into three horizons by impact and effort:
- Quick wins (0–30 days): keywords already close to the Top 3 with high volume — the biggest impact for the least effort.
- Consolidate (30–60 days): already well-optimized evergreen content that needs authority and internal linking, not new content.
- Monitoring and rapid publishing (ongoing): keywords 100% dependent on breaking news — the success metric here is indexing speed, not a fixed position.
We also identified a new keyword opportunity outside the original contractual scope (18,100 searches/month, moderate competition), suggested as an extension to discuss with the client.
Result of this phase
This project was structured in two phases: audit (40% of the project, completed and documented in a 9-section report) and implementation (the remaining 60%, in progress), with a results review scheduled at 90 days using the same measurement parameters (Semrush, Spain location, Desktop device) for a consistent comparison.