I've been writing about SEO since I was 15 years old, and a decade later I'm fortunate to have consulted for companies I love like Ahrefs, Kinsta, Buffer, ConvertKit and multi-billion dollar brands.
The basics can be incredibly effective, but hundreds of sites cover them well and I want to focus on unique, creative ways to achieve better rankings.
Instead, here's my promise: I will put my absolute all into guides like this one to give original insights that help you get an edge over your competition.
That's it. That's my pitch for you to stick around (or perhaps let you know this isn't the site for you).
This is already too much text for a 'click-to-read-more-fade-thing' but there's more if you like.
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This month it was announced that Australian food and lifestyle brand Delicious. (the period is part of their name) hit record traffic numbers, reaching 1.696 million visitors for May of 2023.
This was a 34.3% month over month growth, with those visitors driving 17 million pageviews on the site.
The Delicious. website is clean and easy to read, and they clearly highlight the expertise of their writers who are restaurant owners, cookbook authors and in some cases, “TV chefs”.
How they drove those numbers and who is behind the site is where things get even more interesting.
Delicious. (having a period as part of their name feels really weird to type) partnered with American Express to run a series called ‘Month Out’.
The campaign featured exclusive offers and events for diners in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne. This campaign doubled the monthly traffic to that section of their website year on year and exceeded “all of our metrics”.
Looking at Sydney alone I can see 188 offers for deals at coffee shops, restaurants and bars. While I accept this isn’t that kind of campaign that anyone could easily replicate, it does show the potential of doing some kind of special deals offer in your space.
There’s no reason a blog focused on a specific area couldn’t focus on a smaller number of local businesses to pull something like this off.
You’ll Recognise Some of The Other Sites In Their Network
Delicious. is actually part of News Corp Australia, who have a few interesting brands under their wing.
They’re also behind GQ Australia, Vogue Australia, Taste.com.au and News.com.au, among many others.
GQ and Vogue in the US and UK are owned by digital goliath Cond̩ Nast, yet it looks like News Corp Рunder a company called News Life Media Рcompletely own the brands in the Australian market.
On the Australian version of these two brand websites, there’s no mention of Condé Nast at all. It’s possible I’m missing some kind of licensing deal that has been discussed online, but after reading a few Wikipedia pages and lots of mentions of how the business is going, I’m no closer to a final answer.
I know we can look at the traffic of websites in third-party tools like Ahrefs (search traffic) and Similarweb (all traffic sources) but it’s nice to get data directly from the source.
It’s a little bit odd to me that News Corp Australia are using a third-party company to monitor their metrics (Ipsos Iris, in this case) but I presume that’s also because they’re able to get audience demographics like the age group of visitors.
I would be really interested to know the official numbers of how a site like GQ Australia stacks up against the likes of the Japanese, Italian and French versions, so if they ever share some direct numbers I’ll be sure to report on them.
