The project in brief
A business desk that search engines no longer took seriously
When I joined, Al Bawaba’s business department had one writer. He covered crypto and currencies, and nothing else.
The outlet was struggling with authority and rankings. Search engines had come to treat it as an entertainment news site, not a serious news platform. In business and economics, it had lost much of its authority, in both Arabic and English.
Winning that back takes more than more articles. It takes a plan, standards, and coverage search engines recognize as serious.
Learn the craft, then build the desk around it
- Learn it first. I studied everything I could about writing SEO-optimized business and economics news and articles.
- Plan the year. I built the business section’s content plan for the year, with coverage well beyond crypto.
- Lay the foundation. I set the standards and benchmarks the section’s content would follow, and wrote bilingual reporting that added its own value.
- Bring other teams along. Writers from other teams, handling press releases for example, followed the same principles, so everything under business pulled in one direction.
One editor, no team, no technical support
There was no team to delegate to and no technical support to lean on. The plan, the standards and most of the writing were mine to deliver.
Traffic up 118% in five months, without a team
In five months, traffic to the business section grew 118%. I delivered 63% of the whole department’s target on my own, and set the benchmark for the team that followed.
The work also strengthened Al Bawaba’s role as a regional hub for business journalism and communications.
Traffic isn’t the same thing as authority, and it’s only part of the picture. What the numbers do show is readers finding serious business coverage on Al Bawaba again.
What this can do for your publication
If your content ranks for the wrong things, or doesn’t rank at all, the fix starts with a plan and standards, not volume. I build both, in Arabic and English, and I write to them.