When I partnered with three other baseball bloggers in 2012 to launch a community-driven website for independent, fan-focused coverage, we didn’t set out to create an organic search powerhouse. We were far more concerned with ERA than SEO.
It happened sort of by accident. But along the way, I’ve discovered some things worth sharing, especially over the past couple years as the world of search has been flipped upside down.
(Troy McClure voice) Hi, I’m Nick Nelson. You may remember me from such work/hobby crossovers as 4 Marketing Lessons I Learned from Building a Bustling Baseball Fan Community and The Most Iconic Video Game Characters Ever (and the Lessons for Marketers). Today I’m here to share with you some of the biggest things I’ve learned from an SEO standpoint in helping run a site that welcomed nearly 1 million visitors via organic search last year.
A case study in organic search resilience
Twins Daily first launched in March of 2012. The vision was pretty simple: a go-to spot for fans to find expansive and interactive coverage of the Minnesota Twins, with user blogs and message boards encouraging readers to help shape the conversations.
The website’s performance in terms of traffic immediately blew away any of our expectations and hopes. We’ve been continually surprised and delighted by Twins Daily’s popularity and growth ever since, and by now we founders can hardly take much credit for it. The self-sustaining community of passionate and dedicated fan creators who fuel our content engine, and the loyal visitors and commenters who come by to engage on a regular basis, have made the site a top destination for all things Twins baseball.
Some context: In 2024, TwinsDaily.com attracted nearly 2 million unique visitors. The primary source of acquisition for these visitors was organic search, which accounted for 965K users, or 51% of our total traffic.
This was not our best year in terms of website traffic. There were a number of factors suppressing the site’s performance — including the deflating circumstances around the team itself and the disruptive SEO forces that every marketer is aware of. Still, I take a look back at those numbers as a digital marketer, and they’re cool to see.
With the insight I have into organic traffic trends being experienced by our clients, our agency and B2B industries in general, I also recognize that maintaining a steady flow of organic inbound traffic is a luxury in this day and age. But this isn’t by accident. There are intentional steps you can take to buck negative momentum.
SEO best practices that drive sustainable organic traffic
Running an online publication for baseball fans is obviously a lot different from running a website for a B2B company. But there are plenty of relevant takeaways from our story for anyone who wants to build or protect their organic search visibility in the current environment. These are the SEO best practices that any brand can model.
Prioritizing clarity and consistency.
One of the cardinal rules of SEO is don’t overthink it. Being descriptive, clear and straightforward in communicating who we are has definitely benefited Twins Daily as a digital brand. The site’s purpose and promise are tied into our name. You know what we’ll be talking about and you know we’ll have something new for you every day.
There are plenty of great baseball blogs and websites out there that have clever names referring to their team’s ballpark, or neighborhood, or lore. Nothing wrong with these knowing nods to your audience! But by including the name of the franchise we follow, Twins Daily has an advantage when it comes to showing up in searches related to the team.
We encourage our writers and editors to make a point of being similarly direct about the players and topics they’re addressing in headlines. Make the relevance obvious to Google and SERP surfers!
Featuring authentic and relatable voices.
Twins Daily’s founding mission was to elevate the voice of the fan. Not just any fan — social media can serve that purpose — but the impassioned, thoughtful, creative fan who wanted to take the time to dig deep, challenge assumptions and explore new ideas outside of the mainstream beaten path.
There’s a level of credibility that comes with this, especially for those who put in the effort to develop their voice and cultivate an audience.
I’ve written often here on the TopRank Blog about the growing SEO value of E-E-A-T principles and people-first content amid AI saturation. Twins Daily’s premise — real fans sharing their real thoughts, inviting real dialogues — embodies this.
How can B2B marketers and brands infuse more authenticity and relatability into their content strategies? A few ideas:
- Encourage and empower your employees to create content. Consider “team takeover days” for your social media counts and invite contributions on your blog.
- Showcase social proof and validation wherever you can: customer testimonials, case studies, content co-creation, or work being done behind the scenes.
- Collaborate with recognized and respected influencers and creators in your industry.
- Whenever possible, ensure the content you publish has a distinct point of view and a clearly attributed author, with links to bios and social handles so readers can learn more about them.
Learn how an E-E-A-T audit can quantify your site’s trust signals and surface opportunities.
Going deep on a dedicated area of focus.
Twins Daily is a site about the Minnesota Twins, through and through. But within that subject area, we are everywhere. Our writers and community contributors go deep on niche subjects, from unparalleled minor-league coverage to historical retrospectives to highly specific trade hypotheticals.
We’ve published in-depth scouting reports on players you’ve never heard of. We’ve broken down the implications of Rule 5 draft picks, waiver claims and arbitration rulings. If it matters to Twins fans, there’s a good chance we’ve covered it, and probably with more context and conviction than most.
That kind of focused, expert content sends all the right signals to search engines. It aligns with Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. And it’s a good reminder to brands: depth matters. If you’re trying to be all things to all people, it’s going to be hard to stand out in search. But if you can own a specific niche and consistently deliver value to the people who care about it most? That’s where you win.
A few questions to consider as you define or refine your areas of topical authority:
- What topics or questions can we confidently say we cover better than anyone else?
- Where do we have real-world expertise and experience we can draw from?
- Are we regularly publishing deep, differentiated content around these areas? Or are we playing it too safe?
Learn how topical mapping helps you strategically own the areas most important to your brand.
Removing barriers with ungated content.
One of the more underrated reasons Twins Daily continues to pull in strong organic traffic? It’s wide open.
As more newspapers, media sites and digital publications have gone behind paywalls, Twins Daily remains fully accessible to anyone with a browser and an interest in the team. The same is true of our content here on TopRank’s B2B Marketing Blog. That openness drives more clicks, more shares, more backlinks and ultimately, more organic visibility.
In the B2B marketing world, I understand the rationale for gating content to drive leads. But it’s worth considering which content is worthy of being gated vs. content that can create more value by being openly available.
While gated content is harder for people (and search engines) to discover, harder to share, harder to build trust with, there are situations where they type of B2B solution being marketed warrants potential buyers downloading a specifically useful form of content followed by a sequence of nurture emails with CTAs to even deeper resources, webinars and opportunities to engage. With our agency’s research reports, we’ve tried gated, ungated and even partially gated scenarios to understand what works best with our audience.
In an age where authenticity, transparency and helpfulness are key differentiators it is especially important to know when to gate and when to set your content free to create the best customer experience.
If your goal is to reach and influence a broader audience, a more open content model can help. Think about where you can remove friction:
- Can your most valuable whitepapers or reports be repurposed as blog posts or resource pages?
- Are there ways to provide meaningful takeaways upfront, even if some assets stay gated?
- Do your landing pages deliver real value on their own, or just a form?
In SEO today, putting people first works
At the end of the day, the strongest SEO strategies, much like the strongest online communities, are built around people. That’s been true in the growth of Twins Daily, and it’s true in the work we do every day at our agency.
SEO strategies are changing especially with the impact of AI. Evolving tools and tactics matter, but it’s the unique talent, lived experiences, and perspectives of our team that make the biggest impact. Stories like this are a reminder of the value that emerges when people are encouraged to follow their passions and bring those insights back into the work.
If you’d like a major league SEO and content marketing team to work with your team, learn more about our SEO solutions.
