SEO for Sports Websites
Five of my nine years have been in sports. Cricket platforms at crex.com and cricket.one, football at toffeeweb.com, and newsrooms at Sportskeeda and InsideSport. Sports search is seasonal, entity driven and unforgiving about timing, and that is a different job from ordinary publishing SEO.
Sports platforms and newsrooms I have worked on
What I work on for sports sites
Planning around the season
Cricket traffic barely exists for half the year and then triples. Football has transfer windows. The work is deciding in the quiet months what needs to be ready, because you cannot ship an architecture change during a tournament.
Match hub architecture
Live match pages, team pages, player pages and the editorial around them treated as one connected structure rather than four separate content types that happen to share a domain.
Newsroom workflows
I have run SEO inside a desk publishing hundreds of pieces a week. At that pace nobody reviews individual articles, so the fix is the process. Detail in my editorial SEO systems.
Discover and Top Stories
Different surfaces reward different things, and a sports newsroom lives or dies on Discover. I grew Discover traffic 30 to 40% at Sportskeeda. Written up in my Discover strategy.
What happens after the whistle
Most sports pages are written for a window of about six hours and then left. Some of them should become archive or season pages, most should not exist forever. Deciding which is which is worth more than it sounds.
Migrations without losing a season
I have run migrations on cricket platforms and sports media sites, including redirect mapping and watching indexation settle afterwards. More on the technical side.
How I think about sports SEO
Five things that are true of sports search and not much else.
Work backwards from the fixture list
Sports demand is scheduled. You know when the tournament starts, when the transfer window opens, and when nobody is searching for anything. That calendar decides the roadmap, not the other way round.
Build around entities, not articles
Teams, players and tournaments are what people search for. Articles come and go. If the content is not strengthening an entity page, it is spending authority rather than building it.
Treat surfaces separately
What gets picked up in Discover is not what wins in Search, and Top Stories rewards something else again. A newsroom that writes one headline for all three is leaving traffic on the table.
Make live coverage pay twice
A live blog serves a few hours of demand. Linked properly, it also strengthens the team hub it sits under, and that hub is still ranking next season.
Decide what dies
Every sports site accumulates thousands of pages about matches nobody will ever search for again. Deciding what gets archived, merged or removed is unglamorous and it is usually where the crawl budget went.
"Sports SEO is not about publishing faster. It is about having the structure already built when the season starts, because you cannot build it once it has."
Sports work I can point at
Three pieces of sports work from the last few years, with the company named. The full write ups are on the homepage.
Scaling a cricket platform through an IPL season
Season traffic went from 5M to 25M, with organic visibility up more than 200% year on year.
Editorial SEO inside a 100M pageview newsroom
2,000+ articles optimised, Discover traffic up 30 to 40%, and a new section that reached 300K+ keywords.
Getting a sports site out of a manual action
Diagnosed what triggered the penalty, cleaned it up, and rebuilt the architecture underneath it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Your season is coming and the site is not ready
Send me the site and where you think the problem is. I will tell you what I would fix before the fixtures start, whether or not we end up working together.