The project's main challenge
BB.LV is one of the largest news portals in the Baltics. Here scale is measured in millions: the task isn't to 'grow from zero' but to hold and grow huge organic traffic and engagement without raising ad spend.
A huge news site with millions of pages and high competition in the Baltic region. A news portal has its own specifics: content ages within hours, indexing must be instant, and the section structure must be perfectly transparent to the crawler.
Project goals
Maximum organic visibility
Hold and grow the news portal's visibility in the Baltic regions across millions of pages.
Sections into TOP-1–3
Move key sections ('Latvia News', 'World News', 'Politics' etc.) from TOP-3 to TOP-1.
Engagement without cost
Grow engagement and the share of returning visitors without raising ad spend.
Indexing stability
Prevent technical dips, each of which costs millions of visits.
The 12-month sprint plan
Work ran in sprints: each month a measurable goal and a set of tasks that don't break the giant structure. The focus — managed indexing (news sitemap, speed of fresh material entering the index), clean sections and templates, internal linking between sections and articles, and core speed and stability.
In parallel — engagement work: 'read this → read related' connections, retaining returning visitors and improving behavioural signals that are critical for a news portal.
What Serpstat shows
Today the domain is visible across a broad core of brand and topical queries and holds the TOP on Latvia's key news clusters.
| Query | Position | Volume |
|---|---|---|
| новости латвии | 1 | 74 000 /mo |
| press lv | 2 | 74 000 /mo |
| bb lv ru | 1 | 60 500 /mo |
| латвия | 5 | 135 000 /mo |
| вести лв | 1 | 9 900 /mo |
| новости риги | 3 | 8 100 /mo |
| погода рига | 4 | 6 600 /mo |
| курс евро латвия | 2 | 3 600 /mo |
Source: Serpstat, Google Latvia database. Representative queries shown; full core — 24,579 phrases, est. traffic ≈ 78,348 visits/mo, visibility 270.
Results achieved over 12 months
Sections in the TOP
Key sections locked into Google's TOP-1–3 on Latvia's brand and topical queries.
Scale held
Huge organic traffic held and grown with no technical failures — each of which would cost millions of visits.
Engagement ↑
The share of returning visitors and view depth grew — without raising ad spend.
78,000+ traffic
Estimated monthly organic traffic per Serpstat at 270 visibility — a regional-leader level.
Project team
The project was led by Nikolay Shmychkov — SEO strategy (deputy director, SEOquick). Full team and roles on the 'About' page.
What's next
A similar large-scale recovery case: rehabilitation of the large Lumident project. Have a large media or content project? The concrete next step is a technical audit and a growth plan.