DraftKings Network
New Platform Solutions are a Winning Bet for DraftKings
Challenges
The DraftKings Network (DKN) is a 24/7 streaming channel that features personality-driven programs offering insights on the sports world, betting, and fantasy games. The existing website for the DraftKings Network had grown visibly outdated and difficult to manage. They turned to Americaneagle.com to provide modern design and replatform the website content management system (CMS) to WordPress.
Over 20,000 existing articles needed to be successfully migrated to the new CMS platform. In a redevelopment project of this size, many businesses initially see a significant drop from the search ranking levels they had attained throughout the years of their existing site. To avoid that, the development team needed to transition all pages and content with refined strategies that could avoid loss of search engine ranking.
The DraftKings Network also required an expedited timeline for the new website’s launch. The absolute deadline was driven by both an impending sunset of the existing content management platform and the start of the NFL season, which is also the busiest for DraftKings and draws the most fan attention to DKN.
Solutions
The development team at Americaneagle.com did not have access to the back-end of the existing DKN website to initiate a clean transition to the new WordPress environment. Undeterred, they quickly customized a content scraping tool to effectively retrieve all assets to begin reconstruction on the new platform.
Internal linking, as well as external linking to other DraftKings websites, for several hundred keyword topics, phrases, and teams became a development priority for the new site. Ideally, within the WordPress editing environment, automated linking would consistently assist the content contributors. Success required some sophisticated logic and customization of a WordPress plug-in, Autolinks Manager from DAEXT. For example, the intelligent new automated linking solution can now successfully determine whether a link to related content is most appropriate for the NFL Giants or the MLB Giants.
Meticulous search engine optimization strategies effectively preserved the ranking equity that had been built by the previous website. Some of the development team’s efforts to do so included replication of the previous website’s hierarchy, where possible, detailed page titles, descriptions, 301 redirects, and news format schema. At the time of launch, the new website not only preserved SEO value, but actually exceeded the search engine performance of the prior site. The new site recorded an immediate increase of over 3% in total keywords ranking on page one of Google Search.
An enhanced streaming experience was also built into the redesigned website. Showcased prominently on the new home page, a custom-built DKN media player now displays current and upcoming programs, allowing users to see what's next while watching the popular live stream. The media player snaps to the browser window's corner for continuous viewing while the user navigates throughout the website. The team also developed a custom data import to facilitate easy and quick updates to DraftKings' weekly program schedules, a process that was painfully manual and time-intensive on the old site.
Hosting services from WordPress VIP are providing DKN with the world’s most capable and dependable server set-up, consistently maximizing website performance. Streaming services for DKN successfully scale to periods of peak demand and beyond.
The new DKN website launched, as planned, ahead the NFL season. The web solutions have proven to be a hit with an expanded number of new website visitors, sports betters, as well as the DraftKings Network team. Targeted SEO efforts have quickly improved website visibility within search engines. Once there, website users are intuitively navigating to new content and engaging online more than ever before.
Results
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3.4%Immediate Increase in Keywords Ranking on Page One of Google Search Results
