La Dépêche du Midi

Let your content do your marketing and watch traffic soar

La Dépêche du Midi is a regional daily newspaper publishing 17 editions for different areas of the Midi-Pyrénées region in southwestern France. The paper traces its history back to 1870, when it was known as La Dépêche de Toulouse. Today, La Dépêche boasts a circulation of roughly 200,000 copies daily.

Incorporate text mining into SEO best-practices for maximum results

It launched its Web site in the late 1990s and enjoyed modest success, plateauing at 130,000 visitors per month for several years, with search engines providing a mere 20 percent of the traffic. However, in 2008, the site became rejuvenated when Nstein's Text Mining Engine (TME) and Web Content Management (WCM) were added to the mix, along a new digital team and design.

By semantically indexing content archives, relevant articles were now grouped together - greatly increasing the "deep links" within the site. This is a key element of good Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The enriched content gave a new life to pieces that had long been buried in archives. As content was now clustered contextually it could be accessed by region or by topic. Beyond making viewers stay longer, (doubling their average page consumption), it tremendously increased the content base indexed by search engines, thus contributing significantly to increasing the site visibility.

Traffic jumped from 133k visitors a month to more than 2 million, a 10-fold increase in just 24 months

The foundation to audience monetization

The tremendous increase in traffic combined with more page views significantly increased revenues - and eliminated the need for keyword marketing. The company is now strategizing how to further serve and monetize this new and growing audience.