SEO & Social Strategy for a Large-Scale Media Network
Network Sites
The Challenge
Salem Web Network is part of Salem Communications, a publicly traded media company. Their digital portfolio spans 15 websites, including Crosswalk.com, Christianity.com, BibleStudyTools.com, and several others, receiving 13 million visitors and 52 million page views per month. We're talking millions of pages across multiple domains, each with its own audience, content focus, and competitive landscape.
The core problem wasn't that these sites were doing badly. They already had strong domain authority and loyal audiences. But organic search traffic had plateaued, and in some cases declined, while competitors in the Christian content space were gaining ground. With sites this large, even small percentage improvements in search performance translate to hundreds of thousands of additional visitors per month.
On top of the search challenges, social media engagement was underperforming relative to the size of these audiences. The content was being created, but it wasn't being discovered or shared at the rate it should've been. There was a disconnect between search visibility and social distribution that needed fixing.
Our Solution
Michael worked as the in-house SEO Analyst for Salem Web Network, embedded with their team to build and execute a three-part strategy across the entire portfolio.
Scalable Technical SEO
At enterprise scale, you can't optimize pages one at a time. We developed technical SEO frameworks that could be applied across content templates, so improvements to one template automatically improved thousands of pages. This included optimizing title tag structures, heading hierarchies, schema markup, and internal linking patterns at the template level.
Crawl budget management was a constant focus. With millions of pages across the network, Google's crawlers need clear signals about what to prioritize. We restructured XML sitemaps, cleaned up redirect chains, and improved site architecture so search engines could efficiently discover and index the most valuable content. The same principles we apply to local SEO campaigns around site structure and indexation apply at enterprise scale, just with a lot more zeros.
Content Optimization Strategy
We ran competitive gap analyses across each domain to identify keyword opportunities the network was missing. Some of these were brand new topics where no content existed. Others were existing pages that just needed better optimization to capture demand that was already there.
We also built prioritization frameworks so the editorial team knew which content updates would have the biggest impact. When you've got millions of pages, you can't update everything at once. You need to know which 200 pages will move the needle most. That data-driven prioritization is what separated this from a generic "write more content" approach.
Search & Social Integration
We bridged the gap between search and social by improving discoverability of shareable content through organic rankings. The logic is straightforward: when content ranks well, more people find it and share it. When it gets shared more, engagement signals improve, and it ranks even better. We created that positive feedback loop.
This meant optimizing Open Graph tags, improving content formatting for shareability, and aligning the editorial calendar with search demand data. As search engines increasingly factor in content quality signals that overlap with social engagement, this kind of integrated approach has become even more important. It's something we're now expanding on with our AI SEO and generative engine optimization work, where content needs to be structured not just for Google but for AI-powered search tools too.
The Results
The combined effect of technical fixes, content optimization, and search-social integration produced measurable gains across the entire network.
Double and triple digit growth in organic visitors and page views across the 15-website network portfolio.
Triple digit growth in social media likes and recommendations across the network, with social media adoption and audience engagement climbing as search visibility improved.
Drove all-time high traffic during seasonal and key events, expanding the network's digital footprint and reclaiming competitive positions that had been lost to newer publishers.
Achieving double and triple digit growth on a network already receiving 13 million visitors and 52 million page views per month isn't the same as growing a small site. At this scale, every percentage point represents a significant volume of real people finding content through search. The frameworks Michael built during this engagement continue to inform how we approach enterprise-level SEO projects today.
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