About Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review platform for film and television. It aggregates reviews from across the internet and classifies them as fresh tomatoes (good reviews) or rotten tomatoes (bad reviews).
Why they hired us
When Fandango acquired film and television review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes in 2016, it inherited the site’s strong brand and loyal following — and its weak SEO strategy.
Fandango engaged Local SEO Guide, its trusted SEO partner, to get Rotten Tomatoes ready for the search spotlight.
“The Local SEO Guide team has been instrumental in us re-thinking everything related to all things SEO. Their entire team is always available, incredibly insightful, and keeps their advice specific to each of our properties. We have had great success with non-stop experimentation, continuous learning cycles, and massive traffic growth. It is no wonder that they have been our sole provider of SEO advice for the last 6 years!”
– Alejandra Brizuela Head of Product Management
What we did
We developed a creative plan to get Rotten Tomatoes more SERPs real estate on Google and seized new opportunities to use their assets to increase organic traffic and get in front of as much relevant and motivated traffic as possible.
1. Leveraged Potential Assets
The iconic Tomatometer is one of the world’s most trusted recommendation resources for quality entertainment.
You’ll see it displayed prominently on the Knowledge Panel, on the right-hand side of Google’s first page of search results, when searching for movies and shows of all kinds.
This is prime real estate in the SERPs — even more visible and engaging than paid ads.
2. Identified a Core Issue
While this could be a major SEO asset to build on, it had a big problem.
As a metric composed of film and TV critic reviews, the Tomatometer takes time to populate.
Rotten Tomatoes was missing out on valuable views and clicks in the lag between new releases being announced and critics’ glowing (or scathing) reviews powering a Tomatometer score.
3. Presented a Creative Solution
Before the Tomatometer score is ready, there’s the Audience Score. Consider it the understudy.
Local SEO Guide used schema markup (structured data) to get Google to display the Audience Score in place of the Tomatometer until it was ready to make its debut.
As a result, Rotten Tomatoes was able to appear in the Knowledge Panel a week sooner, on average, tapping into all of that early buzz around each new release.
4. Ongoing SEO Consulting & Support
Rotten Tomatoes and the entire family of Fandango sites enjoy access to:
- A dedicated SEO strategist backed by a team of analysts and content creators.
- Custom SEO strategy with the support to conduct experiments, prove concepts prior to investment and execute on targeted recommendations.
- Business intelligence that goes far beyond performance reporting to uncovering lucrative new and untapped opportunities to gain market share in search.
Measurable Business Results
Local SEO guide’s innovative SEO tactics and search strategy leadership drove over 200 million more visitors to Rotten Tomatoes over the first five years.
- Over 249.9M monthly users
- 13.3M Ranking Keywords
- Between 2016-2022 the organic search traffic has grown 371%
- Between 2016-2022 backlinks have increased by 913%
- All of this growth was achieved with 0 paid traffic
Organic Traffic Growth
Rotten Tomatoes currently has over 249.9 Million monthly users and 13.3 Million ranking keywords. Additionally, SEMRush’s estimated price for acquiring that level of organic search traffic via Google ads, that targeted the same keywords, is 120.9 Million dollars.
SERPs Visibility
Search visibility has increased dramatically during LSG’s time consulting with Rotten Tomatoes, as of March 2022, the brand currently has 983,309 keywords ranking on Google’s first page of results alone. If you are looking for SEO consulting that can take your brand to the next level, contact us to get a free consultation.