Case study
Online Dating UK has published dating and relationship editorial since 2022 and has been read by more than 200,000 people, almost all of them arriving from social platforms rather than search. The work since has been about turning that into a business: a brand you can recognise, a front end that loads, a product of its own and, at last, a plan for search.
onlinedating.uk.comAnalytics, May 2022 to August 2026. Collections and series counted from the live site.
Where it started
An audience that arrives from somebody else's feed is rented. The rent goes up whenever the platform feels like it.
The traffic was never the problem. Six social platforms were sending readers, from around 48,000 people at the top down to 18,000 at the bottom, with direct visits behind them. For a site that had never bought a click, that is a real audience.
What it lacked was anything to do with them. The site pointed readers at a white-label dating platform that paid a commission in pennies and gave us no control over the experience, the branding or the reporting. There was no email list worth the name, no product, and no reason for a reader to come back on a particular day.
Search was the other gap. A site with hundreds of articles and a domain dating back to 2022 was picking up almost nothing from Google, because the content had been written for social feeds and nobody had ever laid it out in a way a search engine could follow.
What we did
A tightened wordmark, a deep red and black palette, and a written brand pack covering voice, imagery and the rules the site holds itself to. The pack doubles as a briefing document for any AI tool used in production, so everything sounds like the same publisher.
The homepage and the main landing pages are now static files with a shared header and footer, pulling live article feeds from WordPress underneath. Editorial still gets written where it always was, and the pages that sell load in a fraction of the time.
Eighteen collections and five recurring series, including Around the World in 80 Dates, On-Screen Couples and Movie Monday. Series give a reader a reason to return on a known day and give the site something to trail on social all week.
The Smart Ask Dating Vault: more than 4,000 dating prompts sold for a one-off $7.99 with a genuine preview, its own terms and a mobile purchase bar. It is the first thing on the site where the margin belongs to the publisher rather than a partner.
Dating Notes collects subscribers straight into Brevo, with an inline confirmation and a version that still works if the visitor has JavaScript switched off. Social traffic finally has somewhere to land that the site controls.
Structured data, a working site search, clean internal linking between collections, and Search Console watched weekly rather than annually. Daily impressions went from near zero to between 60 and 180 across the summer, which is the first movement the site has seen.
The dating year
Dating traffic runs on a calendar, and the work happens weeks before the date. This is how the year is planned on this site, and what sits behind each spike.
Seasonal pages published weeks early get indexed, shared and pinned before the week they are about. Published on the day, they arrive after the audience has already read somebody else's.
Four seasonal collections built once now refresh annually with new articles inside them, instead of being written from scratch each time.
The first full week of January is the busiest of the year for dating sites, and it is the collection this site does not have yet. It is the next thing on the plan.
Where the readers come from
The order below is real and the top and bottom figures are real. It is the shape that matters: an audience almost entirely on loan from social platforms, which is exactly the position the current work is designed to change.
Analytics, May 2022 to August 2026. The four platforms in the middle sit between the two figures shown.
On screen
What carries over
Social traffic is worth having and impossible to keep. An email list and a product you own are the only parts of this that cannot be taken away by an algorithm change.
Sending your readers to somebody else's platform means their branding, their reporting and their rules on when you get paid. Own the transaction wherever the margin justifies it.
Every seasonal page on this site now goes up early enough to be found, shared and pinned before the week it is written for.
Search should have started in year one. Four years of articles were written for feeds rather than for people searching, and that is work we are now doing twice.
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