SEO By Matej
PLATFORM GROWTH CASE STUDY

IntechOpen

Scaling a Publishing Platform from 0 to 700K+ Monthly Organic Visits

Client Overview

IntechOpen is a pioneering open-access publisher of scientific journals, books, and conference papers. At the time, it was a new domain with a rapidly growing library of tens of thousands of academic papers but virtually no organic search presence.

The Challenge

The core challenge was to build a sustainable SEO and content growth engine from scratch. The massive library of content was not optimized for search, the technical SEO structure was weak, and there was no digital marketing framework in place. The goal was to make tens of thousands of scientific papers discoverable via organic search.

Objectives & KPIs

The primary objective was to build and scale a sustainable SEO growth engine that could handle a large and complex content library. Success was measured by the growth of monthly organic visits, the number of papers successfully indexed, and establishing the IntechOpen brand as a top open-access scientific publisher.

The Strategy & Implementation

As one of my earliest leadership roles, this project involved building the entire digital marketing function:

  • Technical Foundation: I collaborated with the IT department to completely overhaul the site's URL structure, fix canonicalization, and implement the first XML sitemaps and robots.txt directives to improve crawlability for the deep archives.
  • Content Structuring at Scale: We designed SEO-friendly templates for all scientific papers, implementing optimized metadata and topic clustering for books and chapters around major scientific disciplines. This created a structured hierarchy that was previously missing.
  • Internal Linking & Authority Flow: We established a system of internal linking between related papers, authors, and book chapters. This not only improved crawl paths and user session depth but also began to build topical authority around key areas of research.
  • Team Leadership: I was promoted from a junior role to Head of Digital Marketing, where I built and led a 12-person team to handle SEO, content editing, outreach, social media, and analytics, establishing a data-driven culture in the company.