Siasat Daily Digital

Siasat Daily has been a pillar of Urdu journalism since 1949. But digital disruption had eroded its online readership: the existing website was built on an outdated CMS with poor mobile performance, Urdu text rendered incorrectly on many devices, and Google had penalised several pages for thin content and slow Core Web Vitals. Younger Urdu readers were migrating to social media for news, and the publication was not present where its audience had gone.

The SEO situation was particularly challenging. Urdu content indexing by Google has historically been unreliable — Google's crawlers struggled with Nastaliq script, RTL layouts, and the lack of Urdu-language structured data standards. Siasat's historical archive of over 200,000 articles was a potential SEO goldmine but was virtually invisible to search engines due to poor URL structures, duplicate content, and missing metadata.

The editorial team was non-technical and deeply accustomed to their existing workflow. Any new system had to be adopted without disrupting the daily publishing cycle of 40–60 articles, while simultaneously allowing the digital team to run SEO improvements and social campaigns in parallel.

We redesigned and rebuilt the news portal on a headless CMS architecture (Sanity) with a Next.js frontend, achieving sub-1-second First Contentful Paint on mobile. Urdu typography was addressed with a custom Nastaliq font stack using Noto Nastaliq Urdu, combined with a bespoke CSS RTL framework that ensured correct bidirectional rendering across all browsers and devices.

The SEO migration was executed in phases: first, a canonical URL restructure and 301 redirect map for the archive; then, automated meta generation using the article's first paragraph and keyword extraction; finally, structured data (NewsArticle schema) implemented for all published content. Within six months, 140,000+ archive pages were re-indexed by Google.

Social media strategy focused on WhatsApp Channels, Facebook, and YouTube Shorts — the three platforms with the highest Urdu-speaking penetration in India. We trained the editorial team on a short-form video workflow for breaking news clips, and set up automated cross-posting pipelines using Make (formerly Integromat). A custom analytics dashboard gave editors real-time visibility into which stories were trending across channels.