Ask a News SEO: AP’s Julie Vanderperre
Ask a News SEO: AP’s Julie Vanderperre
We discuss how the AP's approaching this hectic U.S. election news cycle, balancing daily demands with long-term SEO strategies and adapting to changes
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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie here, back from week one of — wait for it — flag football! A totally new sport (that I absolutely do not love as much as softball). Meanwhile, Shelby has returned from her vacation in Europe with a great appreciation for the Eastern time zone. Jet lag definitely got their girl.
This week: Ask a News SEO with the Associated Press’ Julie Vanderperre. We discuss how the AP is approaching this hectic U.S. election news cycle, balancing daily demands with long-term strategies and adapting to changes in news SEO.
Join our community of more than 2,000 news SEOs on Slack to chat any time.
WTF is SEO?: This election cycle is so relentless. How is the Associated Press keeping up with all the day-to-day work that you have to do, while also making time and space for long-term planning and experimentation?
Julie Vanderperre: It’s definitely been quite the news cycle already and we're not even in the thick of election season yet.
It’s obviously hard, sometimes, to make time for the longer term work when there's so much news happening.
On top of the planning we've done, we're also lucky to have a team of engagement editors and folks on our digital news team who help manage our content SEO on a day-to-day basis, including a live blog editor.
Having those engagement editors — who aren’t specifically focused on SEO, but have a big focus on it — as well as a live blog editor, has been really helpful in navigating the day-to-day chaos. This allows the product team to stay more focused on long-term projects.
One thing we're experimenting with is a topical trending navigation feature for all of our election-related stories. We used the Olympics as a trial run for this, where we switched out our standard trending nav bar with an Olympic-themed one on Olympics stories, and saw really good CTRs. That’s one product feature I think will be really valuable during the elections for recirculation and improving SEO by having more links at the top of pages.
WTF is SEO?: As someone who is an SEO, but also working on a product team, what are your top priorities?
Julie Vanderperre: A lot of our focus on the product team, and also on our digital news team, is around building a site that's not just a destination for breaking news — which is what a lot of people know the AP for — but also a place where readers can find and revisit for other types of content. Things like fact checks, different types of enterprise, AP photography and health and wellness content. So a lot of our focus is on making sure that this content reaches audiences and resonates in search.
We all know how volatile the news cycle can be, so having non-breaking news content to fall back on is really necessary to avoid being too dependent on the news cycle and help stabilize our traffic.
From a product standpoint, this focus includes adding ClaimReview schema to our fact-check stories, film or movie reviews (which we recently did), or building custom homepage modules to get people to click on our "Today In History" content (which previously wasn't getting a whole lot of traffic).
Lifting up other types of content that aren't just breaking news is something that we're really focused on. It’s something where I think the sky's the limit.
WTF is SEO?: What is the most exciting or challenging part of your job right now?
Julie Vanderperre: There's definitely a lot changing in the SEO world in general. That's nothing new — it's always been a space that evolves quickly. But this year, the number of algorithm and spam updates was unprecedented, and navigating that has been a bit of a challenge.
As an SEO, you have to learn to anticipate what Google is going to do, read between the lines and know Google well enough to say, "This is what they mean," even when they don’t explicitly say it — which, most of the time, they don’t. Navigating these updates requires some guesswork and that’s been a challenge.
It's also exciting to work in a space that’s changing really quickly. I get questions all the time about AI Overviews, AI crawlers and even the potential to leverage other platforms as search engines, like TikTok.
WTF is SEO?: What’s one thing you wish you’d known earlier in your news SEO journey?
Julie Vanderperre: I started my career in audience-related roles at different publications, and I knew I wanted to work in a role that straddled both audience and editorial, but I wasn't sure exactly what that would look like.
It took me some time to start focusing on SEO. I realized that working as a news SEO could check all the boxes. I get to combine product, audience and editorial functions in my job in a way that I find really fun, and I wouldn't have necessarily thought was possible within SEO.
I think SEO is one of the roles in a news organization that lets you work most cross-functionally across teams and see many different sides of the business, which is really cool and fulfilling. I didn’t fully realize this about SEO until I actually started doing it. I just wish I had realized sooner how broad SEO work really is — I would have started exploring it earlier in my career.
Before this, I was working at a publication called Investment News, where I was on their audience team, working a bit on audience data. A lot of the work involved understanding who the publication's audience was across various acquisition channels, and specifically helping the sales team leverage that audience information. It was interesting, but we got a lot of our traffic from search, and the focus on SEO became increasingly important.
I started working with a colleague of mine, really focusing on managing Investment News' SEO strategy. Over time, SEO began to take over some of the other audience data functions in my job, and I found that I enjoyed it a lot more.
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Have something you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on Twitter (Jessie or Shelby) or to our email: seoforjournalism@gmail.com.
Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley