Ask a News SEO: Why you should stop using 'SEO' when talking to newsrooms
This week, WTF is SEO? chats with Dan Smullen, the Head of SEO for Betsperts Media & Technology Group. We talk SEO tools, where AMP is headed and why you should drop 'SEO' from your vocabulary
Hello, and welcome back. It’s me, Jessie, reporting live from the floor of my (newly house-warmed) apartment as I still somehow lack a desk. Which will come first: me buying a desk or my spine splitting in two from rage? Who knows!
This week: we’re back with another Ask A News SEO, our interview series with industry experts. Dan Smullen joins us to chat about starting in SEO, getting newsroom buy-in and how small wins create positive reinforcements to get more reporters to think about search.
THE INTERVIEW
Q&A with Dan Smullen
What is something you wish you knew when you first started in SEO?
Invest time into how to master cleaning, wrangling and visualizing data.
When I first started in SEO, I wanted to understand how to build backlinks. I spent countless hours on blogs, forums, and even reading books from the late Eric Ward.
I spent even more wasted hours of my life visiting the link profiles of different sites from the Majestic backlink explorer to try and understand how people were building links.
Instead of all of that wasted time, ending up on dead ends of the internet, I could have spent that time fine tuning my skills in data.
Cleaning and blending data are the two most valuable skills out there when working with SEO data. Better data = better insights.
For example, being able to clean data that comes from the Chartbeat editorial engagement tool so that you can match and blend the data Google Analytics and Search Console data can give you a much deeper level of audience insight than looking at those data sources in isolation.
It can also save countless hours manually trying to spot insights.
My favourite resource for learning spreadsheets and cleaning data is from Ben Collins. Also reading Storytelling with Data from Cole Nussbaumer, was a game changer that I wish I had read a lot earlier in my career. Give it a read and I promise, you will never use a pie chart again when visualizing data to stakeholders.
How do you convince people in your newsroom that SEO is worth their attention?
By understanding what is important to them and what their KPIs are.
For the first two months, I sat as a fly on the wall in the newsrooms. I went to the daily editorial stand ups and got to know the reporting and data teams very well.
I learnt the process of how a story broke, how it got online and what types of stories made print/digital and why.
I even did a shift as a news desk assistant for the day, to really understand the processes and build up rapport.
As most news briefings normally take place before 9 a.m., most national news sites being their busiest then, the reporting tool at the time Chartbeat gave information on concurrent or real-time traffic.
If a story had just broken, Chartbeat would show that most people were on the site because of social media.
Although real-time analytics is what editors and newsrooms need to make real-time decisions, looking at real-time traffic alone blinkers the bigger picture.
Most analytics that I have seen for publishers looking at monthly or yearly data will show that 30-50 per cent of the user acquisition happens through Google search.
Meaning if editors wanted to grow their audience, increase the amount of subscriptions they could generate or even better monetize their page views from advertising revenue, they are going to want to be interested in how SEO can help them achieve their goals.
As an SEO in the newsroom, if you attempt to go in and lecture award winning editors about how to write a headline, or that they need to obey Yoast SEO’s green light, you are going to fail.
Instead, understand their goals, their KPIs and root out the data misinformation in the newsroom.
Make sure everyone is looking at the same picture and working towards the same goal.
And most importantly, celebrate mini wins.
I would have gone out of my way to send a journalist cc’ing the editor when they added the main keyword in the headline. Showing them how that small edit allowed Google to rank their story in the top position. And how that one little change brought three times more eyeballs on their story.
Each of these mini wins, and positive reinforcements get journalists to factor in SEO as a habit when publishing, as opposed to lecturing to deaf ears after the fact.
SEO becomes second nature to them.
Most major news publishers will publish upward of four hundred stories a day. No SEO team no matter how large is going to be able to optimize that output. Instead, where you can make the most impact in the newsroom is on education and empowering editors and journalists to do the “SEO” themselves.
What advice would you give audience editors trying to advocate for SEO-focused recommendations in the newsroom?
Stop using the word SEO.
That was the first thing I did. I changed the word to “search.”
Just as social was a reader acquisition channel, search became now an important channel in the newsroom.
When I spoke to newsroom editors, my language was that people were “searching for” as opposed to “we need to change this headline for SEO.”
There is a reason why “what is SEO” is one of the most popular keywords if you plug SEO into a keyword research tool.
However, most people know how to search for something. Editors and journalists can relate to that. As people search for answers, and search engines help them get to their answer.
I also refused to show journalists how to do traditional keyword research tools in trainings that I carried out. Instead I focused down on the journalistic five W’s: The who, the what, the why, the when and the where.
Most keywords for news related queries will fall into one of those above.
Take the Paralympics:
What is it? The Paralympics
When is it? 2022
Where is it? Beijing
Keywords: Beijing 2022 Paralympics: {Rest of Headline}
It’s that easy.
Instead of advocating for “SEO recommendations,” advocate to help Google show more quality journalism to more readers.
Google’s documentation on how search works clearly states this as a basic requirement: “The most basic signal that information is relevant is when a webpage contains the same keywords as your search query.”
Advocate for the newsroom to use any of the five W’s in headlines.
Remind editors that print headlines are different to digital.
Digital headlines have to work harder. They have to make thumbs stop on social media and they have to contain words for search engines, they also have to be appealing enough to entice readers to click through from homepages.
In print, you can immediately take in all that is around the headline, all the pictures, subheads; in digital there may just be a generic image and a headline.
Search engines also don’t understand puns or the witty headline. They understand keywords.
Fail to use the words that readers are searching for, and accept that search engines will show your competitors' story on top instead of yours.
Bring the onus and expectation back on the writer and editor and facilitate the education of the why we are doing this, not just the “how” to do this.
We are more than just SEOs in the newsroom. We are consultants of change.
What is the process in your newsroom for using search insights to inform your journalism?
At the beginning, we used to blend Google trend data with Google Search Console, social entity and search volume data. Both to give insights into the daily trends, as well as performance of those trends.
We also used to crawl news XML sitemaps daily, and provide endless recommendations of headline changes for SEO.
Despite having invested time into configuring Python code and [Google] Data Studio to automate a lot of these reports, what we found was that our editors didn’t relate to these fancy spreadsheets or shiny dashboards.
Despite how slick the set up was, barely any of the insights were being actioned.
Instead, we returned to old fashion e-mailing. We will email in a max of five story suggestions worth commissioning as well as five stories worth optimizing.
In the background we have automated social listening tools setup such as Crowtangle and Spike to help with this process, but to the editor, all they receive is an e-mail, or delivered in person by the newsroom SEO.
How do you show the value of SEO in your newsroom? What are your key success metrics?
Reporting in the newsroom is completely different to reporting for e-commerce or even lead generation sites.
Generally keyword research is done, and then rank trackers are set up along with predicted traffic and conversion dashboards to track SEO performance.
News on the other hand is real-time, and can fluctuate based on the news agenda at the time. This makes forecasting or even KPI setting a massive challenge.
The business goals of either increasing subscriptions or an increase in advertising revenue remain constant.
Showing how SEO is assisting with the business goals is really all that matters. Keyword visibility on major news events is an important, but a vanity metric in my opinion.
Understanding what makes readers want to subscribe, and remain a subscriber are far more important.
Unlike other industries when as an agency you would create the content or build the links for the client, in a newsroom, you are at the mercy of what the editor has commissioned and how the audience editors are optimizing.
You have little power to make micro changes, however you have a huge potential to make massive changes in the organization by empowerment.
Instead of showing value on traffic dashboards, which is important - instead show how valuable your expertise is to the editors in helping them achieve their goals.
What are your best SEO tools — and what do you use them for?
I will start first with my favourite Chrome extensions.
On-Page SEO Info by Marketing Syrup. Great for: Quickly checking if the meta title is different to the headline and vice versa.
Robots exclusion checker. Great for: Quickly check if a URL has an issue being indexed. Sometimes a story may be the splash, but have a noindex
tag because it was a syndicated story. A very handy chrome extension that will flash red if there is an indexing issue with the URL.
Spider scraper (paid version and free version). Great for: Scraping data quickly from any webpage easily.
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar. Great for: Keyword metrics, such as search volume and keyword difficulty, directly in SERP. Especially helpful when doing evergreen keyword research on the fly.
Ryte Structured Data Helper. Great for: Quick structured data or schema debugging.
Keywords Everywhere. Great for: Provides people also ask questions as well as metrics directly in the SERP. Especially useful for providing quick insights to newsrooms on questions people are asking on a news topic.
I have an endless list of Chrome extensions in my arsenal, but those are my favourites.
When it comes to paid SEO tools, I travel very light. Here are my top four:
Screaming Frog for technical auditing;
Ahrefs for evergreen keyword research and keyword insights;
Keyword Insights for keyword clustering;
SEO tools for Excel is a a quick cheap no code solution for pulling API data directly into spreadsheets.
What are your SEO considerations for newsrooms with paywalls?
I have written my thoughts in detail on the technicalities of paywall SEO on the CXL blog as well as detailed the success story with the Irish Independent on going from 0 to 35k subscribers in a year at Brighton SEO in 2021.
Research shows that the number one reason why people do not pay for news is because it is free. For years people paid for newspapers, and are willing to pay for news and information that interests them. People will also pay for news online. However, the biggest consideration that newsrooms have to understand with the paywall, is that going paywall-only will have a negative effect on SEO.
I wrote about what happens when a newsroom goes paywall first SEO second with their homepage on SEJ.
Subscribers especially at the start will only be a small fraction of your audience. Just like anything you buy, you want to give it a try or even test drive before you make a payment. Having a good balance of free and premium content is the golden answer.
If you are working on a smaller brand, and audience, and want to have a minimalistic impact on SEO, a metered paywall is the best option.
If you are after conversions and have quality information that cannot be sourced for free elsewhere, then a hard paywall is not an issue.
One learning I can definitely share is that once you follow Google’s flexible sampling guidelines and adhere to their paywalled schema recommendations you will not see an impact on Top Stories visibility.
Testing with a paywall
However, we tested putting 50 per cent of our evergreen travel content behind the paywall.
Each article that went behind the paywall for competitive evergreen queries (i.e. “things to do in…”) dropped from ranking top three in Google.ie to beyond the second page of Google.
Evergreen articles that were unchanged remained on page one. Some are even still in position on on Google that were published over four years ago!
Note: Google has no issue crawling or indexing the paywalled content.
I can’t conclude that this is true, but my gut is telling me that paywall pogo sticking has less of an impact with the top stories visibility than it does with regular Google organic listings.
For me, news can be paywalled, but think twice before you put your evergreen content behind a paywall.
What's the future of AMP?
AMP, despite the bad press or people in our industry such as Barry Adams having strong feelings towards it, when I was with Independent News & Media, we tested this and found no impact on traffic. I also presented these findings at last year's NESS conference. Search Pilot has also several case studies confirming what we found. But for me, the future of AMP is two sided. Although it is no longer a requirement to use the AMP format to appear in the top stories, deleting AMP can have negative impacts on your page experience.
If you delete AMP, you need to ensure that your non-AMP performs just as well on mobile search, otherwise you will have a poor page experience according to Google metrics. Which is now part of their ranking algorithm.
For us, the AMP cache caused users to be logged out and was costing the business subscribers and customers. However, sites that rely on advertising revenue from page views, AMP still works, and it may cost their businesses more to move away from AMP and improve their non-AMP experience. The bottom line is that the future of AMP adoption looks in decline as more and more publishers are deleting AMP.
How did you first get started in SEO?
Bing Ads. I know not something you would expect from a person who has specialized in news SEO.
I will explain, but it is going to take a bit of background to get there.
In college, I graduated with BSc. in the Sport and Exercise Sciences, and have worked with professional athletes, as well as helped Irish celebrities get in shape.
But when I left college, we hit a peak recession in Ireland. Those top strength and conditioning jobs were slim to none unless you went abroad.
Sticking to my roots in Dublin, where I started working at a city centre gym and met my wife 10 years ago now, I wanted to pursue a MSc., in Physiotherapy. But again, we were still in recession times, and physiotherapy jobs were hard to come by.
Ciara, my wife, convinced me to instead do a Masters in Business, which I have to my name from Dublin’s Business School.
When strength and conditioning and physiotherapy was not a viable career option for me, my sights were on Microsoft. Not only is Microsoft one of the world's top tech companies, its HQ is five minutes from my home.
A friend of mine was one of the recruiters there and managed to get me an interview for an account manager role at Bing Ads.
At the time, I didn’t even know that there were ads on Google, let alone this completely other search engine to “Google” something!
So much so, my wife put me in contact with the owner of her digital marketing agency at the time, Ian Nunoo.
Following a crash course in SEO and PPC, as well as successfully completing the Bing Ads certification, I made it through six interviews at Microsoft, including speaking with the EMEA director of sales.
Unsuccessful in the interviews with Microsoft, Ian gave me a job at his agency selling digital marketing services to small business owners.
When I showed up at my first pitch and couldn’t pronounce most of the definitions on the “free audit” let alone sell it, that was the turning point for me.
If I was to sell something, I needed to know it inside and out.
Starting off on Moz’s beginner's guide to SEO, as well as binge watching all of Rand Fiskin’s Whiteboard Friday videos.
I built my first WordPress website (catterydublin.ie), installed the Yoast SEO plugin and got to the first page of Google for all of my mother-in-law’s top keywords.
Getting the confidence from that, I asked Ian, the agency owner if I could do the “free” SEO audits for the pitches I was preparing for.
After a while, the SEO work was becoming more interesting than the sales work, and I finally jumped into a career in SEO.
To date, I have since moved on from the small agency work, to working with Ireland’s most successful digital marketing agency.
But agency work is not for the faint hearted. I would argue that agencies are the best SEO universities. Not only do you get to learn by doing and others, but you also get to diversify your skills in SEO. At Wolfgang Digital, I got to work with Ireland’s top e-commerce brands as well as small local businesses. But the hours and expectations were intense.
Four years ago, a recruiter reached out to me to work in house for Ireland’s largest media websites at Mediahuis.
For me the prestige of working on independent.ie, belfasttelegraph.co.uk and the sundayworld.com piqued my interest.
At the time, I thought I was making a mistake, moving from Ireland’s fastest growing digital marketing agency, but switching over to News SEO has been one of the best career decisions I have made.
A completely different discipline of SEO that has led me to talk at various SEO events on the topic such as Brighton SEO and the News and Editorial SEO summit.
Now, with life somewhat back to normal post those two crazy pandemic years, the idea of travelling an hour in and out of the office every day, with less time each day with my kids, does not appeal to me anymore.
Now, I am fully remote, working with people all over the world as Head of SEO for Betsperts Media & Technology Group. And all from my wooden gazebo office at the back of my garden.
RECOMMENDED READING
Barry Adams asked about Core Web Vitals on desktop as a ranking factor. Has it impacted your site? Let us know in this thread!
Mathias Noyez shared this Reuters Institution interview with Chris Moran about how The Guardian approaches live-blogging and covering breaking news.
What’s the deal with wires and redirects? Catch up on the conversation in this thread.
Dan Smullen also shared this in the #evergreen-seo channel on the SEO for Journalism Slack: Google Search trends show how customer expectations are changing.
Have something you’d like us to discuss? Send us a note on Twitter (Jessie or Shelby) or to our email: seoforjournalism@gmail.com.
(Don’t forget to bookmark our glossary.)
Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley