Ask a News SEO: Erin Seims
The NYT's Erin Seims discusses being the bridge between editorial and product, and knowing when to focus on new features versus maintaining good technical SEO.
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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from a scorcher of a weekend in eastern Canada. Jessie spent her birthday bending and twisting at a yoga retreat in rural Quebec. Highlights included tiny kittens and a pond cold plunge. And please excuse any typos in messages from Shelby today, she was up late watching the NBA Finals and Canadian hero Shai Gilgeous-Alexander win the MVP.
This week: Ask a news SEO with Erin Seims, SEO Director at The New York Times! We discussed being the bridge between editorial and product, and knowing when to focus on new features versus maintaining good technical SEO.
Watch the recording of our Top Stories panel in partnership with Trisolute News Dashboard.
Also: Catch Jessie and Shelby at the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association’s webinar on 7 things to know about publisher SEO! Join us June 26 at 2 p.m. ET.
Let’s get it.
THE INTERVIEW
WTF is SEO?: You’ve worked on many products and platforms over your career. Can you give us a quick rundown of what you've worked on and where your focus is now?
Erin Seims: I came to The New York Times in 2014, and was one of two SEO editorial leads at the company. SEO was very new at the time for the NYT and our primary focus was introducing it to the newsroom. This included optimizing headlines, monitoring trends for story ideas and demonstrating the impact of doing these things.
Eventually, I started collaborating with the Product and Engineering team. I flagged opportunities to improve our existing coverage and as we launched new story formats (like live coverage; I helped define the requirements to be optimized for search). I started getting closer to product and technical SEO, just because it helped unlock more opportunities for editorial.
I eventually pivoted from daily news to focusing on evergreen — thinking about explanatory coverage and working with the features desks — which drew me back to technical SEO and building out evergreen templates.
In 2020, I moved over to Cooking and most recently have been focused on The Athletic. I’ve worked on almost every product/sub-brand at the Times during my time here.
WTF is SEO?: For anyone who is interested in the technical side of things, what are some words of encouragement you would have for people who are curious about it, but don't necessarily know how to get started?
Erin Seims: I would always start by auditing. Get to know your site really well, but also stay on top of what your competitors are doing. Look at who's ranking first and what are the things they are doing that you might not be. Look at their features, how their IA [information architecture] is set up and what their structured data looks like.
Also, stay on top of Google’s documentation. Look to see if you have all the requirements for your vertical. For certain features, having the right structured data is critical to competing in that space.
I find it’s helpful to start with a problem. For example, if we're not ranking in real-time for live coverage, dig into why. Who is ranking, what are they doing and where are there gaps on the site that you're working on? That's how I've approached almost every bigger technical project — it always starts with a problem we need to fix.
WTF is SEO?: When you are working on an enhancement for a product, what are some of the considerations that you have? What should news SEOs be looking for?
Erin Seims: A lot of it is from expertise. I’ve done a lot of audits before and know what to look for. When coming into a new product — like The Athletic — I like to take a baseline of the site. Take a step back and look at how the site's performing overall. Where is traffic coming from? I like to learn about every page type, what is it used for and if there are any issues. That's a foundational thing to look at.
It is also so important to build relationships with your editorial partners to get their point of view on what opportunities or issues there are. This has been crucial across all the products I’ve worked on. When you're more in the technical space, you don't want to lose sight of the day-to-day of the editorial team and the newsroom. That’s how you keep a close eye on things.
WTF is SEO?: That sounds really solid and important, but new features are fun. Where do ideas come from and how do you make sure you're balancing the needs of the newsroom versus your technical/product needs?
Erin Seims: There is often a misunderstanding that user experience doesn't align with the SEO need. I've actually found that it almost entirely aligns. What people are looking for and searching for, those are users looking for that, but making sure we’re setting up our site to answer that is crucial.
I think SEO and user experience are one and the same. They go hand-in-hand. That's something you learn working with product — it's really important to over-communicate the why. I can’t think of an example where, from a tech SEO perspective versus the newsroom, we haven’t aligned.
The difference is probably more like how we’d prioritize. What we may see as the biggest opportunity for growth from a site perspective might not be the highest demand from the newsroom, and vice-versa. We might want to start with one project because there will be site-wide impact, where the newsroom may focus on a workflow improvement that is a particular pain point.
As far as where ideas come from, it's a lot of collaboration with editorial teams as I mentioned earlier. We also do a lot of knowledge sharing across the products within the Times. That’s one of the greatest benefits of working here — we have a lot of different internal case studies we can reference. Not everything is applicable — like there are pretty big differences between Wirecutter and The Athletic, for example — but there are a lot of shared learnings. Our team works across all the verticals, we meet regularly and share ideas there. So project inspiration often comes from other teams.
And how we typically prioritize is based on what we believe will drive the biggest impact. There are a lot of different levers. From a product standpoint, we want to make sure there's going to be impact. But the level of effort for implementation also plays a factor — a project could take six months to implement, while we can get quicker wins that don’t involve as many stakeholders. We weigh that when we make prioritization decisions.
WTF is SEO?: In your opinion, what do you feel is the hardest part of product and tech SEO in the context of news?
Erin Seims: Within product organizations, it's really important to have causal relationships — doing X will lead to Y. That kind of approach helps prioritize work. With SEO, the landscape is always changing, which makes it harder to predict and measure the impact of what we do. There are a lot of variables and the requirements are constantly evolving. In product, there’s a desire for clear, controlled outcomes. That’s more difficult in SEO because so many factors are in flux. You can do a specific project, but it doesn’t guarantee a specific outcome. That’s the challenge — knowing that something is important to do, but not knowing for certain the scale of impact.
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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