Ask a News SEO: Caryn Shaffer
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Caryn Shaffer talks about collaboration in the newsroom, plus using Google Trends, Reddit and other tools for local SEO to reach Philly's vibrant community.
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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from a hot, hot, hot weekend in Toronto. Jessie spent Saturday going to yoga, run club, softball and taking a long walk on Toronto Island (followed by a much longer nap). The hip flexors might be unhappy, but a fine price to pay for 12 consecutive hours outside. Shelby, meanwhile, learned that the key to happiness is through a puppy corgi, who gets so excited about absolutely everything. Excuse me while I hide my shoes.
This week: We’re delighted to have Caryn Shaffer, the senior SEO editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer. We chatted about going from solo work to leading a team, leveraging platforms like Reddit to better serve audiences and more thinking about local news SEO for the vibrant Philly community.
Reminder: For our July 17th community call, we are focusing on traffic trends and challenges. 📌 Join the 120+ news SEOs who have RSVP’d to the call using this form.
And: If you’re a solo news SEO editor — join our new Slack channel!
WTF is SEO?: You went from a solo news SEO to now having a team. What was that transition like?
Caryn Shaffer: I’ve gone from working by myself, to working with our other SEO editor, Torin Sweeney. It's immensely helpful to have someone who can help with getting buy-in and building relationships with the rest of the newsroom. Rather than me doing all the work of optimizing individual stories, putting together content briefs and looking at analytics, we’re able to divvy up all those tasks. He'll handle a lot of the mostly day-to-day detailed work, while I handle bigger picture, strategy things.
Shortly after Torin joined, I had the breathing room to completely overhaul our story tagging system and work with product to automate it for the newsroom. We made a Chrome extension that would automate the process of hyperlinking some of our content tags in our stories. That was an interesting project I was able to take on. There's a product manager I work closely with who handles the technical side and communicates with engineers.
We also recently had a new food editor join The Inquirer. So right now, I'm working with a team of folks on an upcoming expansion of our food content. We’re looking at what Philly readers want to know about the city’s very robust food scene and present it in a way that’s search-friendly.
Being able to step away from day-to-day — the more detailed work — and into the bigger picture role has been extremely exciting. It’s more in line with how I think, too — rather than trying to construct a headline, it’s been so nice to broaden my outlook with someone there to help me.
WTF is SEO?: The Inquirer serves a predominantly local Philadelphia audience. How do you think about SEO for local news?
Caryn Shaffer: I mainly use Google Trends, which I think everyone does. Maybe I don't approach it any differently than anyone else — it's just that Philly is such a unique city with a lot going on all the time. We have the history, and sports and it’s a hub city for politicians — Trump and Biden make visits regularly — so it’s an exciting place to be, and people do a lot of searching around Philly.
Certainly there’s a lot to look at how people search around Philly, and how they're chattering about it on social. We have our own social team, but it's good to get the reinforcement that there's more than one audience for a given search topic or opportunity.
The social team and I occasionally put our heads together when it comes to the topics that both the social audience and a search audience want. We back each other up when those two audiences collide. I am extremely impressed with our social team, they’re cultivating relationships on Reddit, specifically, which is huge.
Especially since Reddit has been so prevalent in recent algorithm updates, it feels like we’re ahead of the curve cultivating those communities. We’re getting our content in those spaces, like the Eagles subreddit or the Philadelphia subreddit. Some of our reporters do AMAs on those subreddits because of the relationships that have grown there. People are able to post there, too, without it being immediately deleted.
My advice to colleagues who are not on the social team is that you can't just parachute into a space and expect your content to be welcomed with open arms. You really have to earn the trust and deliver on things that people are asking — just like you would with a search audience.
WTF is SEO?: Are there any strategies you use to communicate to the rest of the newsroom that the work you're doing is long-term and incremental, rather than expecting sudden spikes?
Caryn Shaffer: We communicate the wins when we get them. I've worked closely with Torin to outline how we communicate these wins, what types of wins we highlight, and how we achieved them.
That way editors can learn lessons like, "Maybe if I craft a headline this way, it'll perform well on Google Discover." Or, "Maybe I should consult our SEO editor before publishing several similar stories.”
Also, understanding that even if a story isn't for a search audience, you need to find its intended audience and tailor the story accordingly. That's something we emphasize, too.
WTF is SEO?: How do you communicate about search and share successes in your newsroom?
Caryn Shaffer: When I started, I was in a DM with a few editors who were really into SEO for the newsroom who were definitely interested in daily trends — what people were searching for each day. After I communicated with the editors, they suggested we move this to a Slack channel. So, I set up a Slack channel where I could share what people were searching for around Philly once a day.
Later on, as I talked more with the now desk editors, they wanted me to share these search topics in our twice-daily budget meetings. So, I started doing that — providing a morning note on what news and politics people were searching for, and what sports topics were trending. It's evolved from there, where now I update them on what we're already covering and where there are opportunities for follow-up stories.
WTF is SEO?: Our last question, what's something you wished you knew earlier in your SEO career?
Caryn Shaffer: Just having a better handle on what is actually in my control to change. That’s something that I wish I had known going into it because there's a lot of wanting to rank quickly — but having the knowledge early on that SEO is a long, hard climb. I wish I had known that earlier, so I could take a more chill approach rather than being worried about it.
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THE JOBS LIST
Audience or SEO jobs in journalism. Want to include a position for promotion? Email us.
The Athletic is hiring an Associate Newsroom SEO Editor (Remote, CAN/US eligible).
Business Insider is hiring an SEO Manager (NYC, remote eligible).
RECOMMENDED READING
Google news and updates
🤖 Google’s John Mueller confirms fixes to the delays in Google Search Console performance reports.
🤖 Danny Goodwin: If your website is struggling to get organic traffic from Google Search, there are three core areas you should focus on.
🤖 Google’s Gary Illyes on negative SEO links: “The fear about negative SEO is much bigger than or much larger than it needs to be.”
Gary explains what smaller websites can do to outperform Reddit and other big websites.
He also outlines why soft 404 errors are bad.
🤖 Google: Image SEO best practices documentation has been updated for embedded images.
Even more recommended reading
📈 Barry Schwartz: There was Google Search ranking volatility over the July 4th weekend.
💻 Sistrix: An analysis of SERP changes following the June 2024 Spam Update.
🐁 Rand Fishkin: For every 1,000 Google searches, only 360 clicks go to the open web in the US.
📉 Philip Petrescu: Only 12 per cent of queries show AI Overviews, according to a new study.
📹 Aleyda Solis talks about the Google API leak and how it completes the puzzle of potential ranking factors that Google has hinted at, but never confirmed.
🗑️ Wired: Google Search ranks AI spam above original reporting in news results.
📓 404 Media: I paid $365.63 to replace 404 Media with AI.
📸 Matt G. Southern: Instagram has updated its algorithm to prioritize shareable content. “One of the most important signals we use in ranking is sends per reach,” the company said.
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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
another great post!!
and if anyone wants to learn more about MEGA SEO, please feel free to reach out to me directly at ralph@megaseo.ai 🥳