Making sense of SEO for news publishers.

In issue 01, audience “professionals” Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley introduce WTF is SEO?.

Welcome to WTF is SEO? by audience “professionals” Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley.

Jessie is currently an audience editor in Toronto. She’s also an instructor at Centennial College in Toronto where she teaches interactive and data journalism as well as audience and analytics. She's obsessed with newsletters and how they can help newsrooms build better audiences.

Shelby is a Newsroom SEO Editor at The Athletic. She’s spent the last six years obsessed with audience engagement, systems, and of course, SEO, and how it applies to news publications. Shelby was the first ever Newsroom SEO Specialist at The Globe and Mail.

Jessie and Shelby were constantly sharing resources with each other around search and news, but realized they often had a huge gap - how SEO relates to news, and how audience editors can do SEO better in their jobs. So, we decided to create this - a weekly newsletter that looks at audience, search and SEO for news publishers, and hopefully taking the WTF out of SEO.

We’re so excited to bring this project to you and help provide some form of a resource for the future of audience editors.

Have another idea you’d like us to explore? Email us at seoforjournalism@gmail.com.

In the meantime, share this newsletter your friends!