Ask a News SEO: Harry Clarkson-Bennett
This week is all about affiliate. We discuss whether it remains a viable strategy, the importance of high-quality, user-first content and why avoiding shortcuts will bring long-term success
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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie here, back from a great weekend hosting brunch for a friend’s birthday! Potatoes were hashed, coffee was poured and the celebratory cupcakes disappeared entirely too quickly!
This week: Harry Clarkson-Bennett! Harry is the SEO Director for The Telegraph and the author of the great newsletter, Leadership in SEO. We chatted about all things affiliate — whether it remains a viable strategy for publishers, the importance of high-quality, user-first content and why avoiding shortcuts will bring long-term success. Plus: what publishers need to know about internationalization.
Join our community of news SEOs on Slack to chat any time.
THE INTERVIEW
WTF is SEO?: Let’s start with something a number of publishers are asking right now. Is affiliate still worth it? What should publishers be thinking?
Harry Clarkson-Bennett: I think it is still worth it, for a couple of reasons. I think a publisher's strongest asset is how much content they produce and the diversity of that content. But it's also a weakness because when you write about so many things, you start thinking you can rank for anything, making it difficult to narrow down what to target.
Good quality affiliate content is essential. If you strip money out of it and just say, “people need and want product recommendations — and they still need us.” There’s always space for big publishers because we're good with content and have experts with lots of knowledge in different areas.
I suspect most publishers would likely create this type of content because people want to know these things and they trust brands and authors to have an opinion on products.
If we focus on high-quality review content and ask, "Would we do this content even without affiliate and forget the financial aspect?” and the answer is yes, then it makes sense.
The standard for affiliate content has risen and it’s harder to do. Gone are the days of one-person affiliate sites. Now, the expectation — especially for big publishers — is much higher. If you’re a major publication, you need to meet that standard.
When the site reputation abuse update came out, there was a really good example where a brand had brought voucher codes in-house and had done everything Google asked. Yet, Google still pinged them.
Danny Sullivan, at an Association of Online Publishers meeting about site reputation abuse in London, said, “actually, on one of your pages, you still explicitly stated the opposite.” And he said that’s the issue. In terms of being explicit, that’s the biggest and worst example. One small thing caused a manual penalty.
In a broader sense, it’s just consistency with who you are and why we should trust you.
I think that's something a lot of publishers are quite bad at: telling people about the work that's gone into this content. It’s a lot, and we almost brush over it. You need to tell people what you've done.
WTF is SEO?: What are your top tips for publishers looking to get into affiliate?
Harry Clarkson-Bennett: Definitely leverage your expertise and first-hand experience. If you're a publisher who thinks that they need external influence to help them with that, then it might be worth considering whether it's the right category for you.
Make sure that your content is genuinely good and you can really do this. There's a temptation to rush this stuff, especially when there's revenue involved. You just can't compromise editorial standards. This content is as much Your Money Your Life as almost anything else. The standard is higher — if you commit to that, then that becomes quite problematic immediately.
Don't be led by the money. It has to almost be a secondary consideration. The first is, what does our audience like? What do we want to review?
At a basic page level, linking to multiple partners for the product and linking to products that you don't have a partnership with is a really sensible idea. A page where not every single link is to a paid partner is great. Sometimes the best products on the market are not going to be ones that you have a partnership with. If I was an algorithm, I would certainly prefer a page that didn't have every link on it as an affiliate link.
WTF is SEO?: You've talked about how Google uses engagement metrics to evaluate page quality and ranking. What should publishers do for the biggest boost?
Harry Clarkson-Bennett: A good starting point is to strip it back and think about why Google uses engagement metrics.
Google just can't understand the content. It’s not a person. As much as it’s an incredible algorithm and the most nerdy, expensively assembled thing, it can’t understand content and its best option is to review how we, as people, understand content. Part of why Google has Chrome is to have this data. That’s a good way of framing it.
Google’s use of engagement data has evolved over the last 10 years and become much more prominent. In the early days, it was mainly backlinks and shares. That was a good way for Google to be able to understand the type of content that was having an impact in an industry. But it was possible to game that system.
Ahrefs has a study that shows a drop off over the last 5 years in the importance of backlinks of 20 to 25 per cent. That comes in line with the rise in engagement data and engagement signals.
Click-through rate is probably the most prominent engagement signal for news. For evergreen content, it’s click quality, the last quality click, pogo sticking in the search results and user interaction — with this, Google can build up a much more comprehensive picture. It’s much easier to analyze the SERP and to create something that provides the best experience for people for long-life content because there’s more data to work with.
But for news, it is just the wild west. That’s why it’s so much more click related — with the image and headline being everything. I think it’s important to contextualize the type of content when considering engagement data and Google ranking.
In terms of what publishers should do, there are a few straightforward things. Getting rid of the crazy long intro in articles. People don't hang around. Giving people what they want immediately is great. Summarizing an article at the top, TL;DR-style, gives people something they remember the page for.
Barry Adams said recently that the worst thing a publisher can be is forgettable, which I love.
You have to create a memorable experience. Answer questions directly. Cut the length of the intro and make it engaging and readable. Make things simple when they should be.
WTF is SEO?: What are those things publishers should do to make themselves distinct?
Harry Clarkson-Bennett: Having real focus and first-hand experience. Knowing who you are and who your readers are. Publications that have hemorrhaged traffic (in recent Google updates) should sit back — particularly if they’re non-paywalled — and ask two things: Who are we? Who are we trying to attract?
Having a focus on the type of categories and type of content that you create is really important.
It's so easy to spread yourself too thin. Topical authority is basically, “do you write a lot of content and generate a lot of links, shares and positive engagement signals around certain topics?” It would make sense if you have real focus in those areas that you would do particularly well.
The most important thing is to have real focus in the areas that you're going after and create content better than your competition.
WTF is SEO?: If publishers are thinking about internationalization, what should publishers prioritize?
Harry Clarkson-Bennett: If you do it right, the most valuable thing you ever do as a brand is to nail an international audience.
The first thing to do is establish the opportunity, review your current setup (because migrations and domain purchases are notoriously expensive and unpleasant) and the business’s 10-year plan. Does this make business sense?
If you’re saying you want to expand into the United States, it's going to be hard. If you’re going to do that, then you need to look at it and say we believe we can be a global organization, but it can’t just be to make more money. You need to have a voice and a localized experience that connects with an audience. That’s the premise for internationalization.
From an SEO point of view, you need to consider what type of domain you have and what you really need. A country code top-level domain is notoriously the best, but publishers have had huge success with a sub-optimal setup. Content volume, localized backlinks and consistency over time trumps all.
What you can’t do is strive for perfection immediately. Set up something that's the simplest route to market and test.
Then, establish the types of content that you want to localize. Does all of your content serve a purpose in multiple locations? Is it simpler technically to duplicate the entirety of your site? Considering that news is the wild west, how will you deal with the U.K. version article ranking in the U.S. and vice versa?
Do we want to implement a location-based 302 redirect from one article to another? For businesses that rely on subscriptions, this might make sense. Do you have the resources to properly localize multiple versions of each article? Internal and external links, localized language versions, working with local experts — the list goes on.
It’s really difficult to get everything right.
You have to build out a plan where you chip away, so you can start with your strongest content and build a brand. As a paywalled publisher, you have to give people something for no price to start with.
Internationalization is really awesome. It’s just really difficult to do.
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Written by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley
Super interesting Harry, thanks for sharing, it's definitely a volatile time for publishers right now.