Ask a News SEO: Maddie Shepherd
Ask a News SEO: Maddie Shepherd
Maddie Shepherd, Director of SEO for CBS News and stations, join us for an Ask a News SEO interview, where we discuss the nuances of network journalism and balancing the many SEO needs of the newsroom
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Hello, and welcome back. Shelby and Jessie here, back from a rainy Toronto weekend. Shelby had delicious Jamaican food and hung out with the rock dads in the rain watching Modest Mouse and the Pixies, while Jessie played softball, went to a show and finally tracked down the correct yarn for that flower coaster project.
This week: We’re elated to have Maddie Shepherd, Director of SEO for CBS News and stations, join us for an Ask a News SEO interview! We discuss the nuances of network journalism, balancing the many SEO needs (including technical, content and product), and how Maddie is thinking about AI in her newsroom.
LAST CHANCE to join our masterclass! Tomorrow, we’re teaming up with
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Let’s get it.
ASK A NEWS SEO
WTF is SEO?: Tell us a bit about your role and how it relates to the strategic direction of CBS News?
Maddie Shepherd: I'm Director of SEO for CBS News and stations, which means overseeing all the SEO for cbsnews.com. Previously, I was working at NBC Local, where I was overseeing 40+ domains, so one domain feels like a luxury, but I still work with quite a few editorial teams. I also oversee technical and editorial SEO. I work on content optimizations, run editorial trainings and work directly with product and tech for technical optimizations. My role involves a lot of different responsibilities, but it’s what I love about my job. I can go from workshopping a headline with an editor, to doing a Screaming Frog crawl, to writing up schema all within the same day.
WTF is SEO?: A lot of our readers are those that have to do everything (content, technical, product, etc.). How do you balance your day and prioritize what needs to get done that will move the needle?
Maddie Shepherd: It’s totally a work in progress. What has helped me the most is just being agile and trusting myself to know what is going to be the most important thing in any given moment. That could look like getting a quick SEO win from optimizing a breaking news headline when I need a boost to organizational SEO buy-in. Or it could look like working on a long-term project that's close to getting launched, and I need to have tunnel vision until it’s complete.
It definitely took me a while to learn I can’t feasibly take on every one-off optimization request if I want to push longer-term projects forward. To help keep myself on track, I like to take a bit of time every Monday to think through what projects (or segments of projects) I want to complete by the end of the week to keep me focused and prioritized. When I’m trying to decide which projects to take on, it’s really all about scale. What will have the biggest impact across the site and/or across the organization? That also helps me feel better about politely stepping away from day-to-day optimizations when I need to.
I do find that regularly communicating with teams to set your capacity for day-to-day optimization helps a ton. If I know I need to do a lot of technical work or to finish a big analysis on a given day, I’ll give the editorial teams a heads up that I won't be super available for headline optimization.
For cbsnews.com, I’m the only person with SEO in my title, so my approach is really about empowering each editorial person with SEO knowledge. Not only is it more scalable, but also I find it more impactful for our coverage. Ultimately, when people are empowered with SEO knowledge, they do a better job of optimizing their own coverage than even I could do when I helicopter in and read the story one time.
WTF is SEO?: CBS News is a big network with a ton of smaller, local branches. How do you optimize local news that is nationally relevant?
Maddie Shepherd: For local SEO, I want to get an idea of how people are searching on the local level. I like to use Google Trends to see not only how people are searching nationally, but also to drill down to see how people are searching within a specific market with their location filters. Those filters give local teams a clear view into what people want to know within the communities they serve.
For those nationally-relevant local news stories, even though something happens that everybody in the country wants to know about, I really try to pay attention and see where our coverage stands out. What can we write that’s different and serves our readers? For national publications, a local news story that’s risen to national interest might just be another storyline of the day. Whereas for our local teams, a local news story that’s risen to national interest would be an all-hands-on-deck scenario. That approach for a local storyline that has risen to national interest often isn't mirrored in national newsrooms. When working with local teams, my goal is to help them show that off with their packaging and headlines.
Even if we have a new spike in national interest to a local topic, I remind our teams that the entities and topics involved in that storyline are ones we’ve been reporting on for quite a while. How can we make that clear, not only to Google, but to readers? What reporting do we have already? Can we update it? Can we link to it? We want to show readers that we’re embedded in the community, and they can get high quality reporting from us.
WTF is SEO?: How are you thinking about AI for search?
Maddie: I am thinking about this a lot, but not necessarily within the context of local versus non-local. I want to get as much information as possible, and that broader data I can use to determine how we'll approach this moving forward.
I’m still very much in the fact-finding mindset with AI Overviews, especially given Google’s more recent rollback of AI from results on certain topics. I’m still checking every search results page for the queries I’m trying to target, and it’s been interesting to see how things are continuing to shift as Google tries to find the best way to surface these Overviews. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m really doing my best to try to target queries where the search intent is one that indicates the searcher really wants more than a quick answer, or wants an answer from a trusted source. I’m trying to level up with my understanding of intent — I think it will take even more empathy with the searcher to try to determine which queries are the biggest opportunities.
Trying to get as much data as possible, I’m digging into how my own site numbers have changed and trying to spot patterns. I’m also spending even more time than usual reading as many external reports and analyses I can get my hands on. There are a lot of great minds out there who are working really hard to share their own findings on the broad impact of AI overviews.
WTF is SEO?: What is something you wish you knew when you were starting out in SEO?
Maddie Shepherd: One thing that helped me is being accountable to the results. It’s natural to be afraid of stepping on toes and to try to stay in your lane. Shoutout to Andrew Coco, the Director of SEO for Peacock and NBC Sports, who said something really impactful in a talk he gave for early-career SEOs: Don’t stay in your lane. You learn a lot through SEO that can drive really good results across the board. There are also so many factors outside of the typical SEO responsibilities that impact how well you can do in search.
It can be natural to say, “well, I did everything I could” once you reach the bounds of traditional SEO responsibilities. But I think ultimately, being just a little stubborn, a little persistent and pushing for something to get over the finish line has really helped me, but it's something I had to learn.
Trying and taking a project 50 per cent of the way for the other person to pick it up is definitely valid — but I’ve learned to be driven by the results, whether they’re year-over-year growth stats or spikes in Chartbeat. And I think learning to be motivated by the results has served me well.
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RECOMMENDED READING
Google news and updates
🤖 Google: The final update to Google’s transition to mobile-first index is underway.
🤖 Barry Schwartz: Google now explicitly says white-labeled coupon sites can be against Google's site reputation abuse policy.
🤖 There also seems to be a possible weekend Google update, where on Saturday, June 8th there was Google Search ranking volatility.
🤖 Roger Montti: A study (published by Google) shows the importance of structured data for performing well in search.
🤖 Barry Schwartz: Google fixed the the Links Report in Google Search Console.
🤖 Roger Montti: Google discusses how it manages disclosure of search incidents that affect crawling, indexing and ranking.
🤖 Danny Goodwin: Google AI Overviews visibility has already dropped, only showing for as much as 15% of queries.
Even more recommended reading
📄 ScienceAdvances: A new study analyzed found readers prefer simple headlines. Journalists do not — and are bad at predicting what readers want. (Join the discussion on Slack.)
🧑💻 Emina Demiri-Watson: Here’s what to know about on-page SEO and user-generated content for publishers and news sites.
📉 WTF is SEO? Slack: “Is anybody else seeing a drop in visibility in the News tab and Top Stories?” (Join the discussion on Slack.)
🔎 John Shehata: 71 news SEO ranking factors revealed — and the impact on publishers.
🎤 Emilie Martin: MozCon was this past week! Here are recaps for Day 1 and Day 2.
🛍️ Lily Ray on Twitter: The site http://bestproducts.com and its trajectory serve as a good summary for what happened with SEO in the last year.
📰 George Nguyen: Takeaways from last month’s SEO for News Meetup in New York.
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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