Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here — in your inboxes a second time this week with a bonus send!
This week: A special Ask a News SEO interview with the co-founders of the News and Editorial SEO Summit (NESS), Barry Adams and John Shehata.
🎉🎉🎉 We’re thrilled to be partnering with NESS — again! — to give away tickets to this year’s conference. We have FIVE (5) free tickets for NESS. Scroll to the end of this email for details about the giveaway.
Let’s get it.
THE INTERVIEW
WTF is SEO?: AI is everywhere. It’s on social media. It’s in email. It upended the traditional relationship between Google and publishers. Is AI the thing to blame for what some publishers see as declining traffic?
Barry Adams: No. AI accelerated the process, but it started probably around 2018 with algorithm updates when Google decided to force publishers to stay in their lane, focus on their core editorial specialties and not let them rank for anything and everything anymore. Before 2018, I think publishers could rank for pretty much any topic they wrote about because of the sitewide authority signals they had accumulated. Google saw that as pretty unfair.
[Google] focused heavily on authority signals, and topic authority especially. Publishers were sort of veered into their lane — you can rank for what you’re known as, what your editorial specialties are and outside of that, Google won’t give you a lot of space.
AI made it possible for Google to answer direct questions with a very high degree of confidence in search results, making it obsolete for publishers to write about commodity content.
Publishers got used to that free, endlessly renewable source of traffic. Now, with AI, suddenly that is not an endlessly renewable source of traffic. Publishers have to take every visit seriously and treat their visitors with respect. It changes the dynamic.
Publishers are complaining about this very loudly, but I genuinely believe that we are now at the start of a new era where every visitor counts, where every Google click counts. That forces publishers to re-evaluate the relationship they want to build with their readers and make sure every click is meaningful and delivers a positive experience so the user wants to keep coming back. In the long run, that will end up with a healthier publisher ecosystem with a better relationship between publishers and readers.
John Shehata: In this new era, there’s a shift in user behaviour. The challenge is publishers have been used to Google being the source of traffic for so many years. When we used to have Yahoo directories, sites were getting all their traffic from there. Then, from Yahoo directories to Google. Then, Facebook came and flooded publishers with traffic, to the point that Facebook was driving more traffic than Google. Then that went away.
Publishers got stuck with Google as the main source of traffic, and then Google added Discover on top of that. Suddenly, now user behaviour is that they like AI answers.
All the commodity content is meaningless right now. This is a big problem for publishers, but that traffic was not that great or qualified of an audience. We are in a new era, and publishers are just trying to figure out what can replace that lost traffic.
NESS is also giving back. The conference set aside 40 tickets for SEO professionals between roles and the next generation of journalists.
WTF is SEO?: What’s something that you both have seen in terms of almost benefiting publishers with AI? How do publishers look at this with a positive lens or even a neutral lens to adapt their strategy?
John Shehata: AI has benefited publishers in a huge way within workflows and inner streams. It helped audience teams do mundane tasks much faster, too. AI helps with stuff that you don’t need a human to write, and it could be helpful for a shingle or a part of an article (not the article itself).
The major complaint is the traffic, but a lot of newsrooms have actually embraced AI to help their writers create better content and faster processes.
Barry Adams: To bring it back to the traffic part, some publishers that have, for example, very hard paywalls. They do proper in-depth reporting and investigative journalism and don’t mind being a cited source in an AI Overview or an AI-generated answer. The AI gives users a summary and then refers to them as the original source and the in-depth, detailed reporting. They see that as a pipeline for subscriptions. They don’t get a lot of clicks from AI, but those clicks have a high conversion rate to subscriptions.
If you start with the quality of your journalism and adding something of value, you shouldn’t necessarily be afraid of AI.
It’s okay to be there as a cited source or as a summarized answer. Readers who want in-depth stuff, those are the readers that you want to convert to subscribers. Then, they will come to your website from the AI summary from that cited source, and hopefully subscribe or enter that funnel. Maybe not a hard subscription straight away; maybe a trial, maybe a newsletter, whatever it is.
The publishers that feel really under threat are the ones that know, on an intrinsic level, that they’re not really doing anything that others aren’t also doing. They don’t have a unique selling point. It’s causing an existential crisis among these publishers.
It’s highly ironic that news as an industry is very fast-moving — probably the fastest-moving industry that exists — but news companies are the slowest-moving organizations I have ever worked with. Tectonic plates move faster than news organizations.
This is not a time to be a slow mover. You have to be quick, adapt, and refocus your efforts on things that you know work.
Plenty of publishers are walking the right path. There are case studies of publishers whose traffic and revenue are growing because they are focusing on their quality signals and audience loyalty. This is what you need to do as a publisher to survive. If you’re not willing to make that existential shift in your business and in your operations, then yeah, you’re going to have a very bad time.
John Shehata: Even for reputable publishers, the challenge is they have been dependent on Google as the main revenue stream, and this is the problem. They might be creating great content and doing all the right things, but the majority of their revenue was from display ads. They haven’t pivoted away from “revenue equals traffic” or “traffic equals revenue.” They’re stuck.
Revenue is a big deal here, but publishers have to build relationships with their audience. They have to build paywalls for content that users actually care about, They have to build their newsletters. Now, publishers find themselves way behind and trying to catch up. Even for good publishers, most are stuck because they have been dependent on Google as the main revenue stream.
Barry Adams: You don’t want traffic as your north star KPI. Publishers focusing on traffic as a main KPI are stuck in 2015. You need to focus on loyalty, engagement, repeat visits, even what your readers think about your brand, and trying to quantify that. That will eventually translate into subscriptions and other forms of revenue.
WTF is SEO?: What are the North Stars that publishers need to be focused on right now?
Barry Adams: Branded search. If you’re looking at search, look at branded search. How often do people specifically seek out your brand? Then, look at the loyalty mechanisms on your website. If you have a dedicated app, how many app installs do you get? Measure that; that needs to go up. If you do newsletters, are your newsletter subscriptions growing?
Also, on-page engagement metrics: How many pages or articles read on average before they leave the website. The bounce rate needs to be low. All those metrics combined paint a picture of the kind of experience you’re presenting to your users.
Any single one of them can be misinterpreted. Take them into account in a holistic sense and get a gauge of what kind of website you are, how pleasant you are to use, and if you are delivering the kind of content that your readers want from you.
WTF is SEO?: If you’re a publisher and you’re worried about the future of SEO and broadly audience, who are the main speakers at NESS that you should be paying attention to?
John Shehata: We divided the conference into three specific themes. We still believe on Day 1 that SEO remains the foundation. Even with AI and all different things, audience growth in general and SEO are still the foundation for everything. Edward Hyatt is talking about moving from reach to paywalls and relationships, which is very important.
On Day 2, we believe that AI is the future. Younger generations will be going first to AI to ask questions, look for information, and search for news, maybe in addition to visual elements like Reels, etc. I love “SEO Automation at an Enterprise Scale” with Mark Williams-Cook, it’s going to be great.
On Day 3, we end with “Beyond Google.” We’re talking about things like increasing loyalty, podcasts, newsletters, Reddit and video. Video is very important: YouTube is the most cited platform in AI and AI Overviews.
Barry Adams: I look forward to every single one. I’m particularly looking forward to Day 1: Nicola Agius talking about Google Discover; on Day 2, Chris Carter talking about AI, and Chris Wagner talking about semantic SEO — very much looking forward to both of those. On Day 3: Sophie Loftus about newsletters, and Sarah McDowell for podcasts. Those are the ones I am specifically looking forward to.
WTF is SEO?: What was the philosophy when you approached the NESS programming this year?
Barry Adams: From the moment we founded NESS, it was always about being a community. We always knew SEO is a cross-disciplinary activity that touches on many different aspects of an organization. We cannot hide from the fact that search has become a less important traffic source for publishers in many ways, but at the same time, it is still a pivotal channel and the foundation of audience growth.
Attendees sit in audience growth teams at big publishers or work as consultants for big publishers, and they know very well how it all fits together. Search can’t sit in a separate silo not talking to the video people or not talking to the podcast people, because all of those aspects also touch on search.
I think that’s the underlying philosophy of NESS: to build that audience growth community where everybody can share their expertise and help each other survive this AI-first era.
John Shehata: Many publishers have SEO as a discipline within audience growth. SEO was the most dominant because most traffic was coming from SEO. But even when I was at Condé Nast, my team was SEO, social, newsletters and so on, all together as one team, all speaking together. We have to approach it more as audience growth for news publishers.
Publishers need to change the mindset that search is the product. News is the product. Search, social and all these different channels are just the medium where we put our products and distribute our products. This is happening in so many different places. Who knows when we meet again in ten years if we’re still doing this; the medium will probably be a hologram or watching news on your glasses. Search is just a medium; it’s not the product.
Here’s how to enter our NESS giveaway 🎉
Follow us on LinkedIn.
Be a member of our Slack community.
Contest ends October 9th at 11:59 a.m. ET. Winners will be announced on Friday in the SEO is Journalism Slack and contacted via email.
NESS will run October 13-15th. All event details can be found on their website.
Catch up: NESS recaps
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