Ask a News SEO: Steven Wilson-Beales

We discuss best practices for collaborating with editorial and development teams, aligning content plans and what to look forward to in the year ahead.

Apr 22, 2024

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Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here. Jessie is back from seeing BRRRRRRRUUUUUCE Springsteen [sic — this is how fans cheer on the 74-year-old great American icon] live in Syracuse, New York. Was it in the top five best shows of my concert-going life? Yes. Shelby didn’t see any legendary rock singers, but she did make a delicious rose penne pasta. Who really won the weekend? (It was definitely Jessie.)

This week: We are so thrilled to have Steven Wilson-Beales, the Head of SEO & Editorial Product at Global, join us for an Ask a News SEO interview! We discuss best practices for collaborating with editorial and development teams, aligning content plans with SEO goals and what to look forward to in the year ahead.

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ASK A NEWS SEO

WTF is SEO?: Can you explain Global and highlight your role in the company?

Steven Wilson-Beales: Global is a media and entertainment company which boasts many of the UK's leading commercial radio brands, a whole host of chart-topping homegrown podcasts and many popular live music events. As Head of SEO, my role is to raise awareness of our broadcast and digital news output via search and ultimately, drive registrations to our Global Player app.

WTF is SEO?: How are you thinking about SEO for all those brands?

Steven Wilson-Beales: It's all about prioritization. As Head of SEO and Editorial Product, I work with both editorial and development teams, which is fantastic. It’s great to champion an idea from the editorial team and help it through the development process, or vice versa. To be able to make improvements both to the front and backend, it's really, really nice to sit in the middle of that.

One of the ways I ensure my priorities as an SEO are delivered is by making teams aware of my North Star, or what I’m trying to achieve, and simplifying it so everyone understands, and consistently looping back to it in everything I do, whether in editorial or tech SEO.

With editorial, it's all about focusing on the basics, and staying informed about all content plans.

There's advanced planning before, during and after an event. It's crucial to be involved in all those stages. Reporting back quickly is really important, particularly with a busy news desk, because there's always the pressure to move on to the next story. For instance, if certain topics or stories are indexing well on Google, we might want to delve deeper into those areas instead of moving on.

I focus on these news SEO aspects while also integrating our broadcast output. For example, if there's an upcoming election issue, our digital news editors might cover it through evergreen stories or live blogs, but it’s also important to incorporate our broadcast clips because that adds the real point of difference to our output — you just can’t get this anywhere else.

Technical SEO is a key, too — and here, I play the role of product owner. That’s all about improving our in-house content management system. If we can spot areas to improve SEO when the editors are uploading material, then I'm perfectly positioned to do that.

We've done a lot of work around Core Web Vitals, and we've got some of the best website performance as a UK publisher as a result. It's great to be in that position, and we've seen some good results by investing in that work.

But, as in all things SEO, I try to steer the business away from looking at any one single type of improvement as being the complete solution. I always like to say that technical SEO is holistic. It's a multitude of different things that you have to do in order to make improvements. It's never one thing.

In our case, it was Core Web Vitals combined with internal linking that really moved the dial for us.

WTF is SEO?: What does success mean in your role?

Steven Wilson-Beales: There is a whole list of things. Obviously, it's traffic — being able to demonstrate to the business that you're increasing the reach of the brands. If I can make a correlation between the traffic coming in and registrations, that's always a bonus.

A typical example of success would be receiving Slacks throughout the day from editorial teams inquiring about particular headlines or thinking about features. That is a success because it means they know my role and know how I can help them, and that they're thinking of SEO as part of their editorial output.

WTF is SEO?: How do you communicate success to the newsroom?

Steven Wilson-Beales: We're a very close-knit group of brands here, so a central part of my role will be communicating widely and loudly whenever we have a success in one brand that can be applied to other brands. This cross-team communication always works because basic principles of news SEO are always the same no matter which market you are working in: Knowing your audience, knowing what the competition are doing, headline best practice or how to structure a page — it’s all the same.

It's all about identifying a win and celebrating that loudly. That has a knock-on effect because, after all, who doesn’t want to be praised for turning around an excellent piece of work? It's just about really calling out the moment. Everyone's busy and moving on to the next thing. But it’s your job to call it by saying, “check this out. We had a theory about something and the data has just proved it. Get in touch.”

WTF is SEO?: In the year ahead, what are you most excited about?

Steven: Well, the impact of SGE, obviously. We're waiting for that to fully drop in the UK, but I don't think anyone knows exactly what it's going to do whatever market you’re in.

Saying that, I think it's advisable to tell senior leadership that it's coming. I haven't looked at the precise percentage impact that might have on our traffic, but it's certainly worth communicating that widely in your organization. As SEOs, we might see surprising things every day in search, but your senior leadership should never be surprised by the big ticket items that are about to drop. Always give them a heads up.

The second thing I’m most excited about is going deeper into audience needs. We're all waiting to see how the March [core] update will affect publishers, but the decrease in referral traffic from Google should be a wake-up call for publishers to make sure the content they're producing is unique, distinct and is on track with the specific needs of their audience.

Finally, I’ll be looking forward to weaving more AI tools into my role. I've already explored ChatGPT and found it really useful for crunching and presenting back data. It sounds boring, but that can be quite a chunk of my role, so if I can speed that up, I can focus on better things than pivot tables.

WTF is SEO?: What do you wish you’d known earlier in your SEO career?

Steven Wilson-Beales: I wish I'd known loads of things when I first started!

Be comfortable with probability. We all work in an agile ecosystem where teams need to be clear on the benefits and the impact of any work spent. Sometimes, that's quite difficult in SEO because you can't be exactly sure of the precise impact of the work that you do. That’s why it’s about communicating your overall goals in order to get buy-in.

I wish I’d known that at the beginning because I spent a lot of time trying to find the precise answers to everything online and I became quite frustrated when I couldn’t find it. That highlighted to me why there’s so much value in networking with other SEOs. If you reach out and talk to other SEOs in the industry, you'll be able to cross-reference the experiences of other brands. You are never alone!

Never take your SEO audit tools literally. Never export an SEO audit and send that off. You need to dig into it before making any recommendations. Know your content management system inside and out, and understand the tech stack and who is making improvements to it. Learn how to create a product ticket and communicate with development teams. That's definitely something that I've learned in the last couple of years.

Then, as I’ve already said, really celebrating any kind of SEO success often and loudly. Grab a case study of success and communicate that widely. It will show that there is a method in your madness. It doesn't matter how small that is — it just proves that the method works. Then, leverage that to target bigger projects.

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