I am not your typical SEO practitioner – I’m a new media journalist at heart searching for new ways to combine SEO, analytics and compelling content. Content I know pretty well, but more than a year ago it dawned on me that growing audience might not always hinge on brilliantly spectacular content. Perhaps learning as much as possible about the less sexy arts of analytics and SEO (my apologies if you classify SEO, analytics as titillating) could drive my content to new levels of exposure never dreamed of.
Well, the never dreamed of exposure part, has not arrived just yet, but I have been awestruck by the power of a three-legged content strategy founded on:
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Original content
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SEO basics
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Ruthless devotion to prying insights from the right metric reports
“OK, great,” you say, “whataya got?”
Waste vs. Reward
Once we began religiously tracking every piece of content we produced and measuring its impact over time, I found no silver bullet for how to rank. But I did identify pretty quickly which labors were rewarded and which were wasted.
In the waste column, I moved AP content. It’s well-crafted and of value, but the opportunities to rank and generate links from it consistently showed disappointing results. AP is a great source to fill out a web site with a slew of content channels editors believe people expect on a news site. It allows you to shovel loads of content with fresh headlines. What it doesn’t do, IMO, is deliver consistent value to the reader that is in proportion to its cost or even in proportion to the effort to manage.
So we cut back AP to the bare minimum and focused on generating original content based on news of the day.
And the first insight we discovered (remember No. 3 "ruthless devotion to insights") was:
Power of Names
Because news is ultimately about people and the more unusual, interesting, provocative you are the more media consumers seek you out. The biggest names have been covered, searched and indexed by Google for years. But what if you could identify the new names people want to know about as soon as or even before they caught people’s attention?
Cynthia Hampton, Malik Nadal Hassan, Capt. Richard Phillips and of course, Rachel Uchitel among others. You may remember the story they are associated with now, but prior to that, they were “Average Joes.” And their profile of indexed content on Google was thin. By targeting content focused on these names – the people that users were telling us they wanted to know more about -- we developed content that was optimized for search with simple SEO basics of page title, descriptions, alt-tags, keyword-focused headlines, URLs and aggressive sharing of story links. We saw significant increases in traffic – driven primarily by search referrals – of approximately 1M to 3M pageviews per month in about 10 months.
Copy & Paste News Consumers
Focusing on names in the news business is not all that new. But when you place it in the context of SEO, it causes you to rethink how people use content. When Nev. Sen. John Ensign admitted an extra-marital affair, people scanned that story wanted to know, not who John Ensign was, but who his alleged mistress Cynthia Hampton was. I strongly believe that people subscribe to the “copy-and-paste” method of following a story. It shows in the keyword referrals from search engines. What they usually copy … is a name. Where they usually paste it … is in a Google search window.
I do it, don’t you?
So we noticed Cynthia Hampton first on Google trends, but thanks to daily, weekly and month metrics reports we were able to spotlight it as something we should try again. Which we did with Rep. Joe Wilson who called the president a liar, with Ashley Dupre who called Eliot Spitzer Client No. 9, and Sahel Kazemi who called on NFL QB Steve McNair with a gun.
This strategy worked and continues to because the ability to rank for these names is far easier than for Tiger Woods, Sen. Ensign, Steve McNair and Eliot Spitzer. Those figures have significant content indexed and would require more than on-page optimization to rank. But for the newly famous, the bar is much lower. Look at what AOL’s doing in preparation for SXSW, the annual music/tech festival in Austin.
“New Seed programming director Saul Hansell sees it as the “perfect chance” to showcase reporting and journalism along with what Seed can do for sites within AOL (NYSE: AOL). The basics: Spinner and Seed are recruiting U.S. “reporters” to interview all 2,000 bands for a Q&A and bio in advance of the March Festival." -- PaidContent.org
That sounds like a smart SEO strategy to me – building content that targets 2,000 bands and performers, many of which are lightly represented in Google’s index and who will undoubtedly be searched by its 200,000+ attendees over the week-long event March 17-21.
So not only do SEO basics provide an effective solution to target this traffic, it taps a behavior that is very common for today’s web content consumers and it’s only likely to increase as the news drives more directly and quickly to the non-public people who make up these stories every day.
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