SEO AND NEWS WRITING

Writing About WritingPersonal GrowthJournalismSEO

12 Nov

I was going over some slides and class materials this week and something stood out to me as maybe being worth a deep dive into. Let’s talk about SEO and good practice for SEO in news site maintenance.

Going from a career in marketing to a hopeful new career in journalism, I often find myself revising, reconsidering, relearning, and recontextualising some of the skills I’ve been developing over the past few years.

One of the most intriguing of these is the pet hate of every pre-Web2.0 writer or linguist, search engine optimisation.

A lot of people really despise SEO writing. And for good reason. I hate it too.

In the early days of professional digital content writing, writing for SEO was very different. Keywords were king in how a website ranked. You either got the right series of words your readers might have been searching for online or you didn’t. And whether you used those words (let’s be honest, they were phrases, not words) or not, you ranked or you didn’t.

So, writers took to using very specific, very rigid, very unreadable phrases just to make sure content appeared within the top ten hits on a search engine results page (SERP).

Thankfully this isn’t the case anymore. Google doesn’t rank according to keywords or phrases in 2021. At least not primarily. Nor do any other of the main household-name search engines like Yahoo or Bing.

Still, while looking over some of my notes on SEO writing for news, I couldn’t help but realise that some of the techniques described and recommended weren’t strictly speaking SEO but rather UX (user experience).

So, I wanted to set some time aside to consider what I know about marketing content SEO writing and what I’m now learning about news writing SEO, with the hope of coming out with a better understanding of how the two can benefit one another.

Setting the misconceptions aside.

There are a couple of misconceptions I discovered between what is SEO and what is UX in the outlined materials.

Good internal link structure (the ‘3-click rule’) is UX.

Tagging or categorising content so that users can find content easily is UX.

Making the decision between pagination (segmented pages) or infinite scroll (everything accessible pretty much on the same home or landing page) is UX.

Now, UX will undoubtedly help a site rank and keep retention rate (bounce rate, for the marketing nerds out there) high. But it isn’t necessarily tied that firmly to SEO. And that’s worth thinking about if you want to induct good SEO practices into your writing.

UX will help you rank because it will keep your on-page engagement high. But knowing the difference between that and SEO is valuable when it comes to understanding the techniques and disciplines you’re discussing and engaging in.

Good UX alone will not get you to the top of the SERP lists.

Keywords.

Maybe not a lot of digital marketers will agree with me, but we need to get over keywords. They‘re not the powerhouse they were in 2012. Google doesn’t even take their use into that high a consideration in a page’s ranking.

Still, it’s good to know what they are, how they work, and where they are valuable.

For a news team, this can be especially valuable too.

Digital marketers use keywords to help plan and brainstorm content calendars: what’s written, when it goes out, different funnels of content based on a series of keyword strategies.

Obviously that doesn’t work in news writing. Current events don’t adhere to your keyword strategy. But, on a slow news day when nothing else is happening, a quick mind map of keyword categories relative to a publication’s demographic could be a very useful way to come up with an exciting feature topic.

On-page keyword implementation.

It’s dead. Forget about it. Move on. Search engine algorithms are way smarter than we give them credit for. They don’t look for random word combinations on pages anymore. They look for relevance, clout, actual content quality, and site authority. They’re clever little buggers.

Still, for those who are clinging to keyword implementation for dear life, it’s worth pointing out how implementation-ready local news sites can be.

Think about it. How did on-page implementation algorithms work back in the day? Search engines would take in a search term, search for those exact words and phrases, and then come back to you with the sites it found with those words on them. It was that specific.

Now think about local journalism. Depending on the article in question, you’ve got a city name, a specific subject (person, event, business), and generally some other variable.

What you’ve also got in local journalism is not a lot of competing traffic from other local news sites.

So, if you’re searching for a particular article or news item on a specific topic, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find it.

The point here being, there’s no need to focus on on-page keyword implementation in this kind of writing in order to rank highly. Your search terms are already there if you’ve done your job well.

Not convinced? Let’s test it out.

Here is an article posted today on the website of the local paper in my hometown, the Kilkenny People.

It’s about a new MRI machine being delivered to St Luke’s Hospital and the positive reaction of the hospital’s manager to it.

Now, if I lived in Kilkenny and I overheard something about this story in a coffee shop and wanted to learn more, how hard would I have to search on Google to find it?

In fact, not hard at all. The words “New MRI in Kilkenny St Luke’s” have it as the second result on the SERP list.

Within only five hours, that article pretty much topped Google’s rankings. Why? It’s so specific. It’s not got a lot of competition in search terms.

Keyword strategy is all about researching or guessing what your audience is going to search for. In local journalism, they’re searching for the local. If you write it and people are interested, it will be found easily. Don’t go confusing your readers with dense keyword stuffing just to climb the SERP ranks.

Encouraging analytics.

“Should search trends determine what journalists write about?” was a previous food-for-thought question posed in a class I attended.

This seems a little reductive. Of course a robot shouldn’t tell you what to write. But leveraging trends and analytics to help understand what engages readers, what performs well, or what was plain ignored is extremely valuable information for an editor hoping to keep a publication afloat to have.

In marketing, people look to analytics to tell them what content works and what doesn’t in terms of views, engagement, clicks, and conversions – a conversion usually being an arbitrary goal set for a particular piece of content, for example a form submission on a B2B site or a purchase or newsletter signup on a B2C site.

They use numbers and other assorted data to understand what content helps drive business goals and what content falls flat.

Again, this isn’t something that translates directly to news writing. But it does still translate.

Analytics help us understand what people are interested in. There’s no reason not to use that. We obviously can’t factor news into that. News is news. But it can help plan features, profiles, and opinion pieces.

Maybe a particular local musician or actor drove a huge number of clicks in the past when interviewed. Maybe another one didn’t. Is it valuable to know that when coming up with the next off-diary profile? You bet it is.

Could it also help you calculate, by way of ad income or click-through rate, which columnists may really deserve that raise they’ve been asking for? Very much so.

Leveraging analytics is an invaluable way for editors to understand and plan for content they know will be relevant to and welcomed by their demographic.

Make it mobile.

Let’s get this one out of the way quickly. Mobile matters. But not for the reason people keep rolling out.

We always hear that around 55% of all online traffic comes from mobile devices (not including tablets). This should be reason enough to make a site mobile friendly. However, it’s not the most important one.

If we know something, Google knows it too. And you can be absolutely certain Google knows how much of all traffic is mobile. It knows it so well that it now weighs mobile-readiness extremely highly in its search algorithm.

Simply put, if Google doesn’t think your website is mobile friendly (and it will tell you through its Search Console tool) you will drop in the rankings significantly because of it.

This is a genre-agnostic SEO tip. Same for news sites as for ad agencies.

Backlinks.

Backlinks are a tougher nut to crack trying to translate to news writing. Let’s talk a little about them and what they are first, because they’re the gold standard in Google’s algorithm right now.

A backlink is a link to your site or one of its pages from any other party anywhere online. Google loves backlinks. It currently uses them to judge the ‘authority’ of a website. The more you have, the more authority you have. Backlinks from higher authority websites are worth more too.

Backlinks are taken so seriously that any digital marketing manager worth their salt builds backlink strategy firmly into their yearly marketing plan. They want to know where they can put links, who is linking, what they cost, and what’s being linked. It’s word-of-mouth and cross-pollination for the digital era.

But how do we translate that to a news site? We’re facing down one of the most important SEO tricks of the trade, and I genuinely struggle to see a clear implementation plan.

Perhaps this is where the publication’s audience and subjects come in. If there’s one thing about news, it’s sharable. Businesses or artists covered for profiles, for example, featuring articles on their own sites generates backlinks. Already we’re going in the right direction.

Key community figures (also known by my least favourite word, ‘influencers’) can help too. There are always figures in the community who love to share news and engage in conversations on local topics online. These are invaluable backlink sources.

And considering we already know that Google respects backlinks from high-authority sites the highest of all – can you think of a website with higher SEO ranking or authority than Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn? Social links don’t just help your audience see you on social, they help them see you on Google too!

Adapting and integrating.

These are really just iceberg-tip insights into some of the things that can help improve SEO across the board for any kind of site. How useful they are to news writing or news site development, or how distracting or destructive they could be, I am still trying to figure out.

Still, I can’t help but think an interdisciplinary approach could really be beneficial.