On this week’s episode Edward Hyatt, Director of Newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal takes us through staying abreast and ahead of changes to the SEO landscape. From personal experience he outlines the differences in SEO strategies between subscription and non-subscription publishers, the changes in the SEO landscape over the past decade, and the potential impact of AI on SEO for publishers.
In the news roundup the team discusses the news that Forbes has been using a made for advertising (MFA) subdomain to game the digital advertising ecosystem. Since 2017, Forbes was using tactics that have long been condemned by anyone who cares about quality media – and we discuss the likelihood that they are the only ones. So, what (if anything) can be done?
Here are some highlights from the interview, lightly edited for clarity:
How SEO has changed in the time Ed has been in the industry
The way SEO is seen now is definitely slightly different. My career began in 2015 at the Mail. SEO there was important, search was definitely a big driver of traffic, but it was more, ‘Can we optimise this headline,’ ‘Can we get some more keywords in here,’ and a very one-track kind of process.
As I’ve grown in my career and SEO has matured around me, that approach to search has fallen off pretty hard, even for the more commoditized news websites, to try to stick to that approach, it just doesn’t really work.
Again when I started back in 2015, social media was the big thing – some publishers even cut their SEO teams at the time so they could hire more social media folks. But as we’ve been hit by different changes to platforms like Facebook and X, I think SEO has really found its feet again.
What makes SEO so valuable to publishers is that we are really focused on engaged, interested audiences. That’s something that social media can’t necessarily do in the same way. We’re not going for viral hits, we don’t want random clicks from somebody who fell upon the story when we’re really aligned in our goals to engage intent-oriented audiences.
No matter who you are in audience development, we are here to get readers on the page, whether you work on a subscription-based website like the Wall Street Journal or if you’re on the ad rev side. At the Journal, we really want to connect with folks who would pay for high-quality content from a trusted publisher.
Keeping up with SEO developments
Back in 2018, when I was at The Sun, Google released the Helpful Content Update. This was a super impactful core algorithm update that really touched on things like money, health and life content… high risk-type topics. Lots of news publishers used to rank extremely well for a lot of health content especially. And I think Google probably asked itself the question, “Is this the best experience for readers who are looking up illnesses or looking for financial expertise? Do we want these non-expert publishers ranking highly for these types of topics?”
So what we saw after a while was websites like John Hopkins or the NHS ranking really well for that type of health content. So while the tactics that SEOs might employ to perform well in the search results, the strategy from Google is pretty consistent, the principles of what it’s trying to do.
The latest update that came out in March was tagged as a spam update as well. Google’s making it really clear that it wants high-quality content, and it wants high-quality content that is helpful to readers. At the end of the day, that is the key: how can you be useful and helpful to readers who are interested in your content? I think journalism websites and news publishers, we should really be deeply focused on that.
The impact of AI on SEO
AI is definitely, broadly speaking, one of the most disruptive changes I think the SEO community has seen for a very long time, possibly ever. In some ways, it’s the next step in the road towards zero-click search, which is where Google has been trying to get to for some time – to be useful to people within the search results themselves.
But I think not every website, or type of website, is going to be impacted in the same way… Really, I think the real question is around commoditized news. AI search engines like [Google’s] SGE are commoditizing news. So it definitely means that some of the goalposts are shifting.
For publishers like the Journal, or other high-quality subscription publishers like the Times, or the Atlantic, or the Post, it really means doubling down on that high-quality content that is resistant to being commoditized. Focus on your brand, connect with audiences that care deeply about the types of coverage you focus on, and use that to build an engaged audience through the search experience.
The news round-up
Forbes has landed itself in hot water this week after it was discovered to have been using a Made For Advertising (MFA) site to boost ad impressions since 2017.
- Online ad transparency start-up Adalytics found that instead of ads being placed on www.forbes.com, they were being put on www3.forbes.com; “a website hidden from Google search and accessible purely by people who succumbed to clickbait from other sites via Outbrain and Taboola.”
- According to the WSJ, MFA sites “include high loads of advertising, generic content, autoplay video ads, and a high percentage of traffic that is attracted through paid advertising elsewhere
MFA sites also often aggressively refresh the ads they display, potentially showing visitors the same ad thousands of times in a single session.” - The 4A’s, a trade organization for ad agencies, describes MFAs as “made for arbitrage,” meaning they “buy” online traffic by advertising their headlines elsewhere, sell ad space for more than they paid to acquire that traffic and profit on the difference in cost.
- According to a US Association of National Advertisers survey conducted last year, MFA sites received 21% of all ad impressions and 15% of digital adspend, despite being widely considered as a low-quality medium for advertising.
- “There has long been a suspicion that, when it comes to wasted adspend and contributing to ad fraud, many marketers only care about being seen to do the right thing rather than actually doing the right thing,” writes Omar Oakes for The Media Leader. “The clear implication is that marketers just want to cover themselves by saying “we work with an ad verification company” without actually investigating whether their media is fraud-free or spoof-free.”
For a full day of publisher podcast and newsletter best-practice, from what publishers are doing with paid podcasts to harnessing AI in newsletters, make sure you’ve got June 12th in your diary. Tickets are now available for the Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summit at a pre-agenda rate until the end of April.
