CARLY STEVEN
HEAD OF SEO (THE SUN),
NEWS UK
NEWS UK
Carly is an SEO veteran of the digital media industry, having worked in the field for over ten years. The Daily Mail was her introduction to both SEO and the newsroom, and she has been drawn to both ever since. After her time at The Mail, she served as a consultant for The Montreal Gazette, worked for City AM, and is now the Head of SEO for The Sun.
30 November 2015.
That was the day The Sun dropped its paywall and made content free to read for everyone. Readership rose, but the publication wanted to push its audience as high as they could online.
That is why they now needed SEO, and why they hired me.
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEWSROOM
My career as a newsroom SEO started years earlier and at a different publication, The Daily Mail. I wasn’t there to work on SEO, but somehow ended up being asked to introduce SEO into the newsroom.
If I had known how intimidating a newsroom packed with journalists and editors can be, I would have declined. Plus, nobody really knew what to do with SEO back in 2008; there was no job description and few guidelines. So, I focused on the essentials, like optimising headlines for keywords.
Newsroom SEO is a little different to traditional SEO. We optimise for the Top Stories section of Google News, rather than organic results. When we first started, only a select few publishers could appear in the Google News results. But because it was brand new, doing basic SEO best practice paid off quickly for the team at the Mail.
By the time I started at The Sun in 2016, SEO – and my mission – was very different. My goals were:
- Establish an SEO team.
- Grow search traffic for The Sun.
- Build a loyal, engaged audience.
To achieve those goals, we have tried many things. These are five of the more important takeaways uncovered over the past few years.
UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE
This is the key to everything we do.
Fortunately, The Sun has a clear picture of who our audience is. We have an audience team who analyses everything the publication does, so we know what our big traffic drivers are. For example, Love Island drives a huge amount of traffic to The Sun site.
That means we actively cover it and make sure that content ranks well.
Naturally, this goes beyond SEO optimisation. Much of our success comes down to content quality, and this is where other departments shine. Our TV & Showbiz department is key to this, as they have plenty of industry contacts and score regular exclusives, which help drive performance. When you know your audiences, you can feed them a constant diet of high-quality content they want.
USE FORMATS PEOPLE WANT
When you understand your audience, you learn not just the content they want, but the format they prefer. These are two that were particularly useful for SEO.
Explainers
You have probably searched for things like “when is easter in 2020?” or “is brexit happening?” at some point on Google. Today, you see results that directly answer your query, but years ago, that content didn’t really exist. Part of my mission when I started at The Sun was to explore the potential of these question-based searches. We came up with explainer articles written especially to target that traffic. Since then, this approach has become popular and most news publications produce this content too, so the playing field is far more competitive than it once was.
Live blogging
Live blogging is something we are trying to integrate into our processes, as we see immense value in it.
It is clear people want real-time updates, and not just for live sporting events. Plus, Google loves this style of content: live blogs tend to rank well in big breaking news situations. We need to work hard to convince editors that dedicating a reporter to a single blog for a whole day when they could be producing multiple separate articles is worth the sacrifice.
At the height of coronavirus search interest, we were able to carve a space for ourselves in the Top Stories rail with our live blog. Its fantastic performance is a big deal for us, as it helps make the case for future live blogs.
TICK BASIC BOXES
This is something I learned back at The Daily Mail. Once we found our feet, we worked closely with reporters and editors to ensure content was SEO-friendly. We created a best practice guide, and had SEO team members tweak headlines and make other small changes. It was fairly basic on-page SEO, but it paid big dividends.
A newsroom's pace is frenetic, and even today it can be a challenge to get reporters to follow standard SEO process all the time. It is not that they are reluctant to use SEO; they have seen screenshots that illustrate the difference SEO makes. However, editors can push reporters to move onto their next article, so SEO optimisation gets overlooked.
Today, we are much more sophisticated. We are not just thinking about how to rank for keywords, but how to increase click through for our stories. This might mean tweaking how the headline looks on mobile or what images appear in the Top Stories rail. We obsess over these details in a way that didn’t occur to us in the early days of 2008.
THINK LONG-TERM LOYALTY
Building long-term loyalty is not something you typically associate with SEO, but it has become an ongoing part of our work.
SEO brings in a good part of The Sun’s traffic, and we don’t deviate from maximising that. However, with our larger team size, we have been able to dedicate time to investigate how we keep readers on the site and convert them to loyal, engaged readers.
This means not just reaching as many people as possible, but as many of the RIGHT people as possible. For instance, a good percentage of our articles focus on soap operas. This is because we know readers who enjoy this content are more loyal and often return to the site. They generate far more value for us than someone who googles “when is mother’s day”, finds the answer on one of our pages, then never comes back.
Loyalty is tricky for search: people google what they want, find their answer, and leave. Loyalty is not a priority. To be honest, how our SEO team not just reaches people, but gets them to engage and build loyalty with The Sun brand is still a work-in-progress. That said, we have one way of building loyalty baked into how we work...
BUILD YOUR BRAND WITH OTHERS
Our eventual aim is for visitors to become committed readers of The Sun. However, that rarely happens after one or two visits; it takes at least a handful of return visits to build that loyalty. Luckily, we have help from other brands to keep people coming back for more.
As a publication, we are very TV-focused, which is a broad niche. Shows like Love Island and EastEnders drive a lot of traffic for us. By leveraging these subjects – or brands – we build a relationship with readers and eventually convince them to make The Sun their go-to news site.
If the numbers look good, we make the effort to add other brands to our stable. Strictly Come Dancing is a great example of this. A few years ago, we barely ranked for it and conceded the show search-wise to the BBC and others. But we realised the potential it had to draw readers, so we invested heavily: writing about it, getting exclusives, and giving the show frequent coverage. It eventually paid off, and we now have another well-ranking avenue for readers to find and engage us with.
NEVER STOP LEARNING
I have loved every minute of my return to the newsroom. You live for the big stories and moments; when a major story breaks, you are in the middle of the action. Even the pace of an average day is fast, and the stories always change. One moment you might work on breaking news, the next ever-green content.
Over the first year of my time at The Sun, we enjoyed phenomenal growth and bedded down the SEO team. Over the following few years, we learned a great deal on how SEO supports news in today’s search landscape. However, I know there is more we have to discover, and I cannot wait to learn about it myself.