Traffic Jam: SEO is driving clicks to these Nonprofit Newsrooms

Signs of success from our research on audience growth best practices — but additional questions remain

When people working in nonprofit news hear us say “SEO,” either their eyes glaze over or they cringe. We get it — SEO can feel retro and is often associated with dirty, clickbaity marketing techniques.

But the Single Subject News Project team at the Shorenstein Center sees a unique opportunity for leveraging SEO best practices within our research cohort of nonprofit news sites. Our team is eager to understand how topically focused, nonprofit news sites can best engage and grow their online audiences. Last year, we identified SEO processes as an under-utilized method across the cohort and chose explore it as one of our audience growth research areas.

Over the past year, our fantastic cohort representatives have been working with Kelly DeLay to incorporate SEO best practices into their newsroom workflows.

Since we started this work back in fall 2017, the progress we’ve seen to date is awe-inspiring. Just take a look at this chart, compliments of Kelly, on the percentage change in organic traffic comparing September 1, 2017 to November 1, 2018:

The progress you see here is because of our cohort’s commitment to overhauling workflows (check out how The Texas Tribune did it here), retroactively fixing technical errors and updating the backend of stories, updating asks to co-publishing partners, and identifying and incorporating keywords into their publishing processes.

Given the results, we found that SEO work — when coupled with a targeted email acquisition and content strategy — can focus newsroom’s efforts around building their segment of habitually reading and highly engaged audience. (The Shorenstein Center and the Lenfest Institute have an email newsletter guide coming out soon that details best practices for this mid-funnel work.)

Although we successfully identified several SEO best practices for this cohort of newsrooms, one persistent question remains: how could newsrooms best research and select the specific keywords to incorporate and optimize across their stories and site content? The puzzle for newsrooms like the ones we study is that most of their sites are devoted to high-quality investigative and policy-focused pieces. That kind of content doesn’t mesh well with the whims of changing keyword rankings. This makes initiating more sophisticated SEO practices complicated. So — how can newsrooms take advantage of the added audiences and organic traffic from optimizing keywords, while also operating within an environment with limited or nonexistent editorial flexibility?

Our SEO expert, Kelly DeLay, prescribed the following process for keyword research and implementation at our third cohort convening back in October:

• Pick a broad keyword to start. (For example, if you’re a site that specializes in political coverage, you might begin by searching “election.”)
• Search the keyword in Google keyword planner and export the top 200 resulting words.
• Next, sort these words by “most expensive.” Then, filter out the high-competition words. Drop these words into a NEW list in MOZ keyword explorer.
• Sort the words by “priority,” with those highest in “priority” listed at the top (we prefer “priority” because it aggregates by difficulty, CTR, volume, etc.) See Moz’s glossary for more detail on each of these terms.
• Do any of these keywords match content already on your website or content in your editorial calendar? If so, we recommend selecting one or two keywords from this list and initiating the workflow process within your newsroom to incorporate them.

We’re wondering, how does YOUR newsroom research and then choose the particular keywords for SEO incorporation? We want to gather as many responses as possible to help us better understand how this particular audience growth tactic is applied within a newsroom. Please let us know about your keyword research and selection processes in our brief survey.

If you have any questions on this, please do not hesitate to reach out to me: Emily_Roseman@hks.harvard.edu. Thanks for reading!