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Late last week I caught up with Alex Bennert who is an SEO Strategist at the Wall Street Journal. Alex is scheduled to speak at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies in San Jose on the topic of “How SEO Can Help Save the Publishing Industry” so I decided to get her insight on this topic. Check out conversation below:
[Manoj]: What are some of the most significant differences working as an In House SEO vs. an agency.
[Alex Bennert]: As an agency SEO you are usually managing several clients at once, each one with very different strategies, resources and goals. As an in house SEO, my energy and my skills are completely devoted to a single client. I still juggle multiple projects and work with various internal departments but ultimately there is a symbiosis between these goals.
[Manoj]: Are there unique SEO opportunities available to online publications compared to other sites?
[Alex Bennert]: A SERP today displays multiple content types such as news, video, images, stock quotes and blog posts. This opens up a lot of potential real estate on the search page because many online publishers generate all of these kinds of content. Say for a given query, you have a video, a news story and a blog post that are all relevant. You can actually rank in 3 different places on the first page of a search result. Before the advent of universal search, you had to spam to accomplish multiple placements.
[Manoj]: How important has SEO and Internet marketing become to your industry now that more people look online rather than physical newspapers.
[Alex Bennert]: I’m certain that Internet marketing has become crucial to this industry however as an SEO, I consider myself more of a technologist than a marketer. Search, at its core, is simply a conduit for people looking for specific information. My job is simply to know how search engines access data so that whenever we have information, it can surface on relevant queries. Beyond that, the feedback loop of search data provides us with a lovely little window into the heads of our audience, what they’re thinking about and what words they use to express this in a search box.
[Manoj]:I am assuming duplicate content is a major concern for your online publishers?
[Alex Bennert]: You have no idea! Duplicate content was one of the first and most challenging problems to address when I came to WSJ. It was like a Hydra…every time I cut off one head, another would grow in its place. We implemented the CLE tag immediately after Google announced it, and so far it has been a huge blessing to me in this regard. It’s still a little buggy here and there, but for the most part I’ve been able to reallocate a significant amount of my time away from dupe content issues.
[Manoj]: How do you go about creating a strong SEO culture so that writers/staff are better aware of best practices before publishing content.
[Alex Bennert]: I schedule ongoing training sessions every month so that new staff, people that missed previous sessions or people that want a refresher don’t have to wait long before another session. I have different training sessions for different groups of people…the SEO for my editors/ writers/ bloggers is different from my session for IT. I also have a session for the business team that talks about understanding SEO in the context of syndication deals or microsites as well as a (less-frequent) session for management that keeps them apprised of the big picture so that I can be sure there is always top-down buy-in for SEO.
She makes a great point about media formats and search. I had a client who was getting a substantial amount of traffic after we renamed and optimized a commonly required PDF document in his industry to match the search term people used to find that document. (It was a template used in CD manufacturing.) That connection introduced hundreds of people to the company who were in the process of planning to manufacture CDs.