Stop focusing (so much) on SEO
While the subject line is a little clickbait-y, there’s an important point I want to make.
SEO should be thought of as an acquisition tool; the first step in building your audience.
Obviously, SEO is critical to the exposure and growth of media business, so it’s understandable why so many publishers focus on growing traffic via SEO.
However, what I rarely see is them channelling that same energy into converting their SEO-led traffic into an engaged audience.
The distinction I often make is traffic is vanity, whereas audience is valuable.
Traffic is hard to predict and almost impossible to control. Reddit or Google Discover might send you a million ‘bonus’ pageviews this month and then never ever again.
However, if you focus on engagement and have a direct connection to your audience, you’ll see far more consistency.
A highly segmented, niche audience is significantly more valuable than a mass of uncontrollable traffic.
Related: How to leverage Google Discover to grow your traffic
In a recent essay, Bleacher Report founder Dave Nemetz described how audience conversion was integral to the growth and valuation of the leading sports media company:
“(We realised) we couldn’t survive by depending on other platforms for our audience. We would continue to find new readers via search, social, and other sources. But our core focus was converting that audience so we could own the customer relationship and our distribution.”
He credits the decision to deploy modal boxes (pop-ups) for email collection as a turning point that saved the business. A decision that ultimately led to its USD $200m sale.
Read Nemetz’s full essay ‘The Leaky Bucket’ here.
Hungry for audiences?
Think of it this way:
SEO makes the entire pie bigger. Retention gets you a bigger slice of the pie.
So what are you doing to convert first time visitors into repeat, engaged and long-term visitors?
Other News
It doesn’t take a ton of nasty comments to sink a reader’s perception of a news site.
Comments or no comments? This always comes up in my conversations with publishers and for good reason. Research by Nieman Lab suggests that an uncivil comment thread can create negative impressions of your entire news site.
Also related to comments: Subscription Revenue Is Perfectly Fine; But Community Can Give You More
Facebook Spreads Fake News Faster Than Any Other Social Website, According To New Research
On the heels of the U.S election, there’s been much noise from each side about the role of social media in spreading fake news-but who is the worst offender? New research points the finger at Facebook, describing the platform as “a key vector of distribution for untrustworthy websites.”
If you’re fretting over feature development, this humorous and observational tweet will put everything into perspective!