I caught wind of the above Powerpoint presentation, prepared by the forward-thinking Espresso advertising agency for their clients, in a professional marketing newsletter I get and I thought that some of the facts and factoids contain therein would be of interest to Dangerous Minds readers. It’s 104 slides, but you can take in the most important things in it by quickly skimming through.
Anyone who works in the online media industry, or in advertising, knows the meaning of SEO, which stands for “search engine optimization.” That’s what steps one takes to give one’s online work the best possible chance of connecting to the intended audience or reader via the intermediary of Google. You have to “optimize” your website in order for Google to most efficiently consume it. We do it here at Dangerous Minds, by trying to make sure our titles are straightforward, that we have the name of the subject in the title, that our photos are tagged properly, etc. There are certain rules you just have to internalize and do each time as part of the process.
Many of the players in online publishing seek to “game” their Google results and feature “morning gossip round-ups” and the like, which contain—not by coincidence, either—names which are commonly searched for such as “Mel Gibson,” “Justin Bieber,” “Lindsay Lohan”—-you get the idea—all contained in single post. If you look at Google Trends and follow the heat trail, you can rack up some major traffic. This is another facet of SEO.
One “round-up” post like that can result in a very high percentage of a given website’s pageviews, but this is a somewhat cynical traffic garnering ploy, not likely to convert many new readers to your cause. Still, it’s cutthroat moves like these that the modern news industry uses to survive. Each and every webpage lives or dies by its own merits and these merits are measured, pretty much, solely in traffic. It’s not enough for the tree to fall in the forest. People have to be able to find it via Google.
Newspapers, of course, are no longer where everyone goes to get all of their daily news all in one place and they haven’t been for a long time now. The concept of something coming bundled together between covers is increasingly becoming an antiquated, old fashioned notion. People of all ages are losing the newspaper habit and younger people have never picked it up in the first place. Nor will they ever. Silent movies will never come back, either, and the publishing industry had better get prepared for the day when their subscribers, quite literally, bite the dust.
But the problem with many world-class print publications, not just newspapers, magazines, too, is that they have missed the boat on social media and are now facing the future seeing their place in the new media world supplanted by the likes of nimble upstarts like the Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Gawker and our friends at Boing Boing. All of these blogs have been pioneers incorporating social media and have seen their traffic rise by tremendous amounts in the past year. As one of the slides in the above social media primer prepared by the Espresso advertising agency points out, there are 25 billion links shared on Facebook each month and this is an incredible six times what it was just a year before. What will that number be five years from now?
But getting back to the topic of SEO, it’s no secret that Google regularly changes its search algorithm to defeat the way results can be gamed, the same way it keeps its search results from coming back with page upon page of Viagra or celebrity nudes ads. Spammers are clever and Google needs to stay on top of their tactics. One key component of how Google measures the importance of a given webpage is how many links back to it there are. So each Facebook share and each tweet count for something in how that single URL is ranked in Google. Word of mouth, or word of mouse, whichever you prefer, is the best advertising, everyone knows that. It stands to reason that the “group mind” is going to come up with superior results compared to what a blind computer algorithm can do.
It also seems totally predictable that Google’s engineers will seek to improve on the company’s ability to harness the power of the group mind in such a way as to enhance their most important product, by weighing results even more heavily toward things which are shared person to person via social media. This is why the current trend for the major newspapers to rely so heavily on SEO for as much as 35% of their daily traffic is so perilous for their long-term financial heath. What if one day Google makes a change that wipes half of that out in a single day? It can happen. People use Google today to find the newest news, but that’s not to say that by next spring it won’t be social media driving 80% of traffic. (I pulled that figure out of my ass, but you get the point).
The online products of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, TIME and so forth need to be radically restructured—turned inside out—in favor of seamless integration to Facebook and Twitter and WHATEVER THE NEW NEXT THING IS or they face becoming irrelevant, if not extinct, within a few years. There’s a lot to chew on in the above presentation. If this is a topic that interests you, dive in.
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