Publishers, especially local media, tend to ignore SEO, opting instead to dump insane amounts of resources into social media – specifically Facebook. I continue to argue that this is an increasingly larger waste of time. Not only has Facebook traffic been drastically cut over the last year, but US audiences are moving away from the platform.
Publishers need to spend more time and resources on SEO. In my experience, not only does it provide better revenue per active user, but it now drive significantly more traffic that social media. It’s also on the leading edge of voice search and machine learning.
As newsrooms continue to shrink, they need to spend less time on platforms that are less relevant, and more time on areas that are growing. They would do well to start looking at what marketers do rather than what other publishers do.
Indeed, AI and machine learning are becoming a commodity technology. Plug and play solutions are plentiful on the market. Even SMEs can muster a budget to adopt those. For marketers, this increased accessibility stands for a long-awaited good-bye to the mundane and repetitive work. The new tools can make you more effective, creative and more focused on strategy and impact, rather than technical execution and analytics. SEO, in particular, is a ripe field for applying automation as the following three examples demonstrate.