Forge Search Marketing

5 Critical Mistakes Matt Kelly and the Newspaper Industry Made

Here at Forge we recently came across the article on Gaurdian.co.uk about Matt Kelly of Trinity Mirror slamming search engine optimization for how it has corrupted newspapers, forcing them to abandon their brands in light of obtaining an, “audience beyond anything [they] could hope to achieve in print.” In result, those news organizations that sacrificed content quality, brand values and customer engagement ended up making less money despite the more advanced marketing campaigns and more visitors. Call us crazy, but since when has sacrificing everything that you do and stand for been a good way to achieve better revenue?

Kelly sets the stage for disaster in the opening of his keynote speech:

“If we still hadn’t get [sic] the message, there were separate seminars, two a day, laid on free of charge by Google, complete with glossy brochures, on how to do well in Google News. The seminars were full. We all wanted to know the secret. The brochure made it seem so easy…Of course, as we’re all aware now, it was too easy. In our great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us were all too quick to sacrifice anything that stood in the way of search engine optimisation.“

Mistake #1: Don’t Plan Ahead For The Obvious

As Mr. Kelly and a whole plethora of other newspaper executives sat in on the SEO seminars, eager to learn about how to propel their content around the web, they failed to think about the effects it would have on the future of their industry. If every major news organization begins aggressively optimizing their content to be found by the search engines and all of that content becomes readily accessible, is it not obvious that the value of your work is going to decrease drastically?

“As any first-year economics student will tell you, massively oversupplying a finite market generally leads to a collapse in value. Great swathes of newspaper website inventory – sometimes as much as 90 percent of page views – went unsold.”

Yet, Mr. Kelly, it seems everyone in your industry failed to recognize this before it was too late.

Mistake #2: Destroy Your Brand Values and Standards

As executives learned of the magic of SEO and went back to their organizations saying, “We need to focus primarily on SEO, that’s where all the traffic is!”, they were consciously admitting that the quality of their content and their brand was no longer of importance. Optimizing every article, every link, every word and picture in hopes of being ranked highly was now the priority – not creating unique, engaging content. With the decline in content quality also comes the decline in not only brand values, but brand perception. By pumping out more, lower quality content the newspapers were doing nothing but destroying the loyalty and rapport they had established with their readers. As all of the organizations nose dived into the pool of mediocrity and rampantly copied content, they lost all hope of maintaining a loyal, engaged audience.

“But it gets worse. Much worse, in fact, for our long-term future. In treating SEO as the be-all and end-all of online publishing, we devalued our content in the mind of the users…”

And you’re surprised…why? Do you think Apple has such a relentlessly loyal fan base because they consistently create terrible products? Do you think National Geographic has been around for over 100 years because it produces mediocre content? Of course not.

Mistake #3: Focus On Extracting Revenue From New “Users”

Any business text book will tell you that the easiest and most efficient way for a company to make more money is to find more ways to benefit from its already loyal, paying customer base. Unfortunately, the newspaper organizations took the exact opposite approach.

“We’d never choose such a sterile word to describe the people who buy our newspapers. But online, “users” is about right. They find our content in a search engine, they devour it, then they move back to Google, or wherever, and go looking for more. Often, they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. This was the audience we’ve been chasing all that time. A swarm of locusts.”

After having collectively spent millions of dollars to drive traffic to their websites, suddenly Mr. Kelly and his industry colleagues realized that no one was buying from them and most “users” could really care less about where they got their content – it was all mediocre, anyway. You don’t make money by selling to “users”, you make money by selling to “customers”.

A few good recent examples of this is TechCrunch creating the, “CrunchPad” (now called the JooJoo) and Smashing Magazine writing, “The Smashing Book”. Both of these sites have hugely loyal audiences and they will devour a product that these sites put out. However, neither of these sites would exist if they said, “Hey let’s make a bunch of crappy content and drive a ton of new users to it!” – Surely we aren’t the only ones who realizes how asinine this sounds.

Mistake #4: Make SEO An Objective, Not A Tool.

Hopefully by now you’ve clearly realized that SEO should never have been the primary objective of the news organizations. High quality content is always of the utmost importance. Yes, it is also extremely pertinent to make sure that your wonderful content is found by a great deal of people, but the goal is to turn “users” into “customers” by creating a level of quality content that they cannot find elsewhere. Unfortunately, if that content is not marketed appropriately and effectively, your great content cannot be found by those willing to pay for it.

Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz recently wrote an article on this notion and has a great point:

“Like many parts of life – it’s not about the quality, diligence or aptitude you bring to your field, but your ability to market it successfully. As SEOs, our responsibility is to help the best of the best become the most noticed, most beloved and most linked-to in their field.”

Great content and SEO go hand in hand, but content is always the primary focus so that your SEO efforts can be fruitful.

Mistake #5: Blame SEO For Your Mistakes

As much SEO bashing as Matt Kelly does in his article, he comes to an interesting conclusion:

“It means not letting SEO wag the dog, but instead focusing on creating the most engaging, entertaining, informative content possible. It means building sites that perform well for humans, not search engines. It means we have to stop thinking about users, but start thinking of readers, listeners, viewers. One day, even customers.”

After all the slander and finger pointing, it is good that Mr. Kelly finally admits that they were doing it right in the first place and just ended up making a very expensive, 15 year long blunder.