Just read a fascinating and candid article in the Guardian about the relationship between newspapers and search engines. Matt Kelly, the associate editor of the Daily Mirror comments on how his paper’s strategy has changed from focusing all the attention on making Mirror sites SEO friendly to ensuring that the content is highly desirable and that the branding of the sites is enhanced, as well as loyalty from visitors. One of his prophecies is to seek to “build sites that perform well for humans, not search engines”. He cites an example of the Mirror site 3am.co.uk, recently lambasted by e-consultancy for woeful on page SEO, where they ignored the SEO advice for keyword rich navigation in favour of buzz words such as..”"Gasp!”, “Tee-hee”, “Phwoar”….

The argument from Kelly is compelling and he backs it up with some evidence that the Mirror sites are succeeding in spite of the lack of attention to SEO, admitting they are growing steadily each month and that… “traffic from search engines is ridiculously low for a newspaper website. Around 15 percent for MirrorFootball and less than 10 for 3am. That means the vast majority of traffic has either come from bookmarks, or a referral from an informed source”. The reason for trying to not chase search engine traffic anymore, is that previously there was huge oversupply, which then lead to the CPM falling as well as having upto 90% of the impressions unsold. The solution he argues is to make the content more attractive, create brand loyalty with fewer initial visitors, but build up a loyal following of subscribers which will mean that in time the content and inventory becomes more valuable to advertisers.

One can understand how frustrating it can be for a publisher to have millions of impressions but scant advertising revenue to show for it.  Especially when the content aggregators are making millions from search advertising while they [the publishers] struggle to keep up a decent CPM.

In reaility, a website can be good and should be good for humans AND search engines, the two aims are not mutually exclusive. Whatever anyone says, Content is King, which is why the aim of the Mirror should have always been to create high quality and unique content, not chase visitors. However in their belated quest for high quality content, they appear to have thrown the baby out with the bath water, by castigating the ‘SEO Brigade” and willfully ignoring some basic onpage SEO techniques. One problem for publishers, especially tabloid ones, is that there content is rarely unique, which of course devalues it in terms of it’s advertising appeal.  Whether their new users, visitors, readers, whatever you want to call them provide a better opportunity to sell inventory than when they had 30 million visitors remains to be seen.

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