Printed Matters

Newspapers have done a crappy job of getting and keeping an audience which it could then sell to advertisers.

Newspapers could have had an easy time of it. Because they produce tons of text about their communities as part of daily operations, they had a leg up over everyone else in their ability to dominate a community online. Even the simple practice of shovelware combined with basic SEO got some of them a long way.

Of course, that’s not far enough. The type of traffic you get from organic search results on Google can’t be monetized to the same extent that an engaged local community of site users can. News sites need as well to provide areas where users can interact with the news – discuss, participate, enhance, share. Allowing comments on stories is just the beginning. A news site can develop communities around those discussions.

By doing that a news site develops strong pull. And the resulting engaged readership can be sold to local advertisers. (Assuming, of course, it has good salespeople.)

Alas, even that’s not enough. Anybody can start communities and if they are dedicated enough and have enough online personality they can make them work. Those can compete with the newspaper’s.

Hell, Facebook and Twitter can compete with the newspaper’s. Attention is scarce.

“Community” is just another word for “network.” Networks derive their value from the number of participants and the number of connections between them. The value of a network increases exponentially with its size. Small networks are not valuable, have no pull, and can be easily replaced and die. Large networks have staying power, momentum, and can survive most anything.

The effect of network competition is a fractious set of small networks with some overlap but no cohesion. All are vulnerable. To succeed, a newspaper must build a strong network, a stable community, that can thwart the dissolving effects of smaller networks that spring up around it.

Luckily, newspapers have some advantages in this regard:

• Content – almost by definition, community newspapers have the kind of content that interests the members of a community.
• Credibility – people tend to trust the content and the communities that develop out of that content.
• Expectation – people expect that local community newspaper sites will most likely have the information they seek
• Brand

But even with all these advantages, newspapers can fail to create the dominant network in a community. Because the key ingredient missing above is local search dominance.

Principle: Local search dominance is the key to the success of a newspaper site. Because it is the key to developing the largest and most resilient community.

Go to Google and type in the name of your city or town (or if you live in a really big city, your borough or neighbourhood or whatever). Also type in another term, like “mayor”, or “shoes”, or “restaurant”, or “policy”. Do this for several terms.

If your community newspaper is not at least on the first page of search results for the vast majority of those searches, your community newspaper is FAIL.

And any websites that did show up on the first page for a large percentage of those local searches have a better chance than the community newspaper does of creating the dominant local community, despite all the paper’s natural advantages.

Why? It’s in the nature of networks. Bigger ones grow faster. If you can get all the lost souls into your community early enough, then in the absence of more compelling alternatives they will join it.

But there’s the rub, the compelling alternatives. If Jim builds a network over here on the basis of being discovered during searches for “Yourtown mayor” and “Yourtown politics”, but Bob builds a network over there on the basis of searches for “Yourtown restaurants” and “Yourtown clubs”, then we have two compelling alternatives and one of them is weak.

For community newspapers, practicing healthy SEO was never about getting cheap traffic. It is about dominating local search.

By dominating local search, a newspaper maximizes the number of opportunities to get people to join their network and not some other. Almost as important: by dominating local search, you create the impression that you are the dominant force. You live up to the expectant promise inherent in being the voice of the community.

Not unimportantly, you also give your salespeople a hell of a thing to sell when they make their rounds. “Type ANYTHING into Google about Yourtown, and there we are,” you can hear them crowing.

Of course, all this is predicated on the idea that you properly SEO’d every page on your site, and that you have provided the tools – comments, forums, galleries, whatever it is – to allow communities to form, and that you have ALL the data about your community too – like the business directory.

That is why SEO is still the basic, fundamental job at news sites. It ain’t about the traffic, although that can be part of the measure of success and the sales pitch. Instead, it’s about growing the community as fast as you can, and not giving other fledgling networks a toehold.

And it’s about leveraging what you’re already good at: content, credibility, expectation, brand.

In yesterday’s diatribe about how newspapers have failed to implement a good advertising strategy – which includes gathering the audience as well as selling it – I made reference to Howard Owens’ news website normative: a website strategy based on pull, not push. To help explain that, I asked him a few questions on Twitter, and included his responses in my post.

But there was one tweet I left out. I had asked him whether SEO was an important part of a pull strategy. He said:

@howardowens SEO important, but irrelevant to point I’m making. You want money making site? You need high-repeat regulars, addicts.

I respectfully disagree, Howard. SEO is not irrelevant, it is key to gathering those high-repeat regulars.

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