Case Study: How SEO Training Builds a Foundation for Success

Objective:
Hearst Digital Media Group needed to educate its technical and editorial teams on SEO best practices in order to maximize the search engine visibility of its content. Training was required for a wide range of employees across 15+ sites including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Seventeen, Esquire and Popular Mechanics.

Strategy and Tactics:

Coordinating with Hearst’s in-house SEO team, Define established a training curriculum for both technical and editorial audiences. Ongoing training sessions were scheduled and opened up to all relevant staff. Trainings were repeated periodically to provide reinforcement and account for staff turnover, and over time more advanced topics were introduced.

Through technical trainings, the staff was given a solid understanding of search-friendly site architecture in order to facilitate effective crawling and indexing of the Hearst sites. This was important not only to make sure that current properties were properly optimized, but to ensure that SEO implications would be considered in the development of future sections and features.

In the editorial trainings, it was essential to bridge the gap with editors and producers who had natural concerns over how SEO might impact their process. The key was creating the understanding that editorial SEO is not about manipulating copy or stuffing in keywords. It is about helping search engines to understand what site content is about, so it can be matched with users looking for that information, which ultimately results in greater exposure and more readers.

With this in mind, the editorial staff at each property was taught best practices for optimizing key page elements without impacting editorial voice. Editors and producers were also shown how to use keyword research to gain insight into how users search for specific topics, and to use that information in editorial planning.

Results:

Equipping technical teams with a better understanding of SEO allowed them to better prioritize and execute the recommendations in Define’s SEO site audits, resulting in significant improvements in site architecture and template design. As importantly, SEO was incorporated into the development cycle, ensuring that new site features were search-friendly right from the start.

Concurrently, search-friendly practices were built into the daily editorial workflow. Hearst’s ability to clearly label its content, leverage internal linking and factor in searcher behavior while planning site features resulted in much greater search engine visibility over time.

Hearst’s success can be seen in these results from a select group of sites:

Good Housekeeping – Up 87% in Search Traffic in 2008
The Daily Green – Up 66% in Search Traffic in 2008
Esquire – Up 54% in Search Traffic in 2008
Popular Mechanics – Up 45% in Search Traffic in 2008