Speaking to Journalism.co.uk about Latitude's work with The Independent, Richard Gregory says the publishing industry is not yet as advanced in online search as gambling and finance, but can learn from these areas.
"In reality the publishing market is behind many others when it comes to search. In some respects they've never seen the commercial aspect of it, publishers were slower to adapt to generating revenues from the online environment," he says.
Prioritising the tools you use - whether its search engine optimisation (SEO), social media or paid-for search - is also key, says Gregory, and has been a crucial part of overhauling the Independent's search strategy, which began 15 months ago.
Today's Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) figures show 103.51 per cent year-on-year growth in unique users for the title.
Since March traffic to the site via organic search [e.g. not related to advertising] has grown by 117 per cent with the number of pages indexed by Google rising from 170,000 to 380,000, according to figures from Latitude.
Paid-for search
While paid-for search can drive traffic, it was only a short-term solution in the Independent's case, says Gregory.
"We did it because we had an objective for the first year to get so many visitors. SEO is a slow burn so we needed something to plug that two-month gap. We split the budget initially between paid-for search and SEO just to get some critical mass and get us on the radar," he explains.
On the commercial side buying up Google keywords, for example, is very cheap and arguably provides the most relevant advertising on a page of search results, he says.
But for ethical reasons and in the current climate, with less advertisers around to monetise the page views' driven by search results, optimising organic search will achieve as good results for a fraction of the prize, he adds.
SEO
As such the bulk of Latitude's work has been around optimising Independent for natural or organic search to attract new, recurring visitors to the site.
"Publications like the Independent have an abundance of content, the difficulty is making it available to the likes of Google and Microsoft," explains Gregory.
"It's no good pushing a lot of information out if people can't find it when they want it."
Journalists have been trained in how to write more web-friendly headlines, for example, while the site's archive content has been opened up to make it more accessible to search engine spiders.
"The reality is that SEO is more of a mindset than anything else. It's got a lot of its roots in usability. It's about being found and that applies as much to text as all the other assets you have," says Gregory.
"There are so many retailers who have been burnt by a wonderfully flashy e-commerce experience that you can't find on any of the search engines. Now the tech teams at the papers are going through this."
Increasing UK traffic to the site is the primary focus with targets to grow the volume of UK users, the time they spend on the site and how money can be generated from these areas - travel and finance are particular draws at the moment, says Gregory.
"We optimise for the UK search engines rather than the international ones. We're making sure we're pushing content out to the right UK channels rather than the global ones," he says, adding that international traffic can often be served by publisher INM's global titles.
Social Media
The Independent is beginning to experiment with social media as a new way of distributing its content and engaging with readers to move beyond simply pushing out information feeds, says Gregory.
"A lot of social media is about monitoring and responding. What we'd like the independent to do is to get more of the journalists twittering [for example] rather than them having to go through Independent URLs," he says.
"You have to get more bang for your buck and jump on some of the more innovative and emerging new technologies, because they're obviously cheaper at start. It's about finding the best ones to use there and looking at the social wires to see what topics we should be writing about."
While the Indy will be ramping up its social media presence, the importance of using social media from a search perspective is relative to the amount of traffic it drives to your site, Gregory adds.
"Not all of the social channels deliver valuable users. You have to prioritise that along with all your other activity. Search and natural search are still the largest sources of traffic for the Independent - a top three position on Google's going to yield a hell of a lot more," he says.
"We've got to prioritise and social media's not the biggest thing, so we have to do the things that carry the biggest punch."
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