All of the terms above are obvious and cynical attempts to increase pick up by google but we are increasingly starting to see this creep into the world of journalism? Over the past few days I have been looking at how to increase traffic to clients sites and pick up of news we are putting out. While trawling a number of online resources I came across an excellent column written by Charlie Brooker at The Guardian. Charlie had noticed that hits for one of his stories had gone through the roof because he had included 911 conspiracy theory into the body of the piece.
According to the latest issue of Private Eye, journalists writing articles for the Telegraph website are being actively encouraged to include oft-searched-for-phrases in their copy. So an article about shoe sales among young women would open: “Young women – such as Britney Spears – are buying more shoes than ever”.
Also, these phrases aren’t just being placed anywhere as research has shown that the average reader scans each page in an F pattern. This means that they read the top line, then glance halfway along the line below before skimming their eye downwards along the left hand side. If there is nothing of interest here the reader will go somewhere else.
Charlie was suitably disappointed about this change in journalism but another outlook was taken by Asavin Wattanajantra at IT Pro who explained that this is the way journalism is being taught these days. The thing about online journalism is that unlike newspaper journalism it doesn’t pay to be the first to break a story now it is all about getting your story googled. This is backed up by a recent blog from Chris Green who discussed the way that IT Pro evaluates traffic analysis.
Once every few months he gathers the page impressions (PIs) and unique user visits (UUs) generated by author, rather than by article type or section. In his words “The end result is that we have the traffic generated by an author alongside how much we’ve spent with them over the given period. You divide the amount spent by either the PIs or the UUs and you end up with a cost per PI and a cost per UU, based on a specific author”. This provides Chris with a metric on the effectiveness of that author’s work to bring in traffic to the site, as well as the cost of acquiring that traffic.
Asavin explains that he builds a story with this in mind, and ensures that in the first paragraph he includes links to all the main websites and that the content is written around words he knows the bots will pick up.
Is this the future for how PR will be evuated in the future? - by how many hits a piece of news generates? or how many links to the clients site rather than the more traditional number of clippings? I don’t know the answer, but it is always worth understanding how a journalist builds a story and we all now need to think about whether the information you have provided a journalist will help improve their google rating for the story.
