What the BBC can tell us about SEO?

Recently the BBC posted three edifying articles on their search engine optimisation policy.  The reasons the three blog posts were so illuminating is that traditionally big organisations, particularly news agencies, shy away from the issue of SEO.  Primarily this is because they might not want to reveal their industry secrets to competitors, or to reveal they are doing anything that violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (and many large news sites do break the Webmaster guidelines).

 

The first post gives some background into the BBC’s history with search engine optimisation.  The author of the first blog, Duncan Bloor, speaks about the online content commissioning process, which when he joined in 2009, didn’t take into account the presence of a ‘search audience’.  It was probably assumed that the majority of traffic would be navigating internally from within the BBC homepage.  The website was also poorly structured, and in some sections of the site there were sometimes 200,000 more URLs more than pieces of content.  This was because the site generated different URLs for content depending on how the user navigated there – I know what you’re thinking…duplicate content!!

In the first blog, the author goes on to explain about how why the BBC are so supportive of SEO efforts, and why their staff are all taught the benefits of it – it’s simply another way for the BBC to connect with their audience.  As Bloor puts it, “At heart, my colleagues are storytellers, and search engines are the start of many people’s online stories.”  It’s a bit contrived, but it makes a valuable point none-the-less.

He also gives an example about how writing a decent Meta description can be of value in the SERPs.  They had a page ranking well for the phrase ‘Pancake Recipes’ and other similar longtails.  Between July and August the page had a CTR of 67%, however, upon rewriting the meta description, that went up to 81% between August and September.

The second blog in the series is more technically focused, looking at how the BBC rebuilt the Food section of their website.  It was a huge, and incredibly complex undertaking that will have required the planning and strategization on a scale familiar to fans of the show ‘Monster Moves’.  The writer, Oli Bartlett, discusses the different https responses required to deal with different kinds of pages:

• 410 https Response code – Page Gone – This https response is sent when the requested page is no longer available and no forwarding address is known.  To these pages, the BBC would show users suggested similar recipes to minimise the likelihood they would leave the site.

• 301 https Response code – Page Moved Permanently – This https response was used when a page had been assigned a new URL address, and anyone requesting the page should be sent to the newly specified URI.  In the case of the BBC, the users would be redirected to the new page where the recipe they want is hosted.

• 404 https Response code – Page Not Found – SEOs try and avoid creating these at all costs, but this BBC blog post shows there are times when they are the best answer.  These were used when it made more sense to show a 404 page rather than redirect the recipe back to the ‘Food’ homepage.

The third blog was the most interesting to me because of my background as a copywriter.  Written by Martin Asser, a Senior Product Manager at the BBC, it details how the BBC adapted their headline writing strategy to account for the newly realised ‘search audience’, initially mentioned in the first blog. 

In 2009, the BBC adopted a dual-headline system.  The first headline would be used on the front page of the BBC news website, and would be similar to the kind of headline that is seen in tabloids – short, snappy, attention grabbing, and importantly, not strictly keyword driven.  The second headline would be used at the head of the article itself, and this would generate the Meta data used by the search engines to determine relevance.  Following this simple revision of their headline writing system, their analytics graphs have started to grow rapidly and continue to grow. 

Asser also talks about the importance of SEO to news agencies, but the principles can be applied to businesses in almost all other industries.  Search engine optimisation is about meeting the needs of web users, specifically your target audience.  It’s about creating answers to the questions they are likely to ask, and ensuring that they find that content.  This approach is likely to bring new traffic to the site, and has the potential to secure returning customers.

He also provides a four-point checklist used by the BBC when they write their headlines:

1. Use words that people would use in order to find the information you’re providing – Put yourselves in the position of the searcher, what would you type into Google in order to navigate to the page your writing the headline for.

2. Avoid using words people would never use to find that search content – You might have devised a really witty headline that’s displays your expert grasp of the English language, but if a ‘search audience’ wouldn’t search for that phrase, it probably won’t be very effective.  Think about two of the most famous headlines published by The Sun – ‘Gotcha’ and ‘Will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights’ – both are iconic and memorable headlines, but unlikely to attract a maximal amount of web traffic because people don’t search for those terms.

3. Put the most searchable elements at the front – this is likely to encourage more click throughs from the search engines.

4. Proper names are often used in search, so appropriate names should be included in a headline – this is self-explanatory, and it relates to suggestions 1 and 3 also here.

The key to writing SEO headlines is in context.  In a printed publication, the purpose of a headline it to catch the reader’s attention as they are flicking through a product they have already purchased.  Online, the job of a headline is to get visitors to the website from the search engines, so if the headline doesn’t appear for relevant search results, then it is a wasted effort.  Although subtle, the linguistic differences between the two make for a world of difference.

What have the BBC taught us about SEO

The majority of business aren’t like the BBC.  They don’t have the resources, the budget, the established website, or the already established brand reputation in place before embarking on an SEO campaign.  However, the principles discussed by the BBC in this series of blog posts can be applied to lower budget SEO campaigns for businesses just starting on their journey to SEO success, so I hope you’ve found this valuable.