Sarah McNaughton
Founder, McNaughton Digital Media
The industry’s secret SEO guru
Sarah McNaughton is a digital-media consultant who runs her own company, McNaughton Digital Media.
She’s known in the industry as the “Secret SEO Guru” — even though she admits she’s fully self taught. Working on SEO (short for “search engine optimization”) combines her love of journalism with her passion for spreadsheets and data visualization. And it’s a skill she honed through years of working at digital publications.
McNaughton helped launch Hearst’s health magazine Dr. Oz The Good Life, and implemented strategies to improve site traffic for Bauer XL, the digital arm of a German-owned publisher known for magazines like First for Women. She also worked several years as an executive at Livestrong.com, a site focused on evergreen health coverage, and at its parent company World of Good Brands.
By Agnes Cheung
I have zero interest in filling the internet with noise just for the sake of noise. I don’t want to just create another article that regurgitates something that already exists out there. It’s a waste of an editors’ time, it’s a waste of the readers’ time, and it’s a waste of space on the internet.
When it comes to health, Google is where it all starts for many readers. The moment someone uses Google, that’s SEO. Livestrong, for example, is very much driven by search. When readers ask Google a health-related question, a Livestrong article pops up, they click the link and then visit the site
SEO begins with thinking strategically about the readers: What do they want when they’re searching? How does a company like a health site deliver the answer in a clear, useful way?
Busting SEO Myths
A lot of people have a misconception around SEO, that it’s all data, very robotic, and not creative. But good SEO begins with humans making decisions. I liked to ask my team, “Do we really have the authority and the right to be covering this topic? Or are readers better served at a medical website?”
Let’s use the example of pickleball. Everybody is writing about pickleball right now, it’s the new sport. So if a journalist I worked with wanted to pitch something about pickleball, they would start by looking at how many times people searched the word “pickleball” in a given month (also called “SV,” or search volume).
Some editors also look at how hard it would be to rank on the first page of a search (“KD,” keyword difficulty). That data gives us an initial idea of how valuable the word is in terms of traffic.
I would ask that reporter to think journalistically about what’s missing from existing pickleball articles and what they could do better. If the articles in competing publications lacked structure, then we would write something that readers find easy to navigate.
Sometimes, media sites might throw articles on the internet without even interviewing sources or looking up research, just to be the first. In that case, we would interview a pickleball instructor and include statistics to make the article more informative to readers.
“Why Is My Poop Green?”
Our healthcare system in the United States is problematic. Many people rely on Google to be their doctor rather than having access to specialists. That’s why in health journalism, it is important to give the most reliable, helpful health information.
The WebMDs of the world either generalize too much or use too much medical-textbook language. When the average person reads about their conditions on those websites, they quickly jump to the conclusion that they have cancer, rather than understanding the nuance of different medical conditions.
When I was the senior editor at Everyday Health, I thought a lot about the business model and how the website was built for pharmaceutical advertising. I distinctly remember a report saying that one of the top-performing articles was for the keywords “Why is my poop green?” There was this article about green poop that was driving an enormous amount of traffic every month! If this article saw a different rank, would that change traffic dramatically? I looked up competitors’ articles about green poop to see which one was the best. Ours wasn’t in the greatest of SEO shape at that point, but somehow, it was still ranking.
I started thinking about what readers were searching for and realized that green poop is something people are not comfortable talking about, even with their doctors. So they turned instead to Google — which is why it had a high search value! That was the very not glamorous starting point of SEO for me.
As I moved forward in my career, I learned more about how people accessed my work through Google, and about the intricate, complicated ways in which Google surfaces and prioritizes results based on certain keywords and values. It fascinated me on a very nerdy, fun, data-driven level. So I kind of gradually slid into SEO.
At Bauer, I developed a strategy to clean up their women’s site. It changed the way the team approached evergreen content for search, and I think there was a 400% year-on-year increase in search traffic. That’s when I knew that I understood SEO, that I do know what I’m doing.
How to Fit SEO into an Article
As journalists, we have been trained to write using the inverted pyramid. Back in the day, I loved a witty, clever lede. There’s still a time and place for that. But with health information, if somebody is worried about their green poop, they don’t have time for a clever lede. They just want to know why their poop is green.
Shorten the lede, get to the point — and a good subhed helps readers find information fast.
I learned more about how people accessed my work through Google, and about the intricate, complicated ways in which Google surfaces and prioritizes results based on certain keywords and values.
SEO made me more aware of how to structure an article to serve multiple purposes for the readers. A good article should be written with lots of different “intents” and keywords in mind. I think that’s another misconception that people have, that there is just one target keyword. The human brain doesn’t just stop at one topic. The brain starts to ask questions about related things. The writer should follow the thought process of the reader and structure the article accordingly.
Imagine that reader who has green poop, the first thing she wants to know is whether this is an urgent problem. So as the writer, start by clarifying general causes and concerns, then break that down into sections so readers can easily find what they need. The first section could read, “Did you eat a whole bunch of green roughage? If so, green poop happens. You are fine.”
Then the reader might want to know about more severe causes that have related symptoms, like a fever. So you’d link to an article about fever and the risk factors, or what’s considered a fever in the first place. Later down in the article, you may even want to cover other colors of poop and what those mean, or link out to other articles about it.
In the past, with a dedicated SEO team of non-journalists, there was an unclear divide. The SEO team would tell the editorial team, “Here’s your list of keywords for the month.” And journalists, myself included, would write articles putting five keywords with the highest search volume in the lede, then repeating them again every other paragraph for the rest of the article where every paragraph would be precisely 120 words long.
These are rules that people made up back in 2010 to game Google rather than to create good content. Google is getting smarter and better at eliminating people who are just trying to get clicks rather than helping others.
Good SEO and good journalism fit like a puzzle. These elements come together for stories that are ultimately intended for humans, but they’re also driven by numbers. Having journalists think about SEO on their own means better content and definitely better articles. It’s better for all people involved.