NewsTrack Blog: SEO

As the sports section of the main newspaper in Boston, I found mixed results when assessing the Globe sports section's SEO strength. On the one hand, the Globe does a good job of including buzzwords in headlines. On the sports page of the Globe's website, I saw that nearly every headline had the name of a player or team executive (or multiple), and those that didn't had team names, city names, or league names. So from an SEO perspective, the Globe does a good job framing its content.

On the other hand, I conducted a brief experiment to see how often the Globe would appear in generic searches using Google's News function. I searched: "World Series," "Red Sox," "Patriots," "Tom Brady," "Celtics," and "Boston sports." "Red Sox" generated the most results from the Globe, while "World Series" and "Tom Brady" showed no articles from the Globe on the first page of results. The others had only one or two. While this was a pretty random and surface-level test of SEO, I do think it's telling. I did this experiment on a big day in sports: two days after the Red Sox won the World Series and the day before their parade, the day after the Patriots won a Monday Night Football game, and an hour after the NFL trade deadline. For Boston's news leader to merit so few results on these common searches is not a good sign.

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