Recently a source in The Boston Globe newsroom forwarded to me a memo sent to the staff about the paper’s performance in Google search during 2024. “We get 25%-27% of our traffic from Google; it’s a significant way we reach people who don’t come to the Globe on their own,” wrote Ronke Idowu Reeves, the paper’s SEO editor. (SEO stands for search-engine optimization.)
As you might imagine, the big SEO winners in 2024 were the Karen Read trial, the phrase “who won the debate” (perhaps a reference to both presidential debates), the Celtics victory parade and Steward Health Care.
The memo, though, prompted another thought: What is the purpose of SEO in the age of paywalls? As you probably know, the Globe has an especially strict paywall, with no quota of gift links for the month. I emailed Reeves and asked her whether SEO was successful in getting casual visitors to sign up for a digital subscription given that they couldn’t read even the one story they’d searched for. She forwarded my email to spokeswoman Carla Kath, who told me by email: “Yes, a good number of people do read and subscribe to our stories that they encounter on search. But, because the scope of search is constantly changing, we are always adjusting how we approach it.”
It’s something I’d like to dig into more deeply at some point since it’s fundamental to the economics of digital news. Twenty years ago, paywalls were rare, and the idea behind SEO was to drive massive audiences to your stories so that they’d see the ads that accompanied them. The first iteration of The Huffington Post stressed SEO heavily, and its infamous 2011 headline “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.”