The shared elements of SEO and journalism

Journalism’s first loyalty is to its citizens. SEO’s first loyalty is to its audience.

This connection was in my head during iPullRank’s SEO Week. The first part comes from “The Elements of Journalism,” and is one of nine elements that underpin the obligations of a journalist.

These elements can be mapped to SEO, and serve as both a guiding light for loyalties in our industry, and a framework for content strategy.

Here are some of the elements, mapped to SEO. Thank you to all the speakers tagged below!

A journalist’s first obligation is to the truth ➡️An SEO’s first obligation is to help, inform, and engage their audience in an authentic and relevant manner (Wil Reynolds)

Journalism is the essence of discipline and verification ➡️SEOs need to prioritize accuracy, fact checking, and quality control to genuinely help their audiences (Annie Cushing)

Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover ➡️Many SEOs prioritize best practices and metrics over audience interest. Independence means flipping this priority to the audience, not the platform or best practice lists. (Lily Ray)

Journalists must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. ➡️ SEOs must uncover what's significant and relevant to their audience, and must create content that addresses need and intent, rather than what we think search engines and LLMs want. (Dawn Anderson)

Journalists must keep the news comprehensive and proportional ➡️ ️SEOs should create content strategies that provide complete and balanced coverage of topics that matter to their audiences. Not just keywords with high search volumes.

Journalism’s practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience ➡️SEOs should have the autonomy to drive genuine and authentic content strategies that serve their audiences, not vanity metrics, backed by their expertise.

All of these concepts are directly related to how SEOs should be thinking about optimization for Google and other LLMs.

Brand clarity is critical. That’s backed by authenticity, trust, and relevance to audience needs.

LLMs have an accuracy problem (duh). We have an obligation to create content that helps, not exacerbates, this problem. That can be accomplished with journalistic rigor.

All these platforms reward EEAT. These elements help to ensure we’re planning, creating, and vetting content that is genuinely authoritative and balanced.

There's more, which I’ll explore in future posts.

SEOs have a bad reputation for creating low-quality and inaccurate content. Ironically, journalists have the same reputation problem, driven by a drift away from these foundational elements.

We can flip that narrative by changing the motivations behind why we create content in the first place, and the means by which we vet its quality. We must be loyal to the audience, not the vanity metrics.

This model, and journalistic skills more broadly, can be operationalized at all stages of content creation and distribution.