Using evergreen content to demonstrate the value of search-led publishing

Context

• Search performance had become a growing concern as other digital publishers increasingly competed for high-intent traffic.
• GMA New Media was helping push broader SEO adoption across the organization, including training and closer attention to search fundamentals.
• Coming from earlier roles where SEO had already been part of day-to-day digital publishing, I saw an opportunity to demonstrate the basics through a practical editorial experiment rather than rely on theory alone.

My role

I helped shape the initiative, selected topics, commissioned contributors, edited the pieces for search intent and structure, and monitored their traffic sources after publication. The project sat within GMA New Media rather than the newsroom itself, so the aim was to provide evidence that editorial teams could evaluate and apply independently.

Approach

• Selected evergreen and seasonal topics around holidays, financial literacy, lifestyle, and major sale periods
• Commissioned multiple external contributors to build a varied portfolio of search-oriented articles
• Applied basic SEO principles including keyword targeting, search intent, clear headings, internal linking, metadata, and evergreen framing
• Published the pieces within relevant GMA digital sections
• Monitored traffic sources after publication to distinguish search-driven visits from social distribution
• Compared the performance of the commissioned pieces with comparable lifestyle content from the regular editorial pipeline
• Shared reports and findings with internal stakeholders to demonstrate how search-oriented content behaved differently from social-heavy editorial traffic

Outcome

• The commissioned articles consistently performed more strongly in search than comparable lifestyle content from the regular editorial pipeline.
• They also generated higher average pageviews per article despite the pilot publishing at a much smaller volume.
• Traffic-source analysis showed that the commissioned pieces attracted a greater share of visits through search, while much of the existing editorial traffic remained heavily dependent on social distribution.
• The findings provided practical evidence for more deliberate SEO practices and helped reinforce greater attention to keyword choices, article framing, and CMS tagging in subsequent editorial workflows.