News & Publisher SEO
News SEO that's run the biggest newsroom in the UK.
I was Head of SEO at the BBC for two and a half years - BBC Sport, BBC News, Bitesize, Food, CBeebies, CBBC and World Service. Every BBC digital product. During the 2018 World Cup, the England campaign delivered an additional 11 million organic sessions for BBC Sport. That's a different kind of proof to running a content site. It's editorial SEO at national scale, where every domain decision is measured in millions of daily visits.
News SEO operates at a speed most SEO work never touches. A national news site publishes hundreds of pieces a day, and a breaking story needs to be crawled, indexed and appearing in Google Top Stories within 15 to 30 minutes of publication. If the infrastructure can't do that, the story is invisible when the audience is at its peak.
Organic sessions for BBC Sport from the 2018 World Cup England campaign
BBC - World Cup 2018AMP clicks in a single weekend during the Winter Olympics - 10% of all BBC Sport traffic that weekend
Google Search ConsoleYear-on-year Google referrals to Sport stories on Transfer Deadline Day
BBC Sport - 2018BBC journalists trained to write and structure content for search
BBC - 2017-2019Indexation speed is the product
There's no point in a BBC Sport story about an England result appearing in Top Stories two hours after publication. The technical setup - Google News sitemaps, crawl accessibility, the rendering stack, structured data - has to work in minutes, not hours. Building and maintaining that infrastructure is the foundational work in publisher SEO, and it's invisible right up until it fails on the biggest story of the year.
Structured data is where the visibility is
LiveBlogPosting schema on live match coverage. Article schema on news stories. VideoObject on video. These aren't SEO extras - they decide whether content appears in the rich formats (Top Stories, live blog carousels, video carousels) that drive most news search traffic. I made the case for LiveBlogPosting schema on BBC Sport live coverage and led the implementation.
The domain decision that preserved the BBC's search authority
When I arrived in 2017, an organisation-wide plan was in motion to migrate every BBC product from bbc.co.uk to bbc.com. Food had already moved. Bitesize was split across three states at once. I stopped the migration and reversed it - arguing from the data that Google indexes .com as international content, and moving UK-audience products there would hand decades of .co.uk authority to a domain that Google's UK ranking signals don't attach to in the same way.
The Search Console data made the case unanswerable. Once Food returned to bbc.co.uk in March 2018, the .co.uk estate held a six-figure count of daily clicks for Food alone, while the .com version fell away entirely - by design. The bbc.co.uk search authority that exists today is, in part, the result of that decision.
Scale creates problems smaller sites never see
A news publisher with ten years of content has hundreds of thousands of URLs, and a large share of them drive nothing while cannibalising the pages that do. Log file analysis - what Googlebot actually crawls versus what you want it to crawl - is different work at publishing scale than on a 5,000-page ecommerce site.
Editorial teams are the scale-up
In publishing, the leverage isn't in the SEO team. It's in training 300 journalists to write better headlines, structure articles for search and understand why internal linking matters. I designed and delivered that training across the BBC. When every journalist files better for search by default, the compound effect dwarfs anything a central SEO team can produce on its own.
Most SEO consultants have never worked a breaking news cycle. I've run search for the UK's biggest publisher through two World Cups, an Olympics and a domain decision that protected the whole estate. If your stories aren't in Top Stories while the audience is still searching, that's the gap.