SEO Adoption at Deseret Digital Media

I had the fantastic opportunity to present at the first SLC | SEM conference with Aaron Wester

Rob Johnson

By Rob Johnson

Wed Nov 16 2011

From 2010-2011 I was very fortunate to work with Aaron Wester who at the time was Director over Web Analytics for DDM and knee-deep in understanding the tremendous success and areas of growth for KSL.com and DeseretNews.com.

I had developed an SEO ranking document that took the best SEO practices at the time and had a column for development effort. With this I even printed the source code of each main web view of the websites DDM ran, and highlighted each area with the recommended changes. It's funny to think that I once did that.

This was before version control like GitHub was a thing. Oh those were messy days. Besides I was very early in my career at this time and no sane person trusted me with production credentials quite yet.

seo matrix

A screenshot of the seo matrix doc

With this, I also created a "Share of Voice" tracking system. This would analyze the prominence and placement of our content for certain key terms on search engines and would rank each location and provide an overall score in comparison to other news media outlets. This would provide an easy way to view how successful we were being at targeting certain topics in comparison to local competition.

seo matrix

A screenshot of the share of voice system I developed

We were able to see incredible gains of search engine referrals to our web properties, with the Deseret News seeing an increase in search referrals of 156%.

seo matrix

An old Omniture graph of search referrals YoY

You can view the full deck that was presented below.

View the deck on SlideShare

Or download a PDF of the original deck.

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