Does the BBC need some SEO?
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Jaamit
3 years ago -
7443
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An article in the Mail on Sunday yesterday sensationally ‘revealed’ that the BBC is “paying Google to top its search results” for high traffic keywords such as the Mercury Music Prize. This has provoked a few gasps amongst the search community that the Beeb is somehow buying search positions in some sort of shady deal with Google, using some of it’s £100m marketing budget.
To me it’s pretty clear: the Mail reporter, whether out of stupidity or a cynical attempt to spin a story out of nothing, has failed to understand that, erm, anyone can pay for search positions in Google – ITS CALLED ADWORDS. Nowhere in this article did it explain the difference between paid and organic search results, nor did it make clear that the BBC were somehow paying for natural search positions.
When you go beyond this misunderstanding, deliberate or not, it boils down to “Scandal! BBC Spends Our Money On Marketing!” The implication that the BBC shouldn’t be using public money on marketing such as paid search is ridiculous – it’s a bit like saying charities shouldn’t take out newspaper ads or the Department of Health shouldn’t spend money on sending direct mail about preventing the spread of swine flu. Paid search is another form of marketing, and frankly, its a lot more targeted and effective than most other forms of marketing.
For me, however, the interesting part of this story was in the quote from the BBC:
Promoting content like the Mercury Prize online is an effective way to inform the licence fee payers who will want to watch it or read about it,’ the Corporation said. ‘The BBC has an annual budget for marketing and value for money is at the heart of how decisions are made about spending it.
To me this says that the BBC are looking at search as a medium, and looking for the most value for money from their marketing budget.
Well, a quick Google search of “mercury music prize” shows the following results:
Behind the official Mercury site and the ubiquitous Wikipedia entry, we have the Telegraph and the Guardian’s coverage leading the pack with two entries each, with the BBC languishing towards the bottom of the page with a listing about LAST YEAR’s Mercury Prize winners!
Clearly the Beeb are missing a trick here. Both the Guardian and the Telegraph are noted for their SEO efforts and this result shows the investment is paying off. Contrast this with the BBC – one of the most authoritative sites on the web, they should really have the power to outrank Wikipedia if they did things right. But instead they haven’t even got their basic architecture right to flow PageRank to the correct page, their page titles are horribly unoptimised, and their URLs leave a lot to be desired. Although it would be a big job to organise the sprawling amount of content across bbc.co.uk, with some concerted onsite SEO they could see some serious results from basic onsite optimisation across their site.
If the BBC are serious about promoting their content online, and see the medium of search as being effective and value for money, it doesn’t make much sense for them to be spending money on PPC while neglecting their SEO. What’s more, investing in SEO would give them much more value for their taxpayers’ money.
25 comments so far to - Does the BBC need some SEO? -
Maybe they should take a leaf out of the Telegraph’s book – Julian Sambles did a talk on it at Think Visibility, it is amazing what they have achieved through a focus on SEO…
completely agree – the Telegraph are leading the way with their news site SEO, the Beeb could learn a lot from just watching what they’re doing, and as you righltly say listening to people like Julian Sambles.
Fascinating! You think they’d be tempted with SEO at some point, wouldn’t you? Maybe they don’t think it’s worthwhile or cost effective, take for example the page URLs. You could change it from a 39120301.stm to something more “keyword friendly”, but that’d completely ruin about a gazillion links :S.
More than likely though, they have amazing brand awareness. I don’t search for news on Google, rather I go directly to the BBC’s website. I’m not the only one to have them as my home page as well.
I think they have 3 different factors that have stopped them really looking at their SEO till now: a) their huge site authority has meant they could afford to be lazy (i think this is no longer the case); b) being a huge organisation means they’re not particularly agile and quick to embrace change that smaller orgs pick up quickly, and c) the fact that they’re (kind of) public sector does come with a lot of bureaucracy and regulations so changes come slowly and take years to be approved.
also – re new URLs breaking their links: not if they get their 301s right. They could just try it out on a small section of the site first – bit like what Matt Cutts was talking about here.
There’s a sort of logic to the BBC page showing as Mercury Music Prize is its old name. It’s rebranded as Barclaycard Mercury Prize now. If you search for [Mercury Prize], you get this year’s results.
Bloody rebrandings.
Yeah, I did consider that, but focused on “mercury music prize” after doing some keyword research in Google’s keyword tool: the phrase [mercury music prize] got 4,400 exact searches in the UK last month, whereas [mercury prize] and [barclaycard mercury prize] got… “not enough data”… so ranking well for the latter doesn’t mean much in terms of visitors!
Interestingly this seems to be another example (like the x factor: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/x-factor-google-tools/) where the google keywords and google insights tools seem to suggest quite different search patterns:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=mercury%20prize&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q
ooh interesting! thanks for keeping me on my toes on that one – quite frustrating that there’s a discrepancy between the two, which one do you trust? sounds like Google Insights is better at time sensitive terms. Hopefully my point still stands tho!
Jaamit – insights looks more likely to be right from my massive sample of, er, this example and the x factor one. Dunno!
Sunday Mail didn’t even mention the difference between organic and ppc? craziness. The bbc is probably getting mobbed with “i do seo” emails after an article like this! they certainly need the service as you’ve shown.
Yes, its crazy. my gut feeling is the reporter DID know about it but was playing on people’s ignorance about this to get a story. Which is probably worse than them not knowing the difference.
Spot on – this is a big load of nothing really!
Why shouldnt the BBC spend money on AdWords. My only worry about doing it if I was them was the return on that investment – i.e. they arent going to make any money from it, which to me would be a signal to not spend money in the first place.
Would love to have the opportunity to do SEO work on the BBC website – there are some shambolic things going on with that website!
And to employ a couple of good seo’s would likely bring a lot of traffic to the website, at a much cheaper cost than PPC.
Cheers. Well I think the “R” in ROI can be measured in ways other than making money – for BBC it would probably be around engagement and readership. But yes, SEO could be a lot more cost effective, esp when you consider the cumulative traffic from long tail terms and the long term effects it can bring.
Perhaps someone from the beeb should have been at Julian Sambles Think visibility talk on Saturday.
I find the idea that the BBC shouldn’t market to be yet another scare tactic from competitors who don’t like the competition. If the BBC are going to continue to be a worthwhile national investment (which personally I think they are) they need to be able to invest in the same things that commercial brands invest in, or they will fall behind becomming a national embarassment rather than a point of national pride.
Interesting post man!
Some might argue that the Beeb can simply trade off their brand however as some commentators have noted, as the fight to promote content, rather than brand becomes more fierce this tactic won’t give them lasting success.
They need to evolve not… revolve.
Yep definately a case of the reporter needing to check facts. Actually I think this folds into a larger issue of a lot of tech reporters really not knowing a whole lot about technology!
Seems there’s far too many Journo’s who’s idea of research only extends as far as wikipedia…
Great story, BBC never want an SEO due to its highly qualified no.s of content pages quality and popularity. Popularity is enough for ranking and its lakhs of pages. Contrs to BBC and their whole team.
BBC’s redesign takes SEO seriously. This post points out some SEO aspects that BBC uses in the new design 2010.
http://www.manseo.com/bbc-news-redesign-seo-lessons-learned/
I’m just wondering its drag n drop categories on homepage. Does it help Google???
If the BBC are going to continue to be a worthwhile national investment
Great story, BBC never want an SEO due to its highly qualified no.s of content pages quality and popularity. Popularity is enough for ranking and its lakhs of pages. Contrs to BBC and their whole team.
Some might argue that the Beeb can simply trade off their brand however as some commentators have noted, as the fight to promote content, rather than brand becomes more fierce this tactic won’t give them lasting success.
completely agree – the Telegraph are leading the way with their news site SEO, the Beeb could learn a lot from just watching what they’re doing, and as you righltly say listening to people like Julian Sambles.
verry good
Yes, its crazy. my gut feeling is the reporter DID know about it but was playing on people’s ignorance about this to get a story.
This post points out some SEO aspects that BBC uses in the new design 2010.