Why ‘The Atlantic’ No Longer Cares About SEO

SEO News

The number of online news consumers has grown consistently over the past half-decade, yet not every publication has gotten the same lift as The Atlantic, whose web audience has catapulted from approximately 500,000 to 13.4 million monthly visitors since taking down its paywall in early 2008.

As we’ve explored previously, there are many factors that have contributed to The Atlantic‘s online success: assigning a number of well-known columnists, like James Fallows and Andrew Sullivan (now of The Daily Beast), to begin writing original pieces for TheAtlantic.com; launching and staffing two new online news properties, TheAtlanticWire.com and TheAtlanticCities.com; and building up its digital ad offerings to support those hires.

Furthermore, The Atlantic is adapting its editorial strategy to the shifting landscape of online news consumption, namely, to capitalize on the growing importance of social networks, rather than search engines, as sources of traffic.

“Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media,” Scott Havens, senior vice president of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company, said in a phone conversation ahead of his on-stage interview at our Mashable Connect conference in Orlando, Fla. last weekend. “Truly [our writers] are not really thinking about SEO anymore. Now it’s about how we can spin a story so that it goes viral.”

SEE ALSO: Inside The Atlantic: How One Magazine Got Profitable by Going ‘Digital First’
Bob Cohn, who was recently promoted to editor of The Atlantic Digital, rejoices the change. “Before, it seemed Demand Media was going to own the Internet by assigning stories based on search returns. It was a cynical approach to journalism,” Cohn recalled. “We’re no longer writing to get the attention of Google algorithms. We’re writing to get you to share it, to digg it.”

Cohn says that writers author their own headlines, which are frequently rewritten by their channel editors and sometimes tweaked again by a homepage editor. Often, a headline that appears on Facebook or Twitter is different than the one that appears on the site.

I asked Cohn why he didn’t feed in a separate headline in the metadata. He said he and his team could, but it was no longer important enough to compensate for a boring headline, even in search results or on Google News.

And what kind of headlines do well? “A great headline is just a great headline,” says Cohn. “It has to be clear; it has to be intelligent. We’re not writing for machines. We’re writing for humans.”