Saida Ayupova

In preparation for PubTech2024, we caught up with one of the panelists, Clara Soteras – former Director of SEO and Product at El Nacional and a professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Clara Soteras is an SEO for News expert and up until last month, she worked as SEO and Product Director at El Nacional, a Spanish news outlet, where she has created the SEO team from scratch. She had also set new workflows between editorial, business and strategy teams to increase traffic and visibility in order to enhance the revenue of the company. Clara was also leading an editorial project related to AI and working to incorporate it into the newsroom. Additionally, Clara is an adjunct professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she teaches about digital content, marketing and journalism. Furthermore, she lectures about SEO for publishers and news sites in different Master’s Degrees and courses and has taken part in several conferences, congresses and SEO events. At PubTech2024, Clara is a member of a panel titled SEO in the Age of AI: Emerging Opportunities and Battles. At El Nacional, you built an SEO team from the ground up. What were your main priorities as you embarked on that journey, and how was that reflected in the hiring choices you made? Clara Soteras I have to mention that as of this month I am no longer at El Nacional. I work as an SEO consultant for media outlets with several publications, companies and agencies. At El Nacional I created a team of 8 people with different roles, people more focused on tracking trends, someone more of an analyst who likes planning and of course the technical part. It is difficult to hire people, but above all I hire good people, with a desire and ambition to learn. You can always learn theoretical or technical concepts, but soft skills, professionalism and education are very important for working in an editorial office. One of the things you set out to accomplish at El Nacional was to create workflows that would connect editorial, business, and strategy teams to increase traffic and visibility with the ultimate goal of boosting revenue. What were the main challenges, wins, and lessons learned? Clara Soteras What a difficult question! First of all, there was no SEO in the newsroom, so the most difficult thing was to explain to the journalists but also to the rest of the teams that we had to work together to understand SEO in order to apply it to our strategy because that would make the business sustainable. As an SEO and audience growth specialist, what is your advice to SEO professionals at digital publications when it comes to identifying and setting priorities? Clara Soteras Above all, work with actions in two stages. You have to win users on a day-to-day basis with real-time and Discover strategies, but also think about tomorrow and work on priorities and technical implementations that will improve your product. There have been many changes in the SEO landscape over the last 12 months – many as a result of the advent of AI-enabled technologies. While we will dive into a deeper discussion on this at PubTech2024, could you share insights into what has been your strategy in navigating the changes? Clara Soteras In the media in particular, we have seen a boom in the Google Discover channel. We have not yet seen any changes related to AI Overviews. Consider that the media has an advantage here and that is that AI cannot yet understand or respond to breaking news topics. While El Nacional offers a wider coverage of European and global events, its primary focus is on Catalonia. Could you share how the regional focus impacts your SEO strategy? How does that impact your priorities and tactics versus if you were to run an SEO team for a publication with a global coverage? Clara Soteras Well, El Nacional actually has content in Catalan and Spanish for all of Spain. But I can give an example of how the SEO team controls, prepares and plans all the lifestyle content focused on local topics that interest the audience in Catalonia. There is a lot of focus on writing this type of content for the core user of the media.