The Independent kicks off search strategy to take on competition

April 3, 2008
by Simon Whittick

Latitude will run both paid and natural search for the newspaper, which relaunched its website at the end of January. Search is central to its drive to increase user numbers.

Jo Holdaway, commercial director for Independent New Ventures, the digital arm of The Independent, said its search campaigns were still a work in progress as paid search had never been fully exploited by the paper before the relaunch.

“We haven’t used PPC heavily before, and because our site has changed so dramatically since relaunching, with lots of new content, we want to drive traffic generically to that content,” she said.

“I’m not sure you would get a dramatic uplift in traffic if you bought the terms ‘US election’ or ‘credit crunch’, but all different types of strategy will definitely going be investigated,” she added.

The Independent wants to be recognised as having the best news content online, said Holdaway, but needs to improve visitor figures to get that message across. “You have to invite new users to the party,” she said. “One way of doing that is attracting them when they’re not necessarily thinking about visiting your site. That’s what we need to concentrate on.”

While The Independent does pay for ABCE audit figures, it doesn’t publicly release them. The February figures from ABCE revealed that The Guardian website was still top of the newspaper rankings, with 19.7m unique visitors, followed by Times Online (15m), The Sun (13.3m) and The Telegraph (12.3m).