Sport SEO Editor (FTC)

Job Description

Your Team: The Sun Online is the biggest mobile news brand in the UK – and still growing! – with a young, talented, diverse team who publish the best coverage of news, sport, TV and showbiz, lifestyle and family value.

Our hugely successful, award-winning Audience Development team sits at the core of our publishing operation and is constantly evolving, growing new audiences, and building engagement and loyalty with our readers.

We’re looking for a Sport SEO Editor (fixed term contract) to work in our fast-paced newsroom and provide support to the Sport department, journalists and editors – from day-to-day guidance to longer-term insight.

Day to day you will:

• Act as a daily go-to person for journalists and reporters seeking advice or improvements to articles
• Ability to understand what makes sport blogs drive search traffic at key search periods
• Manage our live football, boxing, darts, snooker and other sport blogs in a minute-by-minute environment and liaise with key homepage editors on look and feel
• Report each morning on the top SEO keywords driving traffic
• Make recommendations to journalists for relevant keywords and keyword combinations to target on articles and blogs
• Make further recommendations on what articles should be earmarked to do well on Google Discover and how to keep them optimised
• Report each morning on how The Sun’s sport pages are ranking compared to rivals
• Pre-plan for future articles and events by building out topics and doing keyword research for upcoming exclusives or events
• Monitor trending data for newsroom suggestions and pass to editorial desks
• Optimise top pages for relevant keywords
• Forward link top traffic driving pages to other more recent articles to encourage circulation
• Monitor daily output and ensure relevant cross-linking in articles e.g. ensure 2 other article links in copy, relevant anchor text and links to topic pages. Either by editing themselves or by working with the relevant desk
• Ensure articles and pages are correctly tagged
• Build out topic pages and tag existing articles
• Edit or ensure that picture captions are suitably written and include crawlable/indexable data e.g. Taylor and Tom take to the skies in private jet vs The couple boarded her private jet
• Have an appreciation of how great visuals work in a crowded marketplace on Google Top Stories
• Edit and/or complete metadata on topics and articles
• Work across a rolling rota, including some nights and weekends, to cover the biggest sporting events

Skills and Experience:

• Editorial background with experience in a digital publishing environment
• Expert knowledge and interest in the British sporting landscape
• Knowledge of US sport desirable
• Good understanding of the principles of SEO
• Experience of optimising websites for SEO
• Familiar with a range of SEO tools such as GSC, SEM Rush, Trisolute News Dashboard or Majestic
• An understanding of how Google Discover works and best practices
• Experience of working within Wordpress

We are News UK: One of the leading media businesses in the UK and Ireland, our newsbrands include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Sun on Sunday and The TLS. Our national broadcast brands include talkSPORT, Times Radio, talkRADIO and Virgin Radio, and we have market-leading local radio stations across Ireland. In 2022 we launched TalkTV, a major new TV channel available to everyone across the UK, delivering a schedule of news, current affairs, entertainment and sport. Our world-famous brands provide news, analysis, opinion and entertainment to almost 40 million people each month. Spanning digital and print, audio and video, events and experiences, our brands are home to a plurality of opinion, representing the diverse communities we serve. News UK is wholly owned by News Corp.

Life at News

At News UK some of us work flexibly, in many different ways. We encourage you to talk to us about the flexibility you need. We can’t promise to offer exactly what you want, but we do promise not to judge you for asking.

We champion diversity and inclusion, we strive to maximise and encourage every individual’s potential and ensure everyone feels valued. We support this through our Diversity Board, D&I strategy & training, creating more diverse content and our intern and apprenticeship programmes. We also have 8 employee-led networks; Cultural Diversity, News is Out, GenZ, Sustainability Champions, News for Parents, Women in Tech, News UK Christian Fellowship and we are awaiting the launch of our Women’s Steering Group.

We take pride in looking after our amazing talent at News UK supporting the Health and Wellbeing of our staff. We offer private medical insurance covering pre-existing conditions, discounted gym memberships, ClassPass at Home, weekly virtual HIIT, yoga and run club classes, and a ‘Bikes for Work’ scheme, as well as offering opportunities for physio/massage, counselling and legal support.

In addition we also offer:

• A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%;
• 25 days holiday and up to 4 volunteering days per year;
• Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary & paternity leave up to 2 weeks;
• Wide range of training available, plus full LinkedIn Learning access.

We want to ensure that everyone we meet has the opportunity to perform to their best when interviewing, so feel free to let us know, at any stage, whether you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, and we will do our best to accommodate.