In December 2023, INMA and Google News Initiative (GNI) awarded their fourth annual Elevate Scholarship to 50 news media professionals from 31 countries. This series features these impressive media professionals who are shaping our industry.
As SEO manager for El Nacional in Spain, Clara Soteras Acosta is always looking for ways to innovate and expand.
Clara Soteras Acosta has always been passionate about storytelling. Her love for writing led her to study journalism, and although she started her career as a reporter in television and radio, Clara quickly found her niche in the digital world, where she began specialising as a digital journalist.
While she was working as a digital editor for a public service broadcasting company in Spain, she discovered the power of SEO and began learning everything she could about it.
That led to being appointed an SEO manager, and Clara continued studying everything she could find to learn how the company could benefit from SEO. She also enjoyed sharing her new findings with her newsroom colleagues, who were able to apply what she had learned.
Her efforts paid off: “In a year and a half, we managed to increase the number of unique users by 400%,” she said.
In 2022, Clara took on a new challenge, working for El Nacional, a Spanish digital native newspaper in Catalonia, Spain. She led the creation of an SEO team and trained a newsroom that didn’t have any experience in digital and, a few months later, she also assumed responsibility of the product department.
“I think we have created a great audience team that has changed the mentality of journalists and editors and trained them in digital writing and content creation,” Clara said.
Currently, as head of SEO for El Nacional, Clara’s tasks include attracting new users and generating pageviews. Understanding analytics and what readers consume is vital in her day-to-day work, and as a product manager, Clara is eagerly consuming information on how to improve and constantly reviews the initiatives of media giants like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Financial Times.
In addition, she works as an adjunct professor of journalism and communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and serves as a judge for global, European, and UK Search Awards. This year she is also a member of the programme committee for Online News Association Conference and one of the judges for its online journalism awards (OJA).
One area of focus is the subscriptions channel, and she is also working with the advertising team. Meanwhile, she is always looking for ways to innovate and expand. For example, along with the head of social, she is looking at how to capture a new audience for the newspaper.
“Currently most of our audience is over 50 years old,” Clara explained. “We are planning different formats, such as contests, quizzes, and youth content, and using platforms such as TikTok, to carve out a niche in the market.”
Clare has already amassed experience in analytics, SEO, and audiences, and now she is eager to learn more about advertising and how to monetise subscriptions or other products.
“I would like to have broader knowledge about the media business,” she said. “I think it is essential to understand all the data of our readers and their needs to offer them the best content, products, topics, and distribution.”
She is also studying the intersection of AI and journalism to discover the best ways to implement AI in a newsroom and test different tools.
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