Ryan Restivo is building a tool that helps local newsrooms become data aware and maximize SEO best practices quickly and easily.
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RSSOne of the themes that has shown up several times on the podcast is that in order to thrive, local news organizations are going to have to operate more efficiently going forward.
One big part of this is going to be utilizing technology to save time and streamline processes. Today’s guest, Ryan Restivo, has been working on a project that is a great example of this.
Ryan was a 2022-23 Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow, and his project there was to build a Slack app that helps newsrooms with SEO best practices. This is where YESEO was born.
YESEO is a free Slack app that helps newsrooms create relevant headlines, generate the right keywords to use, and gives right information at the right time to help publishers get their work seen and read. YESEO has been installed in over 450 workspaces and continues to grow.
In this episode, Ryan and I talked about his background, which includes years with local media organizations as well as a stint with Major League Baseball and why he chose Slack as the channel to create his SEO tool.
Ryan explains how YESEO works from a workflow perspective, what its capabilities are, and discusses SEO more generally for those who may view it as something of a black box (yours truly).
We also talked about YESEO’s business model, why it’s free for newsrooms to use, and discussed AI and why Ryan thinks that it’s a poor term to use for the technology.
Listen to the full episode wherever you get you podcasts, or on the player at the top of this page.
PS – I installed YESEO after our conversation and used it to generate the title of this episode!