This is how the payment wall affects the SEO of El País: it has lost 34% of its Top 3 keywords

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The arrival of the internet in our lives has meant being able to have information from any part of the planet at hand at any time and in any place. However, this enormous advance has also meant a headache for the media  that have had to adapt to the fact that information must flow in the network of networks. To try to continue earning a living, many media such as El País, have decided to add a Paywall, that is, a payment wall for which users must pay to view the publications. It is logical: the work is paid. But ... what consequences does this have on your online visibility? Can it end up turning it into a more profitable medium but less influential in public opinion?

The payment wall of El País

El País has been to date the most influential generalist communication medium on the internet and outside of it in the Spanish-speaking world. On May 1, 2020, El País integrated a payment wall on its website, so that now its users can only read 10 news items per month openly, for free, before having to pay . The first month is one euro, with no commitment to stay, and after that the payment is 10 euros per month , or for those who prefer the annual subscription, 108 euros.

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Of course, El País is not the first online medium that seeks to integrate this business model to its website, since The New York Times (the reference that El País follows) or The Washington Post , the Clarín de Argentina or Globo, from Brazil have integrated this paywall for years, however, we had to know if putting up a paywall is detrimental to the SEO strategy of El País , and this is what we have analyzed.

The loss of El País traffic

It's true, El País has lost traffic. But in these months, since May, it is a general trend in the communication sector. During the months of stricter confinement (especially March and April) the consumption of media increased a lot, and as the de-escalation arrived, the traffic has also decreased, a fact that we can easily corroborate, for example when comparing in  SimilarWeb , the traffic website of the last 6 months of El País against the traffic of La Vanguardia , a medium that does not have an integrated payment wall, and as you can see the trend is very similar:

Graph 1: comparison between organic traffic in the last 6 months between El País and La Vanguardia

But in addition to SimilarWeb, we can see the fall in traffic of El País by Comscore , who confirmed that El País lost 1.8 million visitors during the month of May, a trend that continued during June, the month in which it was positioned  as the fourth most read media in Spain , and also in July, the month in which it fell to  sixth place in the ranking of the main generalist newspapers.

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El País has gone from the first national media to the sixth, online

We could attribute the collapse in traffic in El País to various factors: summer, a season of the year in which generally falls are noticed in traffic of any medium, the same de-escalation and many more, however, as we have discovered , SEO can have a lot more to do with this.

The big drop in organic traffic: 15.22% in just one month

Many users have complained about how annoying it is to find search results in Google, and thinking that they would find the information they need, when they enter they find a payment wall , a fact that now happens with El País.

This bad experience for the reader made us reflect on what Google would do in this situation. And this data came up in Semrush :

El País traffic fell from 42.7 million in April to 36.2 million visits in May from organic search . To make this data clearer, it represents a 15.22% drop in traffic before the wall and after the wall.

We can zoom out much more, to 2 years before the wall, and we are clear that this fall is not seasonal , in fact, in May of last year its traffic had shown growth that maintained the following months.

From April to August, the drop in keywords was 21.35%

But OK. 2020 is a crazy year, this drop in organic traffic could be explained by the de-escalation. The test of cotton is in whether your keywords are now lower in the search engine than before the subscription payment. And in case there was any doubt, we analyzed in Semrush the positioning of their keywords , and indeed they have shown a great fall: the total of keywords positioned in April 2020 was 5.01 million, a figure that fell to 4.48 million in May, that is, post paywall, a drop of 10.57%, all at once.

By August, the number of positioned keywords was already 3.94 million, that is, the fall from April to August was 21.35%. And the trend remains downward.

Although this trend could refer to a loss of keywords that were not very important, not very relevant to your daily traffic. That is why we have focused on the star keywods of El País, those that have the top 3 in the search engine, those that generate the most traffic to any website:

The top 3 keywords for El País was 234,280 last April, while this top 3 a month later, in May, fell to 187,120, that is, a sudden drop of 20.55% after imposing the wall of payment.

For August, the top 3 keywords for El País were 154,950, that is, a drop between April and August of 33.86%, according to the data we have obtained in Semrush. 

El País has lost 1 of every 3 keywords that it previously had positioned in the Top3.

The hard cost of switching to a paywall model

Of course, this trend is still moving , but seeing the evolution of the impact that the paywall has had on El País's SEO, we can interpret that the foreseeable thing will be that the organic traffic of the medium will continue to fall.

If we side with the user it is very understandable to imagine the bad experience of finding a result in the search engine and not being able to read the news once the link has been clicked, and these unsubscribed users will gradually avoid clicking on these results .

In the long run, Google will take this as a loss of interest from users towards El País, which will lead it to continue losing organic traffic and positioning.

We can imagine that this is not a surprise for this large medium that will surely have already calculated this risk, however, it is clear the hard cost of walking to a paywall model like the one it has imposed: less traffic in exchange for more valuable traffic.

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