Washington Post adds three to its SEO team

The following excerpt was sent out from The Washington Post’s SEO and operations editor Bryan Flaherty and head of curation and platforms Coleen O’Lear:

We are thrilled to announce the addition of three editors to The Post’s SEO team: Candace Mitchell, Gwen Milder and Ashleigh Wilson. These SEO editors will work to create strategies to reach and retain new, younger and more diverse audiences through search platforms and expand the newsroom’s best practices around SEO, recirculation and durable content.

As a senior SEO editor, Candace will lead our search audience acquisition strategy. She will partner with teams across the company to understand our search audiences and identify opportunities to create content to turn them into regular visitors and loyal subscribers.

Candace joins us from Gannett, where she led the digital production team at NorthJersey.com and the Record for several years before becoming director of digital subscription strategy for the Atlantic region.

A New Jersey native, she has a bachelor’s degree in communication and literature from Ramapo College of New Jersey.

As a senior SEO editor, Gwen will guide our SEO strategy around durable content and partner with our service journalism editor, newsroom reporting teams and Product to develop and maintain evergreen content.

Gwen comes to us from the Motley Fool, where she served as an SEO content strategist focusing on evergreen content. Previously, she was a digital producer at AARP and a travel editor at U.S. News & World Report. She received her master’s in journalism from Georgetown and her bachelor’s in communication from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her first day will be Sept. 6.

Ashleigh joins the team as an SEO editor after serving as an audience engagement producer at the Houston Chronicle, where she led the dayside programming of the homepage; tracked audience data and trends; and optimized content and projects, including a report on how Southern Baptist leaders routinely silenced sexual abuse survivors. She was also the deputy editor of HouWeAre, a newsletter on identity, race and culture in one of America’s most diverse cities.

Previously, Ashleigh was a web producer and Alexa briefing host at Newsday, a homepage producer at the Arizona Republic and a digital producer in New York.

She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication from North Carolina A&T State University and is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Her first day will be Sept. 6.