Solve complex News SEO, Google Discover, technical, editorial, and AI visibility challenges with guidance built specifically for publishers.
NewzDash combines senior audience-growth expertise with proprietary data across Top Stories, Organic Search, Google News, Google Discover, and AI Overviews to identify what is limiting performance and what your teams should prioritize next.
27+ years audience growth experience
Former Global Vice President of Audience Development Strategy at Condé Nast and former Executive Director of Search and Social at Disney/ABC. John has led audience, SEO, editorial, product, and growth strategies for major news, entertainment, magazine, and local-media organizations, including ABC News, ESPN, Vogue, GQ, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Disney, and Advance Local.
Contributing Author on The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization (3rd Edition) and regularly trains journalists, writers, and students at institutions like the NYU Publishing Institute.
Sharing cutting-edge insights on news SEO and audience growth at leading media conferences worldwide.
Just when I started working with Shehata, this is when I started to realize that SEO is really really important tool for the project of producing work that is good for society.
Nicholas Thompson — CEO at The Atlantic and former Editor-in-Chief, WIRED
Choose your engagement
Senior guidance for publishers that need recurring support across editorial, SEO, product, engineering, and leadership teams.
A defined engagement focused on a specific challenge, with agreed deliverables and timeline.
The original offering supports both ongoing consulting and project-based audits across strategy, technical SEO, content, CMS, and training.
“You are the best John Shehata! Cannot wait to work with you in your next venture! Will definitely be recommending you everywhere.”
Stephanie Fried — CMO at McAfee, former CMO at Fandom
Core audit offerings
Identify technical barriers affecting Search, Top Stories, Google News, and indexing.
Understand what your newsroom publishes, what performs, and what opportunities are being missed.
Diagnose Discover declines, inconsistent performance, or unrealized growth.
This prevents market-wide changes from being misdiagnosed as a publisher-specific penalty.
Measure how AI Overviews affect your topics, content, and competitive visibility.
NewzDash tracks AIO occurrence, cited sources, citation positions, competing publishers, and visibility across Google surfaces.
Ensure your CMS and page templates support strong search and editorial performance.
“Congrats John. You drove a massive part of the company’s transition to becoming a digitally led business. I’m positive Conde will end up as your client. Wishing you great success.”
Fred Santarpia — President of Endeavor Streaming
Training and workshops
Training materials are tailored to the publisher, workflows, teams, and content strategy. Customized training can be developed for:
Special projects
These projects were part of the established consulting scope, including migrations, algorithm investigations, taxonomy, UX reviews, paywalls, roadmaps, and M&A audits.
Why NewzDash
Most audits rely on crawls, analytics, and generic best-practice checklists. This allows recommendations to reflect both what is happening on your site and what is changing across the wider news ecosystem.
“Working with John and his team has been delightful... Their expertise and dedication have made the integration process smooth...”
Aaron Skiba — Platform Lead dw.com & Apps at Deutsche Welle
Why NewzDash
Understand goals, challenges, recent changes, and internal workflows.
Review client data alongside NewzDash market, visibility, and competitor intelligence.
Evaluate the site, content, templates, systems, and workflows.
Organize recommendations by impact, urgency, effort, and responsible team.
Present findings, evidence, priorities, and next steps.
Provide follow-up advisory, reviews, and measurement support.
Whether you are investigating a traffic decline, preparing for a migration, improving newsroom workflows, or developing a long-term growth strategy, NewzDash can help identify the highest-impact next steps.
