News SEO is unlike other industries such as ecommerce and B2B. Publishers rely on different methods of optimizing and platforms.
After performing multiple SEO analysis for clients in the media industry, we’ve put together a list of tips that can help improve your news SEO.
Publish news quickly
Publish news as quick as possible and share it on other social channels to widen the audience.
Make sure you post your content to your homepage and it’s in your sitemap to get Google to index it fast. Most larger publishers get their content index within seconds now.
Publishers typically have a 48 hour window to be in the Google Top Stories carousel. Time is crucial to make sure their story is optimized as best as possible to achieve higher rankings. Being quick and the first to report is a good way to get organic backlinks to your website and get your pages indexed faster.
Write evergreen content
Make evergreen content part of your strategy. With most news articles receiving the bulk of it’s traffic within a short period, it’s best to have someone focused on an evergreen strategy as well.
Create pieces of content that users love to share. Use high quality images within your stories. Charts, tables and data are excellent ways to tell a story and are more likely to get shared.
Overtime, continue to update your evergreen pieces if it begins to lose traction. Do keyword research and find potential evergreen content pieces. Do a content gap analysis and see what pieces of content your competitors have but you do not.
Internal linking
Encourage journalists to link internally to other pieces of content within the website.
Internal linking is often overlooked but is a very powerful tool to ensure other pieces of content are discovered. This will help Googlebot crawl and navigate the site efficiently and can easily rank pages in the search results.
For example, if you have a topic page about the tesla stock price with the url /stock/tesla, you would want to link to that page using the exact match tesla stock price within your article.
Craft good headlines
Headlines and titles are one of the most important pieces of text on the page.
It helps Google understand the main topic of the page and what is shown in the search results. Take extra time to craft a good headline and keep your most important keywords to the left so it doesn’t get cut off in the search results.
Accessibility
Keep accessibility and user experience a top priority.
With 15% of the population having a disability, making your site accessible and user friendly should be a part of your overall strategy. Remember to add alt text to each image. Additionally, you can gain a lot of traffic from Google Image Search alone.
Conclusion
Hope this list helps improve your News SEO strategy as a news publisher. Do you have any other tips that your organization is using to help improve SEO?