Five Critical SEO Considerations While Optimizing News Websites
Through Ahrefs’ Top Organic Pages Report, you can observe that their 10 pages are top of the funnel Category Hub Pages. Then, they silo their news under...
Topics for Critical SEO Considerations While Optimizing News Websites
Learn to optimize your news website for search engines. Such factors will help you rate higher and have more traffic.
News websites have the benefits of a constant stream of fresh content and unique Google features.
However, there are other approaches of SEO for news websites is special.
Just putting news content into the world cannot guarantee it will rate in Google or attract traffic towards your website.
Here, you will learn about five main considerations to plan your SEO strategy for a news website so that you can win in the competition.
1.Create Evergreen Content into Your Approach
As a news website, your key business model is writing about timely subjects.
However, 99% of the time while you write about timely subjects your articles have a short life. You will observe an initial point of traffic to your article and the article will get less traffic.
It is the nature of dealing in news that you are subject to the flows of what news reflects. In order to drive high levels of traffic consistently, you should keep pumping more news.
However, what if you can keep the main news model intact and add more consistent flows of traffic to the website? You can if you create in evergreen content.
Evergreen refers to the content which is relevant and beneficial for a long period of time. Bankrate is an example of a news website which has conducted this perfectly:
Through Ahrefs’ Top Organic Pages Report, you can observe that their 10 pages are top of the funnel Category Hub Pages. Then, they silo their news under such hub parts developing a powerful and related experience. When they get their share of traffic on real news articles, they could create in evergreen chances to provide them with more consistent flows of traffic.
2. Ensure Your Content Shows up in Google News
Obtaining your content involved in Google News is a necessity.
Begin by evaluating the content guidelines for inclusion to ensure that your website is up to Google’s criteria. Most valid news sources already follow such guidelines.
Then, review the technical guidelines for inclusion to ensure Google can crawl your website and realize your pages news articles.
When everything looks good, submit your website for Google’s approval. You can observe whether your website has been accepted normally in three weeks.
When your website is accepted, work on producing strong content. Google News works on many of the SEO principles as organic search. Industry authenticity, keyword optimization, distinctiveness, and social shares will help you rate better and receive more visits from Google News.
Check out Lily Ray’s guide to optimizing for Google News, Top Stories and Discover to learn more.
3. Focus on Clean Architecture
News websites are a challenge for SEO growth since they are big and always growing by nature.
Staying on top of your website architecture is necessary in terms of keeping your website passable for readers and easy for search engines.
Organization is uppermost. Look at the tags and categories you are using on your website and ask yourself if they are working for you.
You require sufficient tags and categories for readers to easily find what they are looking for, but are the ones you are using valuable?
If you have many tags with merely a few articles, it may be more useful to combine things to fewer number of pages with more content.
Another significant aspect of website structure is depth. Indeed, how many clicks does it take to obtain from your homepage to any other page on your website? Retain this amount as low as possible.
Search engines crawl your website through following links from one page to the other, and the “shallower” your website is, the more probably it is that every page will get indexed. Retaining your tagging system organized will help this issue.
The other thing that you can do for enhancing your website’s structure is adding pagination to the bottom of every page, instead of only using “next” and “previous” buttons. It makes it easier to go to specific pages without wading through other, non-related pages.
4. Mobile Usability Is Vital
Today, mobile usability is vital for any website, but it’s even more critical for news websites.
Many Americans refer to their news on mobile phones.
Your website should be made through responsive design, fitting your format to whatever screen size a viewer uses.
In addition, you may want to regard adopting AMP, a kind of publishing technology which removes formatting and makes pages load highly rapidly for mobile users.
Prior to doing it, you will want to read this AMP case study from Independent.ie.
5. Optimize for Crawling Speed
In case of breaking news, you want your pages to be crawled and indexed rapidly by Google.
People do not wait around on a slow website to load, especially when they have access to so many other websites for news.
There are many SEO factors which can help with crawling speed, such as website speed, hosting performance, and XML sitemaps. However, you cannot treat news sitemaps such as every other sitemap. Google has put some significant guidelines for sitemaps in the news vertical.
Firstly, you need to add 1,000 URLs or less in your sitemap. However, you can involve more by breaking the URLs into multiple sitemaps. In addition, make sure not to exceed 50,000 sitemaps in your sitemap index file.
In addition, you should update your news sitemap with fresh articles as they are published to keep Googlebot convinced.
When you post such new article URLs, do not create a news sitemap for each one; instead update your current sitemap. Your news sitemap will merely include news from the past two days and all articles will be kept in the news index for 30 days.
Ultimately, when you go to develop your sitemap, use non-Google plugins.
If you apply the Google Sitemap Generator, it will involve URLs which do not correspond to your special news articles. In addition, the frequency of publication on your website will positively affect crawl speed and it makes sense.
In general, if Googlebot always finds new content on your website with every crawl, it will come to your website more often.
Another thing to keep in mind is that quantity cannot constantly equal quality.
Be sure that your content has value. If you post too much or publish useless content, Googlebot will waste its valuable crawl budget on such less valuable pages and it means that your good content could be kept unseen.
As a rule, all the time avoid repeated content and block unwanted pages with robots.txt/robots meta to make sure optimal crawling speed.
The Takeaway
News websites have a little different function than many other kinds of websites. Most of the visitors are drawn to news websites through breaking news in a short expiration date.
If you retain such guidelines in mind, you will be on your way to have a better-optimized news website and then enjoy more readers.