Boost Your News Site's Performance with Proven SEO Tactics

Traffic is the primary source for publishers to increase visibility and scale revenue. While there are various channels to drive traffic, SEO helps you tap into a vast audience and drive bulk traffic to your site. 

As Google is the go-to source for accessing the latest news and content, securing the top spot in search engine rankings can make all the difference in gaining traffic and attracting readers. The higher you rank, the more visibility you gain and the more traffic you can potentially drive to your website. 

However, optimizing articles for search engines while maintaining the integrity and relevance of your journalistic content can be difficult at times. To help you tackle this imbalance, here are 7 SEO best practices that can help you focus on both SEO and content quality simultaneously. 

Best SEO practices for news publishers

Here are 7 best SEO practices that ensure all your content is rank-worthy 

• Create Good Quality Helpful Content

Search engines like Google strive to provide users with relevant, informative, and engaging content. In the long run, this factor positions your site as an authority in your niche, leading to higher positions in SERPs and more traffic-generating opportunities. 

When your content is genuinely helpful and engaging, readers are likely to spend more time on your website, explore other pages, and share your content on social media. These positive user behaviors send signals to search engines that your content is valuable and, as a result, will improve your SEO rankings.

When readers repeatedly find relevant and reliable information on your website, they are likely to return, subscribe, and become loyal readers. This establishes your website's authority in the industry and increases referral traffic and brand recognition, contributing to your overall SEO success. 

• Get Featured in Google News

Appearing in Google News gives your news articles unparalleled exposure. When your content is featured in the Google News section or carousel, it captures the attention of users searching for the latest news. This prime placement amplifies your visibility and drives targeted traffic to your website, attracting readers.

Additionally, being featured in Google News adds a layer of credibility and trust to your brand. Google has strict guidelines and algorithms to ensure that only quality articles are listed in the feed. By meeting these criteria, you establish your website as a trusted authority in your industry, and readers are more likely to view your content as reliable and shareable.

Moreover, Google News opens up opportunities for backlinks and collaborations. Other websites and publishers often reference and link to articles featured in Google News, which can improve your website's backlink profile. These external links from reputable sources further enhance your website's authority and SEO rankings.

• EEAT Signals 

EEAT has become increasingly important in recent years as search engines strive to provide consistent, reliable, and authoritative content. 

Expertise refers to creating content that delivers a meaningful and satisfying user experience. Experience involves presenting content that reflects a deep understanding of the subject matter and is authored by individuals who cover the respective fields in depth. Authoritativeness speaks to the overall credibility and recognition of the content and the publisher in the broader digital landscape. Lastly, trustworthiness underscores the reliability, accuracy, and legitimacy of the content. 

EEAT guidelines broadly align with best practices for building a solid brand presence. While it is an ideal standard to ensure quality, it also guides publishers to focus on adding value to readers rather than focusing solely on SEO metrics. Some of the best ways to ensure your content aligns with EEAT signals are: 

Highlight Experience: Engage subject matter expertise to create content. 

Exhibit Expertise: Include writer bios with credentials, citing first-hand accounts and exclusive data to back up your insights and increase the credibility of the content. 

Show Authoritativeness: Consistently deliver high-quality, well-researched content to build a loyal audience base and brand recognition in your niche. 

Ensure Trustworthiness: Care for user security and fact-check your content before publishing.

Together, these form a framework that search engines rely on to assess content quality and allow readers to access credible content.

• Schema (Structured data)

Schema markup allows you to provide rich and detailed information about your news articles directly to search engines. For publishers, relevant schema types include Article, News Article, and Blog Posting. These schema types enable you to specify essential details like headline, publication date, author, image, and even the article's word count. Using this structured data, search engines can display enhanced search results, such as article snippets with images and other relevant information. These visually appealing and informative search results can increase click-through rates and drive more organic traffic to your website.

For instance, by implementing the NewsArticle Schema markup, you provide the necessary details that make your articles eligible for inclusion in these highly visible and prominent sections. This can drive significant traffic and increase your brand's visibility among users searching for the latest news.

Similarly, by including author details in the schema markup, you can go a step further in building trust among your audience. Both Google and readers value content created by experts and professionals, hence providing author information directly contributes to your brand's expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EEAT).

• Technical SEO

While creating quality content is vital, optimizing your website's technical aspects can significantly impact your search engine rankings and overall SEO success.

Technical SEO focuses on optimizing website speed, improving mobile-friendliness, ensuring proper indexing, enhancing website structure and navigation and more. Addressing these technical elements creates a solid foundation for your website's visibility and discoverability in search engine results.

Website speed has a substantial impact on user satisfaction and engagement. Slow-loading pages can lead to high bounce rates, negatively affecting your SEO rankings. By optimizing your website's speed through caching, image compression, and code minimization, you create a fast and seamless user experience that encourages visitors to stay on your site and consume more of your content.

Another crucial aspect of Technical SEO is mobile-friendliness. With 59% of the global traffic coming from mobile devices, ensuring your site is mobile-responsive and offers a seamless experience across different devices is essential. Besides being a ranking factor, mobile friendliness enhances user experience, reduces bounce rates, and improves conversion rates.

Additionally, technical SEO involves optimizing your website's structure and navigation, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content. There are also various plugins and SEO tools such as Ahrefs, RankMath, Yoast, etc, that can help you optimise your overall site health

• Optimize for Google Discover

Google Discover provides a unique opportunity to reach users who may not have actively searched for your content. Instead, it presents relevant articles and news based on the user's preferences and browsing patterns. It provides exposure to a broader audience, creating brand awareness and driving traffic to your website.

To optimize for Google Discover, focus on creating high-quality, informative, and visually engaging content. Google's algorithm looks for content with fresh and original insights to engage users. Incorporating eye-catching images, engaging headlines, and concise summaries can make your content more appealing for discovery.

Another crucial aspect of optimizing for Google Discover is understanding your audience's interests and preferences. Analyze your website data and identify the topics and content types that resonate the most with your audience. By aligning your content strategy with these preferences, you increase the likelihood of appearing in users' discover feeds. 

• Internal Linking

Internal linking creates a web of connections that allows search engines to better understand the relationships between different pages on your site. This internal network of links helps search engines discover and index your content more effectively, which can lead to improved visibility in search engine results.

One of the key benefits of internal linking is the ability to distribute link equity or link juice throughout your website. When a page on your site receives external links or ranks well in search engines, you can pass along some of that authority to other pages by linking to them internally. This helps to potentially boost your SERP rankings of your news articles.

Moreover, internal linking facilitates a smooth and intuitive user experience. By linking related articles, you guide your readers to explore more of your content, increasing their time on-site and reducing bounce rates. 

Conclusion

SEO is competitive, as countless publishers vie for the top spots in search engine rankings. However, search engines like Google have become the central repository for accessing news and information, and if you want to reach your target audience effectively, you need to be visible in search results.

By prioritizing SEO and implementing proven strategies, you can position your site to attract more organic traffic, reach a wider audience, and establish it as a trusted source of news and information. Consider signing up for the iZooto newsletter to learn more about increasing visibility and audience engagement as a publisher.