News producers and journalists are struggling to retain their target audience with the increasing number of fresh content on the web. The conventional media, like newspapers, is facing the most significant setback as there is a paradigm shift in how people perceive media. Day by day, new people are relying on online news stories and videos. The only way to keep the news business alive today is by creating a robust online presence. This is only possible by implementing the right SEO strategy for news websites.
It is widespread to see breaking news features on social media and then published on mainstream news portals. A billion searches happen every day as people search for news online. The journalists and the media houses have to work the extra mile to make the news stories reach the target audience. Because of this, there is a massive growing interest among journalists in learning SEO.
Following are some of the SEO strategies for Media and news outlets
- Getting featured on Google’s Top stories
According to a popular survey, the content that appears in the featured snippets gets a more click-through rate than others. Higher CTR means significantly higher organic traffic. The featured snippets came to prominence after 2014. They appear at the top of the SERPs. These snippets feature the summary of the answer to your query.
If you want to get your website to appear in the featured snippets of the search engine, you should target the question-based keywords.
It would be best if one focuses on writing news stories which start with the questions like-
- How to?
- Where?
- Whom?
When you type a search term, many terms related to the search term will appear below in the search query.
2. Submit your website for the Google news publishing center
Google is the search engine that filters thousands of news websites and displays newsworthy stories. It also segregates them based on the preference of the user and their interests. There is a news section of Google that sorts the news based on the categories. Therefore, the published information needs to increase the chances of getting featured.
When once clicked on the search bar, you will stumble upon a list of featured topics and news topics that suggest the trending keywords that are newsworthy.
For the journalists who want their website to appear in the Google News Publishing website, they have to raise an online request and use the search console to verify the ownership of their news website. Then, they should enter all the details, like the news section URLs and the labels, before submitting for a review. If the search engine accepts your application, your website will be listed under the Google news section.
Google search results power all the top stories of Google. This means that there is comparatively higher competition among the websites to rank in the Google News section.
To increase the chances of the news story appearing on the news section of Google, you should have a disciplined strategy. The news coverage should be factually correct.
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3. Experience with AMP Stories Format
Google is the search engine that has a dedicated section for featuring AMP news stories. AMP is the abbreviation for Accelerated Mobile Pages. They are similar to Instagram stories and Facebook stories. They come with an easy interface.
These stories also combine texts, videos and images built on the AMP framework. They can be embedded across various websites. These stories are more effective in engaging users than usual news stories.
They are hosted on the publisher’s website. They do not disappear after twenty-four hours like the other social media stories. The AMP stories contain less content and more images. When clicked, they can expand to a full-page featured news story.
The AMP stories are optimized for mobile users and have a faster loading time. They can be shared across various platforms.
4. Work on your website structure
To get ranked in search engines, you should focus on a proper news website structure. It is also very important to categorize your news section. This makes it very easy for the other people to find the news they want to read. When one starts a new news website, they want Google to index it at the earliest.
Given below are the things you should keep in mind when it comes to sitemaps-
- Your sitemap should contain news from the last 48 hours.
- Sitemap should be updated as new news stories are published.
- Rather than creating new sitemaps for each article, you should update the existing one.
The crawl speed of your site will increase as you post regular content. It is very important to optimize your content in such a way that there are no unwanted pages on your website.
5. Create valuable content
It is very important to create relevant and original content. It is also very important to have category pages for every kind of news. The news you put up should be authentic and legitimate. It is very important to be careful about what you publish on the website. The content headline should not be misleading. The body of the content should contain detailed information.
Content marketing is an evergreen process and you should think about the long run. Even when the information is backdated, you can keep the online traffic flowing to your website.
The content should be optimized by using relevant keywords. You should link these keywords to newly published stories or trending news. You can also redirect the content to a newer and more relevant news piece. The old content can also be optimized by adding more information, videos and images.
Providing information in bullet points and using subheadings for different sections. It is also very important to avoid publishing irrelevant content that will result in Google taking down your site.
In journalism, news stories tend to follow the inverted pyramid structure. This means that vital information always comes on the top. The less important information is there at the bottom of the story. This is something one should take into consideration when doing SEO for journalists and media people.
