How To Do SEO For Your Newsroom Website

Table of Contents

Introduction.

With the overflow of information on the internet, Newsrooms are becoming more difficult to rank. Hence it’s becoming difficult to build a sustainable online journalism business.

I worked in journalism years ago and I can tell you for sure, how hard it was for us to compete with influential figures already existing in the industry.

The only way to keep a news business alive is to create a robust online presence, which is only possible by implementing the right SEO strategy for news websites.

What is Newsroom SEO?

SEO is a set of optimization strategies aimed at improving the positioning of the search engine organic results of newsroom websites. The focus is usually on Google, which dominates the market share for search engines worldwide.

Why should I do SEO for my Newsroom?

SEO for journalists and newsrooms remains the only way to build and sustain journalism as a business since the traditional newspaper is fading off fast.

If print journalism is losing space to digital media, you must look for readers and subscribers on the internet, and this is where newsroom SEO comes into play.

1. Newsroom SEO helps boost the visibility of your website.

Optimizing your newsroom website for SEO helps boost your website visibility online. There are billions of newsroom websites online, but a proper SEO game will help you stay on top.

Estimates show that only 0.78% of users click links on the second page of Google results. SEO for journalists helps your website appear on the first page so people can easily find it.

2. You get Organic traffic.

Organic traffic remains the only method required to build a sustainable business but it’s quite difficult as it requires in-depth knowledge of SEO to achieve.

When users click on your link via Google or another search engine, they join your organic traffic statistics.

That means you did not have to pay for the digital ads or media that made these potential readers reach your website.

3. SEO helps you Monetize your newsroom easily.

No matter how you decide to monetize your newsroom using paid ads, affiliate marketing and many more. You need a certain number of free and targeted traffic to make it a reality.

By increasing the number of readers you attract to your website using SEO, you can also increase the number of users clicking on the ads on your website or becoming subscribers to your digital newspaper.

4. SEO helps your newsroom gains authority.

Google as a search engine is designed to rank authoritative websites first before others. The links that appear in the first few Google results gain authority in the market.

It’s as if they received a seal of trust from the search engine, which placed those sites at the top because they have quality content, deliver the best responses, and offer the best user experience.

How Should I do SEO for my Newsroom?

SEO results in a series of benefits to media survival and competitiveness. Have you seen the snippets that appear at the top of search results when you look for something online?

According to a Hubspot report, content that appears in the featured snippets gets a 2x more click-through rate (CTR) than others.

This is why you need to get SEO for your newsroom business on point. Do you want to optimize your newsroom website for SEO? Here is how it can be done.

1. Understand what SEO means.

You need to understand how SEO helps benefit your business before applying it to your business.

SEO is a set of optimization strategies for websites, to improve their positioning for search engines such as Googe, Yahoo, Bing and many others.

The goal is to appear among the very first search results for keywords related to the topics that your news pieces, articles, interviews, and columns address.

As we said before, people search for everything on Google — including news about current events, data you collected years ago, and people you’ve interviewed, among other subjects you may have reported on your website.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on this blog on beginners’ guide to understanding SEO. Check out the link to the article to learn more.

(The Beginners Guide To SEO) Learn How To Do SEO The Right Way

2. Design a responsive website to start with.

Responsive design is an approach to web design that makes your web content adapt to the different screen and window sizes of a variety of devices.

Responsive Web Design involves creating web pages that render well across a variety of devices and screen sizes.

Apart from making your website appear sleek across all computer devices, search engines tend to favour responsive websites over non-responsive ones.

With the internet increasingly accessed from mobile devices, it’s no longer enough to have a static website design that only looks good on a computer screen.

To build a responsive website you need to understand the best web development practices or work with the best website builder.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on some of the best website builders. Check out the link to the article below to learn more.

What Is a Website Builder and how Does it benefit Your Business?

3. Avoid Producing Copied Content.

News contents are more likely to be plagiarized because they are all trying to pass the same information.

Republishing content is a big thing in the news world. A lot of publishers have developed a habit of finding and republishing great stories from other domains on their websites.

Most times they quote their sources and give credit to the original authors – but this kind of practice can harm their search rankings in more ways than they can think of.

If you are producing copied content for your newsroom website then Google will devalue your ranking on the SERPS.

It’s not bad to write an existing just make sure you at least rewrite them using your own words, to save you stress.

4. Submit Your Website To Google News Publishing Center.

Google News is a massive source of traffic. It sends more than 6 billion clicks to news websites across the globe every month.

Google developed its news curation platform to give journalism a voice globally. Submitting your news website via Google news comes with a lot of rewards which are mainly traffic.

There is a clear set of guidelines and best practices that publishers need to follow or at least consider if they’re trying to get featured and ranked above their competitors in Google News.

Optimizing for Google News mostly revolves around developing a bug-free XML sitemap. It needs to be clean and functional, and not overflowing with content.

Finally, Google provides an interface for the newsroom to submit their website for approval, to get this done you need to access the google publisher dashboard, use the search console to verify the ownership of your news website and enter all the details like news section URLs and labels before submitting for a review.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to make money online with Google News. Check out the link to the article to learn more.

How To Make Money Online With Google News

5. Learn how to use Google web stories.

Google web stories work similarly to Instagram stories and Facebook stories that are told through multiple cards and come with an easy tappable interface.

A Google Web Story is a mobile-first, visually engaging, tappable content format. They provide users with quick concise information.

Google Web Stories are powered by AMP technology and are owned by Google. AMP news stories combine videos, texts, and images and are built on the AMP framework.

AMP stories can be embedded across various websites and apps, and they are more effective in engaging users than usual news stories.

6. Work on Your Website Structure.

Next is to work on the structure of your website if you want to rank higher on search engines, you need to Categorize your news sections carefully, making it easier for people to find the news they want to read.

To achieve this, you need to optimize your site speed and work on XML sitemaps. When it comes to news site sitemaps, you need to keep a few things in mind.

As you post regular content, your site’s crawl speed will increase. As Google bot detects new elements on your website every time it crawls, it will keep coming back for more.

7. Create Valuable Content.

Newsroom platform often creates content that are trendy and can go cold easily. As a news website, your authenticity matters a lot. You have to be careful about what you publish on the website.

You can make your website content evergreen by optimizing it with relevant keywords, linking them to newly published stories or trending news or redirecting the content to a newer and more relevant news piece.

Your content headline should not be misleading or offensive. The body of your content should be factually correct and contain detailed information.

How To Write a Blog Post That Ranks On Google

8. Get Social.

Having a social signal helps you rank better on Google. Creating social media profiles just to share your latest news and content can help boost your search engine rankings.

Social media can help you to interact with your audience and understand what your readers want to see on your news website. Social media can also help you in increasing brand awareness and brand reputation.

If you have a WordPress website, you can enable social sharing easily using free plugins. This will allow people to share your content with their friends and family across various platforms.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to grow your business across every social media. Check out the link to the article below to learn more.

9. Build backlinks.

Backlinks are the inbound links that come to your website from another website. Backlinks are an essential part of SEO that sends signals to Google if your website should be ranked or ignored.

Backlinks help to improve your visibility and drive traffic to your website from various sources.

Building backlinks is not an easy task, it requires you to build a genuine relationship with reputable blogs online.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on this blog on how anyone can build backlinks and become successful. Check out the link to the article to learn more.