SEO For News Publishers: Hands-On Tips To Boost Your Traffic

3:00PM Aug 26, 2023

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Welcome everyone. Good morning. It's so great to see so many faces here on a Saturday the last day of OMA maybe not as bright eyed and bushy tailed. For those of you who were here at the hotel that was quite the wake up call, was it not? I'm still recovering from that trauma. Anyway, thank you so much for coming out to our session. SEO for news publishers. You are certainly in for a treat today. I'm Kazi Dominguez. I'm the customer success manager for the trees elute news dashboard. And my role involves working closely with news publishers in both North and South America as well as Australia. So since 2012, Theresa loot software's award winning news dashboard has delivered near real time data and actionable insights into the search performance of news publishers across Google. We are here to help online news publishers navigate the volatile search universe in their quest to build a successful SEO strategy. But before I introduce our speaker, it's just a little bit of housekeeping I want to get to before we get started so during today's session, you the audience will have a chance to interact and engage and share your own SEO tips. So I want to encourage you to already start thinking about something you'd like to share with the group where you have a quick tip that worked for your own SEO strategy because we want to share the knowledge together today. Also, I was it was brought to my attention that our slides are not opening within the app for whatever reason, but we can make those available so make sure you stop by and talk to us at the end. We're also going to be tweeting them out. So if you're not following Jesus, leave us dashboard on Twitter X, whatever. We're there and we'll be tweeting them out for you guys as well. Also for those of you who have graciously stopped by our booth this week, and entered our giveaway, we will be drawing for the winner of the free news SEO analysis of your news website. So we'll take we'll take care of that at the end of the session as well. So and now I would like to introduce our speaker for today's session. Joy Johnston is a digital journalist with over a dozen years of newsroom experience and over 20 years of SEO experience. She began her Seo career@about.com and has worked in the newsrooms at the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Cox media group where she helps conduct SEO training sessions and developed SEO best practices. As news SEO strategist at choose Aleut news dashboard she supports news publishers seeking to improve their search visibility. In addition, she is an award winning author and caregiver advocate. Her most recent book slow dog is her first children's book and based on Joy's real life senior rescue dog Murphy. So please join me in welcoming our news SEO strategist Joy Johnston.

Thank you and thank you Carsey. Good morning. It's been a little bit longer of a morning that some of us wanted. And again, you know, I see so many familiar faces from the past couple days. So thank you for stopping by and thank you for being here today. And we hope that you get a lot of good SEO tips out of our presentation today. Just to get a barometer of the room before I jump in to the first slide, I want to ask you guys, for those of you who work in a newsroom, how many of you are aware of your newsrooms? SEO strategy? Wow, okay, great, great. Okay. Wonderful and how many of you are actively involved in that SEO strategy? Awesome. Okay, great. So you may know the answer to this question already. Why needs SEO but when I did my very first SEO training about 15 years ago at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, I was assisting the SEO manager and we walked into the room and there was a wall of investigative reporters. I'm talking about like the old school grizzled the you know, hardcore investigative reporters and they were just sitting there stonewalling their, their question was why why do we have to do this SEO stuff? And what I found over the years is that the question has changed a little bit, in that it's a little bit more nuanced. Now. People know people have an idea of why they need to do SEO in a newsroom, but there's barriers right? And so today, I want to stress to you that you know, even if you work for a small newsroom, if you have limited staff and limited resources, you can implement winning news SEO strategies. So why news sel? Well, for tracelink News dashboard, our focus is on visibility. So that visibility is twofold. The visibility is first of all, making sure that Google can actually see the content that you're producing. And then you want that content to be indexed, be crawled, be indexed, and then hopefully ranked well by Google so that your audience can see that content. So it's really a two fold process. And I want to stress and this is gonna be a common theme throughout the session today. Every every piece of the news article lifecycle every step should involve an SEO technique. And that's even before you know what you're writing about, because you really should be doing you should be implementing SEO techniques as you're doing content discovery and you know, what we'll touch upon this a little bit today was user intent and search queries and things like that. So every step of the news article process, you should be implementing us SEO strategies. So we bought we asked our news publisher partners so we have partners from around the world and we have many in Germany, but we also have many from other parts of the country. So we asked our publishers Hey, what is your take? Why why are you doing news SEO on your newsroom? So one publisher fee for chief editor of La nacional.com said SEO strategy expands the visibility of our content beyond our own audience, increases the articles engagement and provides a more clear understanding about the concerns and behavior of the public. And what I love about this is that it's he was talking about expanding your audience not you know, we focus a lot on audience and that's great. But you you do want to focus beyond just your core audience. You want to reach more people. That's how your content will continue to be visible and be competitive and Google. So I'm going to go ahead and jump into the news SEO tips and then after this section, we're going to turn it over to you guys. You guys can ask questions. If you have some issues that you're having in your newsroom around, you know, general SEO issues, throw them out, we can try to crowdsource a solution. I mean, you don't have an opportunity often to have a bunch of really smart journalists in one room together. So let's take advantage of that. So just to start us off with a little fun thing. I don't know if we have any Glengarry Glen Ross fans in the room. Okay. All right one. All right, take it I'll take it. So it's about selling and salesmen and Alec Baldwin is teaching a sales class and so the acronym is ABC. Always be closing. So I just I just updated it for our purposes and always be optimizing. And that is, the common theme for today is that you should always be thinking in your mind, how can I optimize this content every step of the article creation process? So let's get into headlines. This is one of my favorite topics, okay. 65 characters that you've probably heard that 65 characters is kind of like this, you know, golden number for headlines and SEO. And and that's not you know, that's not a lie. The 65 characters came around because that's where Google typically cuts off a headline and search engine result page filled so when you look at the headlines, if you look at articles on a search engine result page, you start counting the characters it's around that 65 mark where the headline gets cut off. So the shorter the headline, the more your headline will appear. On the search engine result page and you know, desktop mobile views. Now I will say that over time that with the especially on the mobile display, there, Google's trying a lot of new like mobile news boxes and different configurations and you will find that you can get away with like 70 Plus and it'll still mostly the headline will show up in those results. I don't like to have a specific number but I always get asked for one. I prefer to say concise, keep your headlines concise. And I saw recently in some Google documentation, they also use that word concise being concise. Not only is it just better writing, but of course you can fit more of the headline into not just the SERPs, but into your apps into your newsletter. So think beyond just specific, you know, SEO when it comes to the search engine result pages and think about the other surfaces your content appears on so if you write it well for SEO, then it will look well across those other surfaces. If you do decide to write a longer headline than it is absolutely critical to front load those keywords because again, the headline will get cut off. Most of your readers are on mobile now. So think you know just think about how you search for content. You know, you have to have those keywords front loaded in order for the user to understand what the article is about and you have, you know, maybe a second or so to get their attention right. Be literal in specific so I'd love Pong headlines. That's why I put that Simpsons up there. I love writing them. I worked in a newsroom where I mean if we had a pun writing headline writing championship like we would have won for sure. But don't do that for SEO right. Be literal, be specific, and definitely include geographic location of course, but setting is also key. So what I mean by setting is if it's a school shooting, you know reported in Philadelphia, well, what kind of school is it? Is it a high school? Is it a middle school is an elementary school? Is it a daycare? Those details make huge differences. If it's a shooting at a mall, is it a department store? Which department store? Is it at a jewelry store? Is it at the food court? Those details make huge differences. And then use modifiers This is more when you're doing list. So you know best Philadelphia restaurants have 2023 or top Philadelphia tourist attractions you know, make sure that you're setting those lists that especially when it comes to like discover those types of headlines work really well. And then this is my pet peeve and I hope this isn't a common practice. But in my last newsroom at some point. One of the TV stations thought that writing the keywords the in for the headline in all caps was helping them win on Google and it's not true. Not only does it not matter title case, Google does not have a character limit. They reiterated this recently. You know there's no character limit for page titles. So and I'm not talking about like your kickers or even a call to action. Like if you're writing about a viral video and you do watch an all caps, that's fine. It's not going to help necessarily with SEO, that could help with the user experience. But yes, do not write keywords in all caps. So I did a headline analysis because I was curious about the 65 characters. So like, I've been looking at a lot of headlines since I started working for tracelink News dashboard and analyzing them and like I think the headlines are much longer than that. So I did a quick analysis with our data and I looked at 55 headlines. And these were the top performing headlines in the news boxes. So these weren't just random headlines, but these are the ones that performed at best. And so I pulled from 10 major publishers, most of them were us and for last month, and the result was the vast majority 84% had more than 65 characters. What really surprised me that was over 75 characters to super long headline 49% I thought that the middle line was going to be the most but I was wrong between 65 and 75 characters, almost 35% And then that sweet spot the under 65 characters was only 16% So you know, what does this mean?

It means that, you know, believe when Google says hey, you know, check your count doesn't matter. Now, Google may not care about character count. You should care about character count again for all the reasons I already mentioned. You also want to think about you know, keeping it short because your CMS might have a character limit. I know I used ark in my last newsroom and it our configuration had 100 character limit. So and I mean that's more than generous. You know, you definitely should be able to, you know write most headlines within 100 characters. Okay, so, articles. Again, you kind of see a common theme here. Don't focus on word count. Focus on covering the topic. Well, you may be able to cover a topic. In 500 words, it may take 1000 words, but the key is to make sure that if the headline is a question that you're answering it well, and if it's, you know, if it's a topical related headline, make sure that you're covering that topic, according to your audience needs. Now this next one, there's been controversy recently because John Mueller goo Google. He came out recently I think it was on a podcast and he kind of said offhandedly, oh, doesn't matter if you link to authoritative sources. But I think that there needs to be a little context there. Of course, it doesn't matter if you're dropping in cdc.gov links into you know, car review or you know, computer reviews stories. Of course, you want to link to qualified authoritative sources, not only for SEO purposes, but for for brand authority. And, of course, you know, to build up trust with your audience, right. So continue linking to authoritative sources, but to make sure that you're drilling down. So if you're writing an article about like a CDC alert, say a food poisoning alert or something, make sure that you're actually linking to that food poisoning alert and not just the cdc.gov I see this happen all the time. And not only is that not great for SEO, but it's just a bad user experience. Definitely linked to your own content. This I see so many times, you know, this gets overlooked. Make sure that you're linking to your own content. You know, this is so important for topic authority, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And then if you are writing a longer article, make sure that you're subheads make sure you're using subheads. First of all, do not do not publish a giant block of text saying how that will look on a mobile device, right? I immediately leave those kinds of stories, and I love to read. Make sure that you're using subheads. And that's a great opportunity to add some more keywords in there. Right. So definitely use that. And then this next tip is really important. You're not going to hear me talk a lot today about competitors. Because, frankly, I think people I think publishers spend too much time thinking about the competition. Now don't get me wrong, competitor analysis is critical. And we have several competitor analysis features in the news dashboard. So do take it seriously. But you need to make sure that your own content is optimized. Well, you know, if you're just looking at the competition day after day and copying what they're doing, that is not a winning SEO strategy, not a winning content strategy, right? You want to be the one that's being chased. And you only do that if you're able to, you know, be creative and think about unique angles that you can take so you got beat out on a story. Okay, what can you offer now, can you offer a new photo or a new quote a new interview, try to add a new feature to stand out against the competition. And we got some tips from a publishers. And this goes exactly with what I was saying. So Chris Wagner, head of SEO at RP digital, he said, Don't forget to be different, publishing an article with the same article image as your competition will make you seem like everyone else be different. And I couldn't agree more with that. images and video. So this is a little more technical. I do find that most modern content management systems do a lot of this for you. Make sure that your alt text is being included. Usually when you upload an image to the CMS, it will ingest this content automatically for you but make sure that that's actually happening. Make sure that you're optimizing images and videos from mobile. That means really pay attention to those thumbnails. Make sure that you're the screengrab from the video is optimized. And don't forget that videos. You know, Google does look for Page Title Headings and captions on video. So there is optimization opportunities there. And then I did want to spend a couple minutes on Google discover before we turn it over to q&a. So how many of you in working in newsrooms, again, how many of you find Google discover to be really important to your newsroom strategy? Okay. So yes, Google discover it. It drives a lot of traffic for some of our publishers. And we've talked to publishers, you know, where it's driving the vast majority of their traffic. That is not necessarily a good thing. Of course, John Mueller has talked about this recently as well. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. We know this. I mean, you know, those of you have been around for a while, you know, we've gone through Google updates. We've gone through Facebook and instant articles, Twitter and newsletters. Now it's like second round in newsletters. We've done all these things, right. We've done all these pivots. But I would say, you know, definitely pay attention to Google discover and there's ways you can leverage it to try to build topic authority. So Google discovers is a bit of a different animal for Google because it's not Search Driven. Specifically, it's a customized feed, very personalized feed. And it is based on partially on what people search for but also depending upon your privacy settings. can be things like travel, like travel to Philly, so you know, it's bringing in a lot of Philly news, daily restaurant recommendations, things like that. Sports so NFL season is about to begin. So I'm starting to get that NFL news in my feed. So one of our German publishers said users expect tailored information and their Google discover feed optimized content for a good fit. So how do you do that? Well, you can craft emotionally engaging Call to Action headlines, that does well. Typically, the content leans more towards lifestyle and software news and hard news unless you are a political news junkie, so then it probably wouldn't, but make sure that you're using high quality images and short videos. Those do really well on Discover. And you know, it is unpredictable. So try to consider it supplemental. One way we like to use discover we have a discover report that shows you if your article is performing well and discover is it also performing well on the mobile and desktop SERPs. So, one tip I've learned from my colleagues is that you can take that information and then you know, don't forget about desktop because desktop, there's some opportunities still there. Mobile desktop is very, very competitive. And if you're a smaller a newer publisher, you're really going to struggle probably to to you know gain action in that area. But if you look at desktop it's not as active not as competitive. So you might be able to, you know, get some traffic out there if you target specific topics that do well also in discover. So just a tip I've learned from my colleagues and with that, the turnover human a sprayer. Any questions? on anything that we've talked about so far? Great. Oh, okay. Um, I think I saw your hand for Sam.

What's your advice? For custom URLs? We recently got that ability through our CMS. And we're trying to come up with some best practices.

Oh, that's a good one. I mean, we do have a feature in our tool where we can target specific URLs and paths. Yeah, that one can't answer off the top of my head, but touch base with me after the session I'm happy to to follow up with you on that one. Because of the sidebar

what what recommendations do you have between having the title tag and the regular article headline? Sometimes we'll write the regular auto article headline for like a human or for social and then the title tag will be more SEO driven. Is there drawbacks to trying that?

Great question. I almost included this in the presentation. So I'm glad you asked. Yes. So you can kind of have your cake and eat it too. With headlines so you may see so you may have seen okay, I said you know write concise headlines, but the New York Times doesn't write concise headlines on Washington Post and plenty of other publishers don't write short headlines they write very long conversational headlines as newspapers style. So what they do is yes, the h1 that headline. Tag The front facing headline on the live website is the long flowing newspaper style headline, but then, in the better title field, you will see the optimized shorter version of that headline. And you can look at this on any publisher site. Just go to an article right click View Page Source and you can see it and you know, you could compare the two. It's kind of a fun experiment to do actually did it recently when I was doing that headline analysis. My take on this is it's not a bad idea to do it if you have a large newsroom with plenty of resources. In the smaller newsrooms I've worked in, we didn't do it because it's a challenge to make sure you're keeping up with both headlines, especially if it's a developing news story. So it's it's a fine tactic to do it, you know, allows you to have two different headlines and as you said, Sometimes one plays better on social and but that wouldn't play well on search. So certainly fine to do but make sure that you're keeping up with most of those headlines as the story develops. This gentleman

quick question on the the Google helpful, unhelpful update. How much did that change the game for the publishers you work with? And what tips might you have? If you haven't made adjustments because of it? What should you be doing?

Yeah, great question. So you're talking about the one that that's kind of been for the last year because there's one that just happened like this week that I haven't even had a chance to look at yet. Yeah, so helpful content. So you know, honestly, this whole presentation is kind of built around getting you guys to think about helpful content, helpful content plays well on discover it plays well, you know, across Google, and what it is, it helps with topic authority, which we'll be covering in a little bit. Yeah, I mean, the sites that are able to focus more on explainers and focus really more on on search intent and user intent and optimize the headlines for that they've done well with the helpful content update, I would say probably, you know, the entertainment publishers and maybe the those more niche publishers who can't find a way to take advantage of that helpful content focus from Google, they have struggled a little bit more. So you know, to me, the helpful content update is, to me it's a good thing because it's writing content that people are searching for, you're trying to offer them solutions to their issues. And, you know, I've attended many webinars and media conferences at media party. We spent a lot of time talking about this a couple of months ago, focusing on helping people find the content that they need in order to make their lives better and to improve their lives. So I, you know, I think most sites can find a way to incorporate that into their strategy. One more I'm sorry, coming to me afterwards. I'm sorry. You kept raising your hand I'm sorry, the woman in the striped shirt.

Thanks. I think this is maybe related. Admittedly, I'm not the strategy person for SEO, although I do implement a lot of it. But yeah, we have stopped using the tool that we're using as robustly to do though you know, we used to have the like, reminder to add an internal link, etc. But like what we were told about, I would say eight months ago was that like, it doesn't matter as much to Google anymore. So we've kind of taken that off the reporter's plates like which they're grateful for and like one less thing to do, but it sounds like maybe this is still relevant, like, like do should we actually consider going back to it has something changed maybe with Google since then. Okay. So what specifically? It was things like we use Yoast, so it would just literally, you know, if you couldn't get to green it was you know, try adding the keyword a couple more times. Try making sure you're linking internally making sure you have enough External links like we were doing that with every single article. But we kind of have stopped because like, at least it seemed like that Google wasn't prioritizing all that as much anymore. But is that not correct anymore? Or

so I would say that Google is not really fond of other tools that help us search kind of, in this search, this news SEO space that we play in. That's just my opinion. I don't have any personal ties to Google. But my feeling is they're never going to say Oh, use this tool versus that tool. And as far as optimizing headlines, I mean, I think they would ultimately prefer you to follow their advice directly versus using like an intermediary or a third party app. That's just my opinion. I've used Yoast and it's not a bad tool. But I do feel, in my opinion that it's best when people are trained kind of organically and how to implement SEO best practices without having to rely on the tool because if you're just looking at Green Light and yellow light and red light, you know, you're not really under necessarily understanding why right and SEO is not that hard. You know, I know, you know, everyone is super busy in the newsroom and maybe learning one more thing is just not on the plate, but it's not that hard. And I like I said one of the common themes of this session is, you know, I think at this point that SEO actually helps your writing. It's to me, if you do it, right, it can actually improve your writing. So that's just my opinion on that, but that's a great question. Okay, so we're moving on, right. Okay. So live optimization SEO for breaking news. This is also one of my favorite topics theme going here today. So, overall, you want to focus on speed, clarity, and structure. This is really critical optimization begins before publishing, but that doesn't mean that you need to check off every list every item on a 20 point SEO checklist. You are wasting your time and losing ranking potential if you do that. So one of the news search gurus, very Adams did a informal survey analysis and it's his opinion and it's also my opinion that Google does kind of a quick and dirty crawl and a breaking news situation. It's just too chaotic and and they're not doing a full on crawl looking for all of those helpful content update helpful content elements. So you need to focus on a few key factors which we'll talk about in a second, and then publish. And then you can go back and add all the bells and whistles because number two, Google can't rank what hasn't been published. I know kind of funny, but yeah, you have to get it published. And I've been in newsroom situations where there's a paralysis around Oh, a headline or image and don't let that slow you down. Speed really matters. Now, I did not put on here about you know, confirming the breaking news because I assume that all you guys are very ethical and you have you know, all those confirmation guidelines in your newsroom and you follow them faithfully, so that that should go without saying and then you of course want to track your performance both in real time and post mortem. So if you have access to the app, you should be able to see the breaking news tips. You can use the QR code and I'm going to open the chips. Great. Okay, so I worked in a small group newsroom about 10 people and there was literally like one person on evenings. And weekends for a breaking news shift. So they had to manage everything, right. So we implemented my manager decided that we were going to implement this simplified breaking news workflow, and it worked. It worked really, really well. So first step, you identify your keywords and yes, you should be using a search tool or Google Trends to do this. And you want to focus on the breakout search terms. You want to front love those breakout search terms in your headline. And then yes, keep your headline concise, simple. And for events with limited information. It's one sentence right? Whatever you know, it's shooting reported shots fired reported at elementary school in Philadelphia. You know, if you have the name of the elementary school great, and you know, police are responding. Include a link and embed to your authoritative source that could be law enforcement. It could be a school, et cetera. And then you finish with a call to action. So this is a breaking news story returned for updates, pushed to live stream or your app or social accounts. And then this is really important do include a photo or video but don't wait for a photo or video from the scene unless you already have it, which is great. But chances are you're not so it can be a breaking news graphic, you know that you have. That's your brand. It could be a stock image. That's fine up on first publish. You'll change it shortly afterwards. If it's a celebrity or no notable person death if you have evergreen photo galleries videos, this is really useful time to bring those out, right? Because you can use those for the image and then you publish. You publish. That's it. You don't wait around. Okay, now you've published so now you really get into the nitty gritty of the live optimization tips. So the first thing you want to decide, well, one of the first things you might decide is are you gonna do a live updates format or not. How many of you attended the CNN breaking news webinar session that was in here yesterday? Cool. It was a great session and they really did a nice job of showing how they handle a breaking news situation. What what how the story choice like if they have multiple breaking news stories happening the same time. So you do need to decide at some point is this a big enough event that's going to be ongoing so that you're going to need to do a live updates, structure and you want to do that in a way so that to signal to Google to use a live label. One of our German publishers also recommended creating live tickers. So that's also helpful. And now Now is the time that you do want to change that image and use something other than a generic image. We used to get creative in our newsroom. So we would do like Google Earth, Google Maps. There are many things you can do if you don't actually have an image from the scene just yet. And then the next three are really interconnected. So you want to consider the search intent of the keywords that you're monitoring around this breaking news situation. And then you want to, you want to create related content based upon those keywords with that search intent. So what I mean by search intent is if you know you see in Google Trends, a lot of people are looking at live or updates. Well, that suggests that they want ongoing updates. So go ahead and do that. live updates format. explainers Are you know would be the who, what, when where why questions, and then anything with visuals would be like photo see watch. And then where is of course suggest the map and I saw a lot of this play out during the Mallee wildfires. Looking at the search trends on that you saw like, you know, Maui wildflowers map or you know, they're basically begging you play please create a map. So yeah, just keep that in mind. The user intent search intent is really important. And then use the secondary keywords and meta descriptions subheads body copy and moat Yeah, definitely important that someone else should be doing this other than the person managing the breaking news story. Make sure that you're tracking the performance in real time. You know, it's the only way to stay competitive because like I said, the those search boxes as top story search boxes are extremely volatile. And so the sooner you're able to get into the mix, you know, the better chance you have of getting in there. And you know, if you're a smaller publisher with less search authority, you may not stay in there that long. You may get bumped out by, you know, the New York Times or Washington Post but you know, every little bit helps and I mean, by following this workflow, the small publisher I worked for, you know, we were able to to be competitive in those spaces at times and and it was all based upon good SEO techniques and being quick on breaking news. Do you make sure that you do a post mortem, you want to make sure that make sure that you know and celebrate what worked and don't be afraid to tackle what didn't work? You know, it's a it's an ongoing process that you'll have to refine. But over time, you'll get quicker I mean, we got down to we said our goal was eight minutes from confirming a breaking news event to publishing but we honestly we could do it like in six, five or six minutes. So it definitely worked for us and it simplified the process so much and we were allowed, we were able then to do all those SEO tasks that needed to be done. And one final thing I wanted to say about the breaking news workflow if you're like, oh, yeah, I don't know. Like one sentence that makes me nervous. I was really, I was really against going to that format. When my manager brought it up. I because I'm a fast writer. I'm like, I can write three graphs easy. I don't want to write one sentence that that makes me uncomfortable. But I had a colleague who was super smart, but did struggle during breaking news. And the colleague knew it and you know, it was just one of those things. So years later the colleague left the company and in their farewell letter, they said, you know, they'd been diagnosed with dyslexia.

So, you know, and they said that they that we would never know how many workarounds they had set up for themselves to try to keep up. But they were a huge fan. Of this streamlined breaking news workflow for that very reason, because it helped them, you know, feel like they could keep up with a team. So just keep that in mind. You know, yes, breaking news is important. Not all of what we do is important, but it's not important, more important than your colleagues. mental well being so with that, we got another q&a session. Okay, I saw your hand first gentleman the blue standing

Okay, so when it comes to building SEO headlines for breaking news, should we be putting breaking in the title or should we just be kind of keeping it? You know, just a simple little headline, like with all the information that's needed, and then kind of circling back I didn't get to ask earlier but when it comes to ranking, your links, what are some of the channels we could use to really build that domain authority up, like do our newsletters and our socials work or?

Okay, let me answer the first question first, and then I'll come back. Can you just stay back there Friday because I wanted to review that. So the break so breaking news, yeah, I wouldn't waste the space to put breaking news what you could do if your CMS allows it is to have a label. So just have breaking news. What we did an arc is we set up a template. And so we had a breaking news template. It was front it was pre loaded with some breaking news generic keywords. We had a breaking news graphic, and you could add a breaking news label if you choose to and that space if your CMS supports it, but yeah, I would go with whatever the keyword whatever the the the most active keyword is, I would front load that I wouldn't waste the space with ranking but it depends upon your publisher style. And then for the ranking question, can you just repeat that?

Yeah, so we're trying to like we're gonna be trying to really get our newsletter going and stuff like that when we were putting our links in that. Is it ranking our content on that? Or should we be trying to find other channels that we own to rank our content and build our domain authority that way?

I mean, I would say newsletters are a surface in which, you know, anytime you're you're displaying your content around a specific topic. It can help build authority. I wouldn't say newsletters, technically support you know, SEO there's not maybe a direct connection there. It depends on how the newsletter is formatted and but you know, what I will say is that newsletters, again, depending if they're free or premium, they are being pulled in to like the the generative AI content they're being pulled in. Sometimes into perspectives boxes. So there's, I've seen newsletters display across some search results in Google. So I think there is a growing opportunity there. I think it's one traditionally that we've kind of thought of as a separate thing, a separate product, but you should definitely 100% be putting any any article links in your newsletters that you're trying to build topic authority around. Again, grow your audience, you know, any way you can sure. Woman in the middle. Yes.

Thanks. Just a quick follow up speaking of newsletters, I've seen some applications that are putting their newsletter on their website. Is that helpful? Or do you think that's just something that should stay and like your email provider?

That's interesting. Do you have an example? Like, do you have like a specific example or just something you've seen around?

Yeah, so that's like a newsletter roundup in the morning. That's like, here's the Daily News. Here's like our articles for the week or whatever else. I've seen some applications just put the entire newsletter like a on their website as an article format. So you can go back versus I'm sorry. Yeah, have your own browser option, but not like through the MailChimp. It's like their actual website. So as you're just saying that I was like, would that be helpful then because we're linking to other content in your own I wasn't sure if that was helpful. Or not.

I mean, yeah, I would, I would think it would be I mean, I yeah, I wouldn't see why. I mean, maybe they're just trying to you know, expand their newsletter audience try to get you subscribers. Yeah, I wouldn't see why that that would be a problem. Yeah, I'll be curious. I'll be looking out for that. And I'll be tracking some of that. Yeah. For analysis. Yes. Woman in the burgundy.

What would you recommend if the trending phrase or keyword is different than your style? For example, we had a public official with a formal name, but people were searching her nickname.

Right. Okay. Yeah, that's a great question. You know, obviously, you're always going to have to default to your style versus SEO. Most likely, right? If there's a way to get both in, maybe you could, you know, use your style, maybe frontload. That you could also possibly if if you're allowed in your style guide to include it, at least in the lead or somewhere else within the article that can also be helpful. But yeah, sometimes Yeah. You can only do so much. And if your style guide you know, forbid certain things, then you know, there's just nothing you can do about that.

I'm sorry, we ended up doing the headline with the informal name and then first reference our style. Would that be kind of putting the

if if the on Google if the search trend if the breakout search term is definitely more for the nickname versus the formal names, and I would try to get the nickname in the headline if you can work it out with your style guide. You could try to do both possibly we've done that before and past newsrooms. I've worked in if you use sub heads, you could also maybe fit it in there as well. Woman blue

Okay, so I have an answer for the question up there and a question for you. So for the breaking news tips because like the one sentence thing made me think of it. One of my friends told me once try to imagine you're like shouting to someone as the elevator doors are closing and like get all the information that you can into that. So that's something because I covered it in college and I covered breaking news for my paper last semester. And that was something I always kept in mind with that and it really helped. That's a great tip. And then my question is what for like, keywords in metadata? Would you say that there's like, an optimal number of them to have?

That's a good question. So keywords used to matter in the meta keywords Ville as you're asking they used to matter a lot. So when I began in search, like 20 years ago, I hate to admit, but yeah, 20 plus years ago, it was all about the keywords right. And then, you know, Google and Yahoo and other search engines found that people were you know, being unscrupulous and you know, stuffing keywords and, and just doing bad SEO tactics. So they really kind of cracked down on that. And so like Google then D prioritize the, you know, focus on keywords. You know, obviously keywords still play a huge role is as we've been talking throughout the session today, but as far as the keyword field, there's not a real limit, as long as you're, you know, it's gonna be during a period like you're stuffing it, you know, irresponsibly, there's not really a limit. Now, your CMS may well have a limit. I believe in arc, there was a limit of how many keywords you could enter. And again, you know, it's just, it's a probably a very minor ranking factor at this moment, but it it's still good practice to do. And, you know, it can help you think about okay, I got these keywords, then how can I incorporate them into the article as well? Thank you. Do we have time for one more? No, no. Oh, moving on. Okay. Topic authority. Alright, so this is my last favorite topic. So I did lead to major topic Authority building projects. Over my career. I did one for local TV sites. And they were trying to build up their topic authority and really their site authority by foking, focusing on local news, SEO. And then I did one last year in which I focused on I worked for national news desk at Cox media group and we had a ton of content a ton of explainers. Just it's just a ton of like holiday content, so much content, and it was just sitting across all these Google Docs and it was a mess. So we decided to organize it and optimize it and try to get some SEO movement. Out of that. So some of the steps you want to do for building topic authority. First thing you have to do is conduct a content audit. And with that, you want to perform a keyword gap analysis which you know, basically means you want to look at I'm sorry I guess you can still see I just realized, I don't know why it came back here. Let me do it in presenter mode again. Okay, there we go. So basically, you want to look at the keywords that you want to rank for. You want to see hey, are your competitors in that space? Are they trying to rank for those keywords as well? Those probably aren't the ones you want to focus on. You want to focus on the ones in which your competitors are not necessarily covering as much. Those are your opportunity areas. And you should definitely it's critical that you organize your content when you're doing a topic authority project. So I highly recommend I don't know if Jesse from WTF is sec. Oh, yes, there she is. Hi. So just a quick plug. If you follow only one SEO newsletter, I do recommend WTF is SEO How many of you guys already follow? Yeah. Okay, great. Awesome. Okay. So they have a spreadsheet formula, that it's a free tool that you can use. It's like a Google sheet. And I gave this to my producer who was managing this project who was doing this project for me and he was an Excel like, nut, right? He loved Excel and all that spreadsheet stuff and I'm just like, whatever. Okay, great. He loved that spreadsheet. He said it was like the greatest thing. He started using it for personal projects. So I highly recommend you go to their site and look for it. Totally free to use the most important thing is you organize it and you have goals. So what is your goal for this project? It's really important to know that going in you know, are you trying to, you know, beat out your competition in a certain topic area. Are you just trying to grow authority in a topic area? Are you trying to grow site authority? Are you trying to increase your search traffic? So these are all important things to think about? And you don't stop there. Once you organize that you do have to optimize it them and promote it very important. You know, leverage your CMS use list if you can and Ark we could build lists by topics and then we would build templates, as I mentioned before, and you would attach those lists to that topic to that template. And then anytime anyone was writing about that topic, it would the list would already be in there so they wouldn't even have to think about it. Again, streamline the workflows, right? And then yes, you do want to track performance, and we'll talk about that in a minute what metrics you look for. But first, we're gonna get back to Chris of SEO RP digital and so he was talking about a project he did in which they were trying to build top authority around lottery, which is big here too in the US. So he said frequency and in depth coverage of articles. matters. Be patient and continue to produce articles around a specific topic for several months. After suddenly losing traffic after a core update. We decided to continue and with the next update, we got the traffic back. And I do think that's important that you be patient I know that can be hard in the news world, but this content isn't going to be like an overnight success. Okay, this is about a slow burn. It's about building up topic authority slowly and surely over time. So, evergreen content sure you guys pretty much know whatever in content can be can be many things explainers, reviews, travel guides. Don't forget about your archival content. The Atlanta Journal Constitution, they do a great series where they they leverage their their photos, their huge, huge photo library, right decades and decades. And so they create these really cool photo galleries like my neighborhood in Midtown from like the 1970s and the 1950s. And it's just really cool. Seasonal Okay, so I know seasonal isn't exactly evergreen, but it's perennial, I would like to argue. And in my last news room, our seasonal content probably did better than anything else in this area. So I'm talking about you know, holidays. I'm talking about big events like the Super Bowl. I'm talking about severe weather event, you know, especially if you live in like a hurricane zone, like Florida, for instance. So these are things that come back year over year that you're going to be covering. So think about what matters in your area, you know, in Philly and might be more like winter weather, things like that. But think about topics that you cover. Year over year. You know, can you build explainers? Can you build out content in that topic area? And then there's a few metrics that of course you want to use to track results. Visibility is one. So you do want to monitor ranking status again, you know, these aren't probably going to be you know, in the top stories news box necessarily, though, I would argue that again, Google's expanding their you know, range and especially this search generative experience, the generative AI powered search, there are a lot more opportunities for evergreen content in those responses. Engagement is really important. You know, you do need to know if you know, give it give the time for your topic authority project to to grow. But at some point, if you're not getting that engagement, you have to realize, maybe my audience isn't as interested in this topic as I thought. So do pay attention to that metric and then pageviews document the traffic patterns. This will really help you know when you need to start covering something so you know, like so like for hurricane season, you know, we would start updating our content probably at least a month ahead of when hurricane season began. June 1. With Halloween. Guess what guys is time the Halloween candy is out at the store right? So it's time. So then that's something I learned about.com was like to start that holiday content like a couple of months ahead to really get it out there in the search world. And then, finally, about AI search impact. So again, I just mentioned this reviews, first person accounts, travel tips, explainers. These are all things that are being surfaced and Google's Ste right now. So again, it's a helpful content, right? That's what they're promoting. So do you have content that can play well in this space? And so, another so this is gonna be the final q&a session. So if you have any questions, or burning questions that you still want to ask, go ahead. I guess gentleman in the back.

Thank you. So once we identify that evergreen content what are the best practices for what we do with it next, and how we kind of resurface it for people.

So what I would do first is do that content audit, ideally in a spreadsheet, but doesn't have to figure out which buckets of content that you have the most content in. And then you want to see how that content is already performing for your audience, and go from there. So ideally, the content that you have the most of is also what your audience is most interested in, and then you would continue to grow that bucket. So it's a kind of a two step process. But you know, ideally, first do that audit and figure out what exactly you have and then I would target one at a time versus trying to do too many at once.

I guess more to the nitty gritty like if you have an evergreen on how to cook with leftover Halloween candy. Do you just take that article and you know, bump, we just bumped the timestamp on it every year or do you take that article and copy and paste it and create a new article?

Yeah, that's a great question. And yeah, don't do the latter. Some publishers do but what we did at our, at my last publisher was we, we refreshed it we made sure all the links were working. We added any new content if there was anything and then we simply updated, bumped the timestamp that signals to Google that there has been an update in that story. Any other questions? Oh. Sorry.

Thank you. So, for helping with topic authority, is it worthwhile to put the publisher name in Mega title show, for example, top Philadelphia restaurants, narrow pipe? Philadelphia Inquirer.

Right. That's a great question. That's a common practice. I certainly don't think it hurts and that is many public publications style. So that is fine to do. I don't think it's necessary. But I certainly don't think it's a bad practice. Okay, maybe one more question. We're kind of running low on time, right. Yeah, so one more question just so we want to be respectful of Oakland A's you know, wrap it up. All right. I already call on you. Yes.

Thank you. Thanks so much. So I have a question around the Organize area. You mentioned like, you know, have goals before you start to sort of decide okay, what to go deep on. Can you talk a little bit about what those goals might look like? Are they like audience focused or authority focused like what you have the most authority in?

Yeah, it can be a few different areas. So you might be looking to increase your search referral traffic overall. You might be looking to increasing your engagement, your audience so it could be audience engagements, you might be looking to increase article engagement time. So it could be something specific like that. You might just be looking to update your authority in that topic overall. So that would be more of a ranking metric that you would look at. So those are a few of the areas that you would want to focus on. So it could include engagement, traffic, search referrals. Okay. All right. Um, thank you so much. We're going to start wrapping it up. Like I said, we were not gonna have time for the AI but we have a great blog post that we just published. So make sure you go to news dashboard.com. And you can check that out. And I'll be tweeting it out. We'll be tweeting out on our account as well. It actually covers more than what I was going to cover in here, so no worries there. All right. Let me put up the tech takeaways and resources. There's Murphy did he appear? Okay, that's my dog Murphy. Ah, thank you. Okay, thank you so much.

Murphy is a sweet sweet dog. Yes. Thank you. Let's give joy a round of applause. She did a fantastic job. Thank you. And if you guys want to please check out slow dog her children's book. It is amazing. It is such a heartwarming story. It really tells you to you know how to slow down in a fast paced world and not miss the world that's actually around you and all the beauty so I highly recommend. We're just gonna do a quick we're gonna do the giveaway real quick as well. And I want to remind you, please feel free to come up and talk to us our whole our team is here. And we can discuss some things to talk more about your guys's newsroom, your SEO strategies, those things we will be more than happy to meet you and to talk strategy. So all right for those of you who came by our booth, we were offering that free SEO analysis for your website, your news publishing website, which you know can be pretty costly. So we're gonna be doing that for free. And so I'm just kind of like mixing some things around here. We had a lot of entries. And let's see who has one. All right. Nancy Yang from the Star Tribune. Congratulations. I'm gonna be fantastic. Perfect. Thank you all so much for coming today again, and we invite you to come up to us talk to us meet as and we'll have even more information to share with you. All right.

Oh, and we do have just hit the slide. Oh, sorry. No. Yeah. The I in the corner.

I forgot about that's fine. There we go. Free three months of use. You get a free three month trial of the truth loot, use dashboard COMM And sign up with us please. Thank you so much.