Intro
Traffic from Google (Search, News, and Discover) is becoming increasingly important for news websites. Yet there are very few news websites that really get SEO right. Why is that?
Our experience is that this is mainly because most SEO tips and SEO agencies are focused on optimizing SEO for non-news websites that sell a service or product and not for news websites, which requires a totally different approach.
But what is the difference between SEO for news websites and other websites? News websites are not only attracting traffic from Google Search, but álso from Google News and Google Discover (some websites get up to 50% of their traffic from Google Discover).
But that's not the only difference as you can read below.
Slowly growing Google traffic vs Google traffic spikes
For a new piece of content published on a non-news site, the organic traffic graph looks like the graph below most of the time. It will normally take some time for a new page to attract of traffic from Google as the page needs to build up authority and trust in Google’s eyes. So it can take months or even years before the page will rank well in Google.
But for news websites the organic traffic graph looks more like this:
As an article gets a lot of traffic in the first hours and days after it has been published.
So how is it possible that with a news websites new articles can start picking up traffic within minutes instead of days or months?The reason for this is that the majority of the traffic to news websites is not coming from the normal search results (the 10 blue links) but from the Top Stories carousel in the Google results.So for news articles traffic from the Top Stories Carousel is of a higher importance than traffic from the normal search results.
But a news article is only visible in the Top Stories carousel for approximately 48 hours, so when the article is no longer appearing in the Top Stories carousel then the traffic it gets from Google will drop dramatically.A lot of these articles will start receiving some traffic from regular Google Search (the 10 blue links) after they dropped from the Top Stories carouse, but this doesnt happen for every article. This mostly depends on how interesting these stories are in the long run, so more background stories will have a longer life span in Google Search than breaking news stories. Articles that consistently drive Google Search traffic in the long run are called Evergreen articles.
Not 10 but 10.000 relevant keywords
90% of websites revolve around selling a service or product. For example, a law firm in New York wants to attract people who search on Google for 'lawyer New York' because these are people he can sell his services to. If many people come to his website who have searched on Google on 'buy iPhone Miami,' this traffic is worthless to him, and the law firm will not suddenly want to change his business model and start selling iPhones.
But with a news website, the goal is not necessarily to sell a fixed service or product but rather to attract as many readers as possible by fulfilling an information need. So the topic or keyword on which a news website wants to be found is not fixed. Instead, it is the opposite: A news website wants to be found on the keywords that are frequently searched for (within its niche), and so there are many more potentially interesting keywords to optimize for.
Suppose a soccer news website notices many people searching for a new Colombian player that just transferred to Manchester City. Then this news website would do well to write a background article about this player to attract more traffic from Google.
If many people are searching for this player, this means there is also a lot of interest in this player among soccer fans. So writing an article about this player will attract more visitors from Google.
Direct relationship between page views and revenue
For most websites that are selling a product or service, the objective is to convert their visitors as quickly as possible to order the service or product offered. But for a news website, the goal is to keep the visitor's attention as long as possible. And also to make the visitor view as many pages on the website as possible. Therefore, smart linking and displaying related articles is essential for a news website, which makes SEO different for news websites
Optimize traffic from Google Discover and Google News
Non-news websites get 99% of their Google traffic from Google Search. But for news websites, Google News and Google Discover are also huge traffic sources that need to be optimized for. Many news websites attract more visitors from Google Discover and Google News than from Google Search. Check also out our Ultimate Google Discover Optimization Guide to see how you can increase your traffic from Google Discover.
More content means the need of a good taxonomy and internal link structure
There is, of course, a lot more content on a news website than on a normal business website. Because of this amount of content, the taxonomy, content categorization, and internal link structure are essential for a good search engine ranking of the content.
At Newsifier we have optimized our CMS 100% for news websites. So we have not only optimized for Google Search but have also optimized for Google News and Google Discover. Are you interested in how we have fully optimized our CMS to maximize traffic from Google and other search engines? Ask for a free demo here.
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