Is your online publication struggling?
Online publishers struggle with SEO more than any other type of web property. These sites are typically very large and usually suffer from technical issues, poor Google news indexing, lack of SEO fundamentals, outdated SEO knowledge, absence of staff training and overall know-how. If you are relying on the constant need to create content to just maintain traffic levels you may suffer from one or all of the following.
- Crawl Issues
- Indexing Issues
- Duplicate Content
- Paywall Restrictions
- Google News Issues
- New Lack of Sub-navigations
- Lack of Editorial Training
- Declining traffic from Google
- Google Penalties & Violations
- Lack of Internal SEO resources
How I help Publishers
As a Google news expert, I can address all of the issues above and others. Over the years I’ve discovered many unique issues that de-indexed sites completely from Google News specifically. .
Something as simple as editing a robots.txt file is enough to bring traffic to a standstill. SEO for online publishers is more than just keywords and links.
If you’re struggling to increase traffic, registrations, or need training for your editorial or development teams, contact me for a free consultation.
Publisher Case Studies
Increase in Organic Traffic
Organic traffic dropped for (www.americanlawyer.com) TAL’s law firm profiles section. This was a supplement to the existing site.
The reasons were due to changes to the site that impacted certain search signals, such as incorrect title tags and meta descriptions.
In December a sub-navigation was implemented to tie profiles to each other and duplicate profiles were removed. These changes increased organic traffic by over 600%!
Google News Traffic Increase
An online publisher had traffic slow down from Google news. There were many technical and legacy issues that was causing problems within Google News.
I performed an audit and identified several issues. In July we started making changes to mobile and to the sitemaps.
Traffic from Google news went from 2,000 visits per month on average to nearly 70,000 visits from Google News in August.
Since the site had a separate mobile url – we added canonical tags and separated mobile and desktop in search console.
In September the desktop version of the site had the highest amount of clicks from Google in more than a year. Traffic increased by more than 5x!
Google News Optimization
SEO for news sites can both complex and simple. There is usually a mixture of content creation and technical issues that cause problems with rankings. I’ve been fortunate to have worked with publishers of all sizes – large and small. Both have different issues and what works for large organizations doesn’t always work for smaller ones. It is also important to understand that SEO for publishers is different than for blogs and eCommerce sites. Google news is different than standard search optimization and therefore a requires a different approach.