How we Got a News Website to hit 1 Million Organic Traffic Per Month

News is a business that keeps you on your toes all the time.

You never know what will happen next and you may have planned a few things but all of it may go for a toss if something comes up suddenly.

If you have seen any News channel on television, you would have noticed that most of the news anchors and hosts are rushing here and there.

The dynamic nature of the news business makes the SEO of a news website totally different from the usual content driven website.

The people who have handled the SEO of a news website would know that the strategy and execution for the SEO of a news website are different.

The reason is simple. News websites are based on happenings around the world and hence the topics that they cover are not pre- decided.

They do not rely on the search volumes provided by various keyword research tools as they do not know what will happen next.

While some bit of planning can always be done because news websites cover known topics like Elections, Budgets, etc but most of the time, doing a pre-planned SEO of news content is not possible.

The question arises that how would a news website drive traffic and earn money?

This was the problem faced by a News Website that I was consulting.

They were driving limited traffic from Google News.

Some of their older news stories were also driving organic traffic but it was little.

They were in a dilemma whether to compare themselves from the usual content websites; content of which was generating traffic throughout the year.

But when it came to their news website, the primary focus was to cover news stories which did not have a shelf life of more than 48 hours……. sometimes maybe a bit more.

Another Problem.

One of the primary traffic sources of news websites is Google News but not all news sites get traffic from Google News.

The reason is that when the users see a bigger and known news website ranking on the given keyword, they prefer to click on bigger brand websites and not the smaller ones.

This site too was facing the same problem i.e. their site was approved in Google News and it also appeared or ranked well for a lot of keywords but in spite of that, the traffic from Google News was not that high.

The Solution

Getting clicks from Google News – I started experimenting with the story title and while the timing was crucial, I trained the editorial team to include words that were appealing and compelling.

This made the users click on this site instead of any other established site because of which our site was not getting clicks.

This improved traffic from Google News.

However, from an overall organizational objective, this was not enough and we wanted more traffic.

Another Solution

For me, the choice was simple, continuing to focus on all news stories was not going to get me anywhere so the obvious option was to diversify a bit and cover all sorts of topics.

I knew that several news websites (in fact all big news websites) were not offering ONLY news content but also offering content of various other categories.

Some of the categories covered were

Health
Entertainment
Spirituality, Astrology, Yoga, and Ayurveda Automobile, Science & Technology Regional Language Content

Games, Gadgets & Gizmos
Food and Cuisines
Fashion & Lifestyle
Finance & Investments
Real Estate & Property
Education, Motherhood & Parenting Others

Next Step:

I started identifying the potential of our current content writing team and then basis their content writing interests, I selected a few categories on which we would build content.

I did thorough keyword research for these categories and prepared hundreds of topics that were searched by a lot of people throughout the year.

This helped us prepare a content calendar which made our team clear about when to develop which content.

While we worked on the content calendar, I worked closely with the content writing team and trained them to write search engine friendly content.

Technical SEO

The news site had a CMS which was used by the editors to upload the stories.

For me, it was a good thing because I did not have to train the editors how to use simple software.

However, the problem was that the CMS was not search engine friendly i.e. the CMS did not have elements that were helping the SEO elements.

Some of the SEO friendly elements that I focused on were:

● Page Title
● Meta description ● Heading Tags
● Internal Linking

I worked with the technology team and made sure that these elements were in the CMS and once the editorial team used the interface to upload the stories, these elements came into the picture (almost automatically).

I did conduct a few training sessions with the editorial team on what they had to do and how they had to use each of these elements while uploading a story.

This step ensured that our content had elements that search engines give weight age to.

What is search engine friendly content?

Search engine crawlers have a particular way of reading the content and while they are evolving and becoming smarter by the day, they read a few prescribed elements which if used well can give clear signals to Google.

These signals are about the theme of the article/story content and their keywords.

Problem

The existing team of content writers did not know much about SEO and including keywords in their content.

They did not know anything about meta tags, heading tags, long-tail keywords, internal linking, etc.

I conducted several training sessions of the content team in which I explained how to write search engine friendly content.

Initially, the team took the time to get hold of writing content as per search engine guidelines.

We kept on putting efforts into creating content that was original, well researched and also targeted keywords.

Once they were comfortable and also saw some good organic traffic, the efforts were scaled.

Today, the site is doing 1.2 Million organic traffic and this traffic is further growing 🙂

Off Page SEO

Luckily, the news category is such that these websites get a lot of backlinks because of their content, brand and network.

However, to build the authority quickly, I built some links from relevant + high authority websites.

This combination built a good backlink profile, good domain authority and backlink juice for our site.

Summary

When it comes to news websites, not all topics and content are SEO worthy.

News stories have a very short shelf life and hence you should not expect traffic from those pages throughout the year.

Timing is important so any professional should work closely with the content/editorial team and also pre-plan seeing the various events.

To add further, a news website can also create non-news content and it can fetch a lot of SEO traffic.