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News SEO

#SEOnerdSwitzerland Meetup

Tobias Willmann

Head of SEO

Blick.ch / Ringier AG

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Newsbox

Top Stories

Ranks max. 48h

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Yes, it’s still always Safari in Apple’s News Widget

It’s never AMP

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SEO

News SEO

Link-Building

Outreach...

Don’t care

We have lot

Naturally grown

because of good content

Links

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SEO

News SEO

Struggle to get good content

Content is the core product

Content

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  • Faster production
  • Content at the right time
  • More SEO relevant content

But … it’s about

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Optimize

Input

Write

Optimize

SEO-Team

Input

SEO-Team

Write

Journalists

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Explain SEO + Train people

a german example...

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🦄

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Train people to do better titles for SEO

  • have separated headline for the <title>-tag ...

  • Use the entities like locations, organisations, people
  • Put the main keyword if possible first in the title
  • ...

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👍

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Coronaldo

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Print and forget

the Internet

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Legacy lifecycle of an article ...

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Forget

Write

Publish

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Near content

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1) 25.05

2) 30.04

Someone forgot my redirect

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How blick.ch’s SEO team extends it …

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Forget

Write

Publish

Recycle

Extend article

Re-optimize

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Technical SEO

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Support bots

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News XML Sitemaps

RSS feeds, proper links, sections, tag pages …

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Extend your site with structured data

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schema.org

NewsArticle

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AMP

is a web component framework and a website publishing technology

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It’s fast

  • JavaScript + CSS is limited
  • Pre cached coming from Google, …
  • Some blockers for bad practises (e.g. render blocking Ads, which cause layout shifts)

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Top Stories currently* just work with AMP

*but… next slide...

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Web Vitals:

Avoid Layout Shifts

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Layout Shifts

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Layout Shifts

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old

new

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Web Vitals:

Speed

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First Image

Ads

A lot of Javascript

Ads

Ads

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If you have solved the basics…

Are there publishers with uncompressed images? 🧐

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Example:

Big CSS file, which blocks rendering

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530 kB

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Worst case…

Big CSS and Big JavaScript loaded for every pagetype

All URLs load all CSS and all JavaScript

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The homepage loads CSS and JavaScript needed for comments

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Maybe use

CSS-in-JS / JSS

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Where’s the CSS file?

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CSS is inside the React component

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https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/load-css-simpler/

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Just load the needed JavaScript

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Homepage: no templates-event JavaScript

Event Page: templates-event JavaScript is loaded

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Split JavaScript files (with CSS) in components

And apply some load prio

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https://addyosmani.com/blog/script-priorities/

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Comments are just loaded on article pagetype with

<script defer> at the end of the <body>

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Web Stories

(aka AMP Stories)

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  • Visual Storytelling
  • (AMP)-HTML based
  • You host it

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Google Discover showing Web Stories

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Data

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Organic vs. direct in Google Analytics

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Strong brand => a lot of people enter session on home

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Amazing CTRs from top teaser on home

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Most Pageviews coming from Homepage

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Organic article is landingpage entrance is in here

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Understand the “positioned on home boost” + optimize

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Underperforming teaser

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Tracking of rankings

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80% of short head keywords haven’t been trending a month ago...

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useful data ...

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A general / stable keywordset won’t work for News

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Newsdashboard

Sistrix / Searchmetrics

Google Search Console

Special News keywordset

General / stable keywordset

All long tail keywords

You need a ranking

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Freshness + frequency of data for News SEO

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Newsdashboard

Sistrix / Searchmetrics

Google Search Console

Google Analytics / Chartbeat / Parse.ly

15 min

7 days

5h - daily

real time

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Some data about

finding topics

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Your brand is Google Trend

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Seasonal topics

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GSC Recycle article

Google Trends / GSC

Newsdashboard

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Predict, when you need the article

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If you publish in the first week of december you will miss 42% of the possible interest

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