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How To Create Content Tagging Policies For News Publishers

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How To Create Content Tagging Policies For News Publishers

September 2022 was one of the most turbulent months of recent times for news publishers.

The month started with the Helpful Content Update, which targeted low-quality, unhelpful content.

That was swiftly followed by the September 2022 Core Algorithm Update: one of Google’s broader updates, which overlapped with the September 2022 Product Reviews Update, targeting low-quality affiliate content (among other things).

For some of the biggest publishers in the game, this has caused major disruption, with publications like the Metro seeing a 40% decrease in visibility.

In an industry that often relies on fairly turbulent traffic sources such as breaking news stories and Google Discover, appropriate content tagging can provide the safety net in which traffic consistency can be somewhat more reliable.

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I’ve been working with several large news publishers across entertainment, football, gaming, music, and healthcare this year, some of which attract tens of millions of users each month. They all seemed to be lacking in one particular area: content tagging.

Why Content Tagging Is Important For News Publishers

When used appropriately, content tagging can help to boost a publication’s organic performance massively. However, many publishers are getting it wrong. Three of the main motivations for optimizing content tagging are as follows.

Stronger Topical Authority

We know that with Google’s various updates, there’s a big focus on ensuring that websites that are a genuine authority for the user’s search query are ranked higher. For news publications, becoming an authority relies on a number of factors, such as author specialties, relevant backlinks, and expert content.

With content tagging, you can pull all your expert content on a particular topic into one place, making it easier for Google to crawl, find the connections between different articles, and understand just how authoritative your publication is in this area.

This means each article is directly supported by a tag page and multiple other relevant articles, giving Google more confidence in its topical authority.

Safety Net Of Consistent Organic Traffic

Tag pages can do much more than pull all of your articles together, though. They can actually become strong landing pages that rank for high-volume, generic keywords.

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Due to the nature of tag pages being a central hub that can answer various questions on a specific subject, Google is more likely to rank a tag page within the normal organic listings (rather than Top Stories, etc.) for a high search volume generic query.

For example, when someone searches for “Love Island,” there isn’t a huge amount of context behind what the searcher is looking for about Love Island. By serving a tag page, Google gives the user a wider variety of content to consume, therefore increasing the likelihood of satisfying their search intent.

Using the Metro as an example, a quick look in Semrush shows tag pages potentially pulling in hundreds of thousands (and in many cases millions) of organic users each month.

Screenshot from Semrush, September 2022

And most of this tag page traffic, unsurprisingly, is coming from the high volume, generic keywords such as”‘Love Island”:

Metro traffic driving keywords

Screenshot from Semrush, September 2022

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When the Metro also ranks in Top Stories for “Love Island,” they’re doubling the chances of capturing the click.

If they do happen to see a drop in organic performance for their Love Island articles, their site still has the safety net of the tag page to pull in the traffic from high-volume, generic keywords.

That is, if the tag page maintains rankings, of course.

What Can Happen Without A Tagging Policy

Having started working with a few large publications which haven’t properly implemented a tagging policy, I’ve seen firsthand how messy things can get when a tagging policy isn’t in place.

When not properly trained on the ins and outs of content tagging and how it relates to SEO, writers have added endless random tags to articles, creating masses of tag pages that offer no real benefit to the website.

From an SEO perspective, these are the issues this causes:

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  • Wasted crawl budget: When large volumes of articles are created daily, alongside masses of new tag pages, this results in Googlebot (and other bots) wasting resources by crawling low-quality tag pages rather than the articles themselves.
  • Diluted topical authority signals: When tagging is overdone, you can end up with multiple tag pages which essentially focus on the same subject but spread the articles and topical authority across multiple tags. An example of this would be writing an article about Cristiano Ronaldo breaking his nose, then creating a tag page for “Cristiano Ronaldo,” “Cristiano Ronaldo nose,” “Cristiano Ronaldo broken nose,” and “Cristiano Ronaldo nose injury.” Really, we only need the “Cristiano Ronaldo” tag here, as the article itself will be targeting the “nose” related keywords. So, not only does the main “Cristiano Ronaldo” tag page have to compete with three other related tag pages, the article itself does, too.
  • Index bloat: When niche tag pages are created (such as “Cristiano Ronaldo nose” and “Cristiano Ronaldo nose injury”), they end up having just one article tagged, resulting in thin, low-quality tag pages being indexed, which end up being almost exact duplicates of each other.
  • Hardly any traffic or rankings for tag pages: When writers don’t know how to effectively tag content and optimize tag page performance, the tag pages just end up being a wasted opportunity, as they likely won’t rank or drive traffic.

When improper tagging has been done for a long time, the clean-up job is quite time-consuming and requires detailed analysis to ensure nothing of value is removed. Prevention is definitely better than the cure!

So, tag pages can act as the glue that holds relevant content together and as consistent, evergreen traffic drivers when article performance declines.

But how do you ensure your writers are united in an approach to tagging which benefits the site as a whole? Through tagging policies, of course!

How To Implement Tagging Policies For Writers

Every news publication that publishes content on multiple topics should have an appropriate tagging policy in place, but what should be included? And how should it be written? Below are the items I would advise publishers to focus on.

Create An Introduction To The Policy

Start with a one-paragraph explanation of why the policy is needed and what it aims to achieve. If tagging has been a historical issue for the site, then this is an opportunity to give examples of where things have gone wrong and why. This helps writers to understand the purpose of the policy.

Rule 1: Make Tags Generic Yet Relevant

As mentioned earlier, tags have real potential to rank for high search volume generic keywords, so they should ideally target just that!

You also prevent the risk of diluting topical authority signals through multiple niche tag pages, which all compete for similar keywords.

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Rule 2: Use A Maximum Of X Tags Per Article

A good target for tagging is to have one or two tags per article (though this does vary for each publication).

That way, writers will be less likely to create multiple, similar tags, which helps to control index bloat and crawl budget efficiency.

Rule 3: Use Existing Tags Where Possible

Hopefully, your publication creates more than one story per topic, so ensure writers are searching for an appropriate existing tag before they start creating a new one.

Rule 4: Use Lowercase Text And No Special Characters

Depending on the system being used, tags that writers input with capital letters or special characters can end up being applied to the tag page’s URL, which isn’t ideal – and can, once again, result in duplicate tag pages being created (e.g.,/Cristiano-Ronaldo/ and /cristiano-ronaldo/) or just generally unoptimized and messy URLs.

Rule 5: Add Internal Links To Tag Pages From Articles

This one is important. While all of the other points relate to the creation of tagging pages, internal linking from articles is how you start to build up the authority of the tag page itself.

Writers should be linking to the article’s main tag page within the first paragraph if possible, and to other secondary tag pages within the rest of the article where possible.

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Ensure You Are Providing Context

One of the main reasons writers end up not adhering to general rules around content tagging is that they simply haven’t been given the context behind why they should be doing things a certain way.

A publication’s SEO strategy relies on writers understanding how their efforts support that strategy, so ensure training is done to help them understand why tagging needs to be done a certain way (feel free to point them towards this article!).

The policies themselves should be simple documents that just outline the basic rules of tagging, almost like a checklist. Training should be provided with the introduction of these policies to provide the context, which can be done in video form to ensure everyone gets the exact same training.

General Tag Page Setup

Beyond the writer’s responsibilities, publication owners need to ensure they have the right technical setup to support the growth of tag pages, too. The following areas should be adequately addressed to support the writer’s efforts.

Convert Tag Pages To Landing Pages

Simple things like indexability need to be considered when setting up tag pages, as well as basic optimizations such as meta titles and descriptions, headers, and intro text.

Providing more detail than your competitors’ tag pages (bio information, introductory text with internal links to related tag pages, etc.) and ensuring that many tagged articles are made immediately available on the first page will also give you an advantage.

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Break Content Up Over Multiple Pages

Pagination is an important consideration, and although Googlebot can crawl and index pages that utilize infinite scrolling, my preference would be to break content up over multiple pages, using pagination to make things simpler for Googlebot and avoid any potential issues with rendering, etc.

Add Tag Page Breadcrumbs To Articles

Although writers and editors are responsible for ensuring internal links to tag pages are included within the article’s body text, the technical setup of the page should ensure that the main tag page is linked to by default.

Add breadcrumbs to the top of each article that links to the main tag for that particular article. Article pages will often include a breadcrumb link to the main category (e.g., “Music”), but breadcrumbs also present a fantastic opportunity to promote tag pages.

Add Tag Page Breadcrumbs To Article Schema

Along with the physical breadcrumb link on the page itself, breadcrumb schema can be used within the Article or NewsArticle schema on the page to link to the tag page, giving Google another indication of the connection between the two pages.

Create A Tag Page XML Sitemap

Big news publications inevitably end up with multiple XML sitemaps, including a Google News sitemap and multiple other sitemaps for the masses of older articles, all stored within a sitemap index.

There is also a great opportunity to group tag pages together within their own sitemaps, which can be split out according to their category.

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For example, “Artist” sitemaps for music publications, “Team” sitemaps for sports publications, etc., give Googlebot quick and easy access to these important pages.

Create HTML Sitemaps For Priority Tags

To make tag pages even more accessible to both crawlers and users, creating HTML sitemaps is a great way to ensure there are easily accessible internal links to all of your priority tag pages, which essentially become topic indexes.

Again, this might come in the form of an ‘Artists’ or ‘Teams’ page.

Conclusion

Publication owners need to lead by example when it comes to tagging, so by creating a technical setup that prioritizes tag page visibility and sharing a tagging policy that helps writers to understand what they should be doing – and why they should be doing it – everyone can work towards the same goal together.

More resources:


Featured Image: Zerbor/Shutterstock

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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?

In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.

Price: Free

Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.

Most common reporting use case

GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.

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As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:

  • Total Impressions
  • Average CTR
  • Average Position
gsc-performance-overviewgsc-performance-overview

Tip

If you’ve signed up for AWT using Google Search Console, you can view your GSC performance data in Ahrefs by clicking “GSC Performance” from the main dashboard.

But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.

organic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-yearorganic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-year

Favorite feature

One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.

google-search-console-indexed-pages-reportgoogle-search-console-indexed-pages-report

If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.

Price: Free

Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.

Most common reporting use case

Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.

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Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.

Such as:

  • Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
  • Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
  • Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
  • Social media platformsFacebook, Reddit, and Twitter
  • Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage

Sidenote.

If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks

google-looker-studio-partner-connectorsgoogle-looker-studio-partner-connectors

Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:

ahrefs-seo-audit-dashboardahrefs-seo-audit-dashboard
Ahrefs Google Looker Studio integration

With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.

Favorite feature

The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.

Price: Free for 500 URLs

Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.

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Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.

screaming-frog-user-interface-screenshotscreaming-frog-user-interface-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.

Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.

Favorite feature

Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs. 

If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.

screaming-frog-api-accessscreaming-frog-api-access

Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.

Price: Free

Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.

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when-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustrationwhen-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustration

For example, you could use our:

Most common reporting use case

One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.

With AWT, you can:

  • Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
  • See the performance of your website
  • Check all known backlinks for your website
ahrefs-overviewahrefs-overview

Favorite feature

Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.

If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).

Price: Free

Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.

Most common reporting use case

For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.

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ahrefs-seo-toolbar-overviewahrefs-seo-toolbar-overview

With the free version, you get the following features:

  • On-page SEO report
  • Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
  • Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
  • SERP positions
  • Country changer for SERP

The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.

If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.

severity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbarseverity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Favorite feature

The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.

indexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbarindexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.

Price: Free

Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.

google-analytics-screenshotgoogle-analytics-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.

Favorite feature

You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.

Price: Free

Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.

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Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.

google-slides-screenshotgoogle-slides-screenshot

Most common reporting use cases

The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.

Favorite feature

One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.

share-video-chat-google-slidesshare-video-chat-google-slides

This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.

Price: Free

Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.

Most common reporting use cases

Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.

Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.

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Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.

bbq-google-trends-graphbbq-google-trends-graph

Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.

Favorite feature

Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.

google-trends-comparison-examplegoogle-trends-comparison-example

Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.

You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.

regional-trends-via-google-trendsregional-trends-via-google-trends

Final thoughts

These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.

The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.

Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.

These findings include:

  • When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
  • 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
  • Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.

Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.

As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.

High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects

The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.

The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.

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The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.

This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.

The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.

Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results

With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.

When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.

Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.

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New Competition From Unexpected Sources

The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.

On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.

An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.

Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search

The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.

Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:

“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”

Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.

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Methodology & Limitations

To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.

The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.

While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.

Why We Care

The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.

Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.

SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.

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As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.

How This Could Help You

While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.

Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:

  • As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
  • Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
  • Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
  • Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
  • Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.

Looking Ahead

While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.

By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.


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