Back to: How to Increase News Website Traffic
Contents
Introduction
I won’t discuss how to write a news story because if you are in news niche, you already know this far better than me. However, in this article, I will discuss some easy to understand and implement techniques to make your content appear well in SERPs and particularly in rich snippets.
Your website’s traffic depends on your content. So, consider optimizing all articles carefully if you are serious about traffic. Let us discuss these basic techniques.
Featured Image
Featured Image is the first impression which a user gets when he lands upon a page. I have often seen people using images from PixaBay as featured images. But I consider this practice wrong. Until the picture does not say something, it is useless. I prefer using text on the featured image. We can use Canva for that. To make the text more visible, we can use a semi-transparent background for the text area.
And don’t forget to use keywords in Image Title, Alt text and Description. If keywords are used appropriately, your image can bring thousands of views because most of the bloggers focus only on content SEO. Image SEO is an untapped market.
Headings
There are two benefits of using headings (H1, H2, H3):
- If we are using Table of Contents Plugin, the headings are taken as index and the plugin automatically and Google often uses these as sitelinks. This way, the site may appear with rich snippets in SERPs
- The user gets a better picture of your content. He does not feel bored if the content is organised into small sections.
We can use keywords from PAA section of Google as subheadings for maximum SEO.
Bullets
Bullets include both Ordered List and Unordered List. You can use them within the content. Like Headings, bullets also have two benefits.
- They are more engaging than plain text (but use them only once in a specific section).
- They may appear in Google Rich Snippets and even in the Featured Snippet. Google and even Bing love bullets.
Images and Videos
We all know that images and videos are far more engaging than plain text. So, try using images and videos (embedded) in the content wherever possible. But don’t use too much images and videos. Optimise each and every image. As every image is like an article in SERPs.
If any image ranks in Google, your site will be in skies!
Anchor Links
Anchor Links are a must for any site to rank and engage the users. In simple words, they are links on certain words/phrases of your article to other relevant articles for your site. Here is an example:
You can see in the image above, in just this piece of text, there are five anchor links. Imagine, if we add at least 2-3 links in one paragraph, how many links we will have in a single article? And if each user clicks at least 1 link out of those, there will be huge impact on bounce rate, avg. session duration and of course CPM.
Keywords in the Content
Keywords are not just for headings. We can use them in content as well. However they should not appear as bolt from blue but rather natural like a part of sentence.
Here are a bunch of keywords which can be easily added to the content. e.g. “digital marketing is better than traditional marketing” is a keyword yet it can be a part of the sentence.
Try adding as many keywords to the content as possible. It will help you outrank the competitors. But remember, it should be natural.
Quizzes
We can also include quizzes after the content for more engagement. I personally love “Quiz Cat” plugin. You can use anyone which you like. For every article, we can add a quiz or poll in the end. It will help you retain users for 5-10 seconds more which in turn will be a drastic change in the overall engagement of your site.
Keep your quiz of not more than 20 questions. Keep the level easy. And try using 2-3 options instead of 4. This way, we will be able to get more engagement. You can also use insticator for that (if you have more than 500k monthly traffic)
Podcasts
Podcasts are also a mean for engagement. I have seen big sites using podcasts for maximum engagement. We can create audios of our content. We will discuss podcasts in detail in another lesson of this course.
I think these tips are enough for new users. Once you implement them, you will be able to find more ideas by yourself. Hope you like this article!